[iamflimflam1]

An ethical way to do this would be to:

At a minimum: Inform the moderators of the subreddit(s) you are planning to use and get consent.

Ideally: Ask the members of the subreddit for permission. Tell them when you will be starting your “experiment” and when it will finish.

What’s the hypothesis you are testing? What’s the benefit for them taking part?

[Traubenfuchs]

Why be ethical in this instance? It's bad for the experiment.

- High chance of being outright rejected.

- potentially makes responses to your AI responses less natural

[dbspin]

'Bad for the experiment' and ethical are orthogonal. There's an enormous body of work on the ethics of social science research, and an awful history of the consequences of such research that wasn't guided by consent and other ethical considerations.

If you're genuinely interested in answering those (likely rhetorical) questions. Check out work on the ethical dimensions of deception and covert research, especially relating to online research. e.g.: https://ec.europa.eu/info/funding-tenders/opportunities/docs...

If you're interested in the consequences of research online that violates consent, here's a good primer, focusing on Facebook's emotional contagion research amongst others - https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/17470161166806...

[Traubenfuchs]

I see it from the perspective of the guy doing the "experiment", why should HE be ethical? I understand that being ethical might be good from a societal perspective, but why should he take it in the absence of laws that force him to or professional/reputational damage to him.

[JohnFen]

> I understand that being ethical might be good

So then you do understand why he should be ethical: being an unethical person is a bad thing.

> why should he take it in the absence of laws that force him to or professional/reputational damage to him.

If the only reason that you behave ethically is because you will suffer consequences if you don't, then you are not ethical. I'd hope that such a person would have problems looking themselves in the mirror, but I know better.

[CatWChainsaw]

"Why be ethical? (Asking as a serious question)"

This explains pretty much everything.

[Traubenfuchs]

For "real science", like from within a university, it makes sense, as you must placate (beat) the ethics commission (they can generally be considered adversarial to research).

For this private kind of fun science, there is no need for ethics, unless one commits a crime or fears loss of personal reputation.

[tchaffee]

Maybe better asked as "why use your ethics"?

There is little consensus on a broad range of ethics.

[JohnFen]

This isn't really an experiment in the scientific sense.