AI-generated content material a triple menace for Reddit moderators

Reddit payments itself as “the most human place on the internet,” however the proliferation of synthetic intelligence-generated content material is threatening to squeeze a number of the humanity out of the news-sharing discussion board.

Content moderators on a few of Reddit’s hottest boards see some worth in synthetic intelligence-generated content material, however they’re typically fearful that AI will scale back the utility and social worth of a group that prides itself on authenticity.

“They were concerned about it on three levels: decreasing content quality, disrupting social dynamics and being difficult to govern,” stated Travis Lloyd, doctoral scholar within the area of data science. “And to respond to this, they were enacting rules in their communities, which set norms, but they also then had to enforce those rules, which is challenging.”

Lloyd is lead writer of “‘There Has To Be a Lot That We’re Missing’: Moderating AI-Generated Content on Reddit,” which is being introduced on the ACM SIGCHI Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing, Oct. 18-22 in Bergen, Norway. The work obtained an honorable point out for finest paper.

The senior writer is Mor Naaman, the Don and Mibs Follett professor of data science at Cornell Tech, the Jacobs Technion-Cornell Institute and the Cornell Ann S. Bowers College of Computing and Information Science. The different co-author is Joseph Reagle, affiliate professor of communication research at Northeastern University.

More than 110 million persons are lively on Reddit every day, discussing just about any subject one can think about – from information and politics to sports activities, leisure, enterprise, in style tradition, Pokémon and pets. Users can put up content material (information hyperlinks, pictures, movies), touch upon others’ content material, and upvote or downvote objects. The standards for up- and down-voting differ by classes, referred to as subreddits.

Earlier analysis from Lloyd, Naaman and colleagues sought to grasp how the various Reddit communities had been responding to AI content material; this paper goes a step additional, participating immediately with content material moderators to see precisely how they attempt to protect Reddit’s humanity in an more and more AI-infused world.

This work started in 2023, a 12 months after the discharge of ChatGPT. Lloyd stated he was inquisitive about how this new software would have an effect on the data ecosystem.

“We had a hard time studying it because it (AI-generated content) is hard to detect,” he stated. “And then we realized community moderators would have a hard time with it, too.”

For this work, the researchers recruited moderators of in style subreddits that additionally had guidelines concerning using AI content material. The researchers wound up with 15 moderators who collectively oversaw greater than 100 totally different subreddits, with memberships starting from 10 individuals to greater than 32 million.

Lloyd performed the interviews and located that almost all moderators noticed AI content material as a damaging. There had been positives: One, for instance, noticed worth in it as a software for translating into English from one’s native tongue. Said the moderator of the “Ask Historians” subreddit (r/AskHistorians): “… perhaps they’re an expert on German history, but they don’t speak English all that well. So they write their answer in German, and then use ChatGPT to try to translate it … it is their own intellectual contribution or content.”

But the moderator of r/WritingPrompts was much less versatile: “Let’s be absolutely clear: you are not allowed to use AI in this subreddit, you will be banned.”

Of the three primary issues, content material high quality was high of thoughts. According to at least one moderator the authors talked to, AI content material “tries to meet the substance and depth of a typical post … however, there are frequent glaring errors in both style and content.” Style, inaccuracy and divergence from the supposed subject had been chief points.

Regarding social dynamics, a number of respondents expressed worry that AI would negatively affect significant one-to-one interactions, citing decreased alternatives for human connection, strained relationships and violation of group values as potential byproducts.

Moderators additionally feared that their already troublesome job of patrolling content material on their particular person subreddits could be made even more durable with the rise in AI-generated content material. Said the moderator of r/explainlikeimfive: “I would rate it as the most threatening concern … It’s often hard to detect and we do see it as very disruptive to the actual running of the site.”

Naaman stated it’s presently left as much as the moderators – all volunteers – to assist Reddit protect the humanity it cherishes.

“It remains a huge question of how they will achieve that goal,” he stated. “A lot of it will inevitably go to the moderators, who are in limited supply and are overburdened. Reddit, the research community, and other platforms need to tackle this challenge or these online communities will fail under the pressure of AI.”

“This study showed us there is an appetite for human interaction, too,” Lloyd stated. “And as long as there is that desire, which I don’t see going away, I think people will try to create these human-only spaces. I don’t think it’s hopeless.”

This work was supported partially by funding from the National Science Foundation.