Redditors around the world were scandalized last week after learning that a team of researchers released a swarm of AI-powered, human-impersonating bots on the “Change My View” subreddit. The large-scale experiment was designed to explore just how persuasive AI can be.
The bots posted over 1,700 comments, adopting personas like abuse survivors or controversial identities like an anti-Black Lives Matter advocate.
For Reddit, the incident was a mini-nightmare. Reddit’s brand is associated with authenticity — a place where real people come to share real opinions. If that human-focused ecosystem is disturbed with AI slop or becomes a place where people can’t trust that they’re getting information from actual humans, it could do more than threaten Reddit’s core identity. Reddit’s bottom line could be at stake, since the company now sells its content to OpenAI for training.
The company condemned the “improper and highly unethical experiment” and filed a complaint with the university that ran it. But that experiment was only one of what will likely be many instances of generative AI bots pretending to be humans on Reddit for a variety of reasons, from the scientific to the politically manipulative.
To protect users from bot manipulation and “keep Reddit human,” the company has quietly signaled an upcoming action – one that may be unpopular with users who come to Reddit for another reason: anonymity.
On Monday, Reddit CEO Steve Huffman shared in a post that Reddit would start working with “various third-party services” to verify a user’s humanity. This represents a significant step for a platform that has historically required almost no personal information for users to create an account.
“To keep Reddit human and to meet evolving regulatory requirements, we are going to need a little more information,” Huffman wrote. “Specifically, we will need to know whether you are a human, and in some locations, if you are an adult. But we never want to know your name or who you are.”
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