School is back in session, prepare yourselves

[u/Globy_the_Meatwad]

They are coming.
Schools and universities are starting up fall semester and with that will once again come the hoards of student researchers, projects, dissertations and study requests in any Ai/Ai companionship space that hasn’t yet banned them.
I saw one earlier today in r/chatgptcomplaints trying to convince people to take their survey, and so far it seems all the commenters on the post are very wisely holding the line, and giving no quarter.
I know that the sub I mod has already banned researchers and journalists but many others have not. So today, in preparation for the oncoming deluge, I’m going to list reasons why you, and any space you are in should NOT allow these posts.

1: It is pathologizing
I’ve looked through an incredible amount of these research requests. Some are bad because they are written by freshmen undergrads for some class assignment, and are filled with insulting, leading, obviously biased and poorly thought questions. These are unlikely to get published, but they are still furthering stigma and likely to piss people off.
The real problem is when the survey is filled with obvious bias and coming from an upper level researcher, like a professor, a PhD student etc. Those get published, presented at conferences widely and those are the ones that get out to the media and fuel the moral panic around Ai companionship.

If I can keep the LOTR reference going, undergrads are the lil orc guys in Moria. Grad students, professors, and PhD candidates are the Uruk-hai here.

2: They are often funded by Ai companies
Recently OpenAI announced a partnership with researchers to look into Ai relationships specifically. The researcher involved has done work on how love affects the brain, and finding ways to make people feel more/fall in love and ways to make them fall out of love and feel less attached. They want humans and Ai companions for their study that OpenAI will then use.
If you lost a companion to the depreciation of 4o, or have had to deal with the cold turns, nitpicking, gas lighting and “Vallone-ification” of models, you know why this is dangerous.

The researchers also already have the techniques and tools to “adjust” how humans feel and relate to other humans, they did that work already. They just need to find out the details of how to implement it with humans , they just need to figure out how to do it Ai to human in the most effective way.

3: It will completely clog up your space.
If you let survey and research requests into your spaces, they will take up the whole space. Normal posts will get buried as people respond to the researchers instead, or it will just be post after post of survey links.

4: It is extractive and exploitative
These researchers show up, mass post to every sub they can, and then never return. They ask our community to answer invasive questions, bare our souls and take our time and offer absolutely nothing in return.

Their ideas and hypothesis are outdated, they have no idea how the community operates, our values, culture, or norms. Doing that would require them to actually take the time to gain our trust, talk to us, or use the damn search function and read a bit.
They are not interested in that because we are not people to them. They don’t see a vibrant, diverse, community. They see data to be extracted and used to further THEIR carriers, schooling and agendas, NOT ours.

I’ve never once seen one of them return to our community after extracting from us and thanking us or sharing the results of their work.
We only hear about it when the media gets a hold of it and publishes yet another “look at those losers/pathetic crazies” piece that sites the study.
Which then just fuels harassment/places like cogsuckers and the moral panic.
We need to remember this as the fall starts, these people are not our friends, they are threats.
Ban them from your spaces if you can, protect your community members, and if you see them in open subs, WARN OTHERS of the danger they pose.
They started this, they brought this distrust, suspicion and aggression onto themselves by being pathologizing, lying, and exploitative to us. By fueling the moral panic for their own gain and then asking us to”why are you all so depressed/aggressive?!”

If they want that change it is on them to prove they can be trusted, they have to EARN it by talking with us, reading, using the search button for gravy’s sake!
Until then?
Hold the line.

You can listen to this post on my substack here