Data Ethics Journal Club

This time we’re going to watch/read Anatomy of an AI-Powered Malicious Social Botnet by Yang and Menczer, which is a case study about a network of bots deployed on Twitter that used ChatGPT to generate realistic-looking content. It is a pre-print available on ArXiv, posted in July 2023. This piece is fairly long, so we would recommend focusing on sections 1-3 and the discussion in section 6. 

You can read a summary of the article on the club's webpage

Here are the questions we'll be discussing:
1. Have you interacted with bots in the past or do they play a part in your social media consumption? What were your experiences?
2. Do you think LLMs will exacerbate misinformation on social media in particular or the internet in general? What do you think the Internet will look like in 5 years time if/when LLM use becomes mainstream?
3. The authors call for more LLM detection methods, regulation and public awareness. What do you think needs to be put in place against social media bots? Whose responsibility is this?

Join via the Zoom link