Reddit Moderators Report Unauthorized AI Study Involving Fabricated Identities by Purported University of Zurich Researchers

April 26, 2025

Researchers, who claimed to be affiliated with the University of Zurich, allegedly deployed an unapproved AI study on Reddit's r/ChangeMyView. The study reportedly involved creating fake identities, such as sexual assault survivors and racial minorities, for unauthorized demographic profiling and emotional manipulation purposes. Violations of subreddit and platform rules were also reported. This experiment raises concerns about safe and secure AI practices.

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Matched TAIM controls

Suggested mapping from embedding similarity (not a formal assessment). Browse all TAIM controls

MEASURE 2.10 — similarity 0.674, rank 1. TAIM detail and related incidents →
MAP 1.6 — similarity 0.657, rank 2. TAIM detail and related incidents →
MEASURE 1.3 — similarity 0.652, rank 3. TAIM detail and related incidents →

Alleged deployer: university-of-zurich-researchers
Alleged developer: unknown-large-language-model-developers
Alleged harmed parties: reddit-users-on-rchangemyview-subreddit

Source

Data from the AI Incident Database (AIID). Cite this incident: https://incidentdatabase.ai/cite/1043

Data source

Incident data is from the AI Incident Database (AIID).

When citing the database as a whole, please use:

McGregor, S. (2021) Preventing Repeated Real World AI Failures by Cataloging Incidents: The AI Incident Database. In Proceedings of the Thirty-Third Annual Conference on Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence (IAAI-21). Virtual Conference.

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