By Tom Fleischman, Cornell Chronicle
Reddit bills itself as “the most human place on the internet,” but the proliferation of artificial intelligence-generated content is threatening to squeeze some of the humanity out of the news-sharing forum. Content moderators on some of Reddit’s most popular boards see some value in artificial intelligence-generated content, but they’re generally fearful that AI will reduce the utility and social value of a community that prides itself on authenticity.
“They were concerned about it on three levels: decreasing content quality, disrupting social dynamics and being difficult to govern,” said Travis Lloyd, doctoral student in the field of information 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 author of “‘There Has To Be a Lot That We’re Missing’: Moderating AI-Generated Content on Reddit,” which is being presented at the ACM SIGCHI Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing, Oct. 18-22 in Bergen, Norway. The work received an honorable mention for best paper.
The senior author is Mor Naaman, the Don and Mibs Follett professor of information science at Cornell Tech, the Jacobs Technion-Cornell Institute and the Cornell Ann S. Bowers College of Computing and Information Science.
