I'm a little confused by this response about informed consent (https://twitter.com/RobertRMorris/status/1611582827224797185) but I think it illustrates a significant problem among some researchers with conflating "research ethics" with "would an IRB allow me to do it" which is potentially really harmful. I would hope that the reason to seek informed consent isn't because a regulatory body forces you to, but because it is the right and ethical thing to do. (2/n)

But regardless, based on the thread I think that though the help providers were aware of the AI (since they were choosing to use it), it seems that the people seeking help were not aware. Though based on the "once people learned" finding, at least some of them must have been debriefed? Were they essentially following typical protocol for a deception experiment? (Though if that were the case I would have expected that as an answer re: consent rather than "we didn't have to".) (3/n)

The Twitter thread emphasizes that they weren't using PII, but prompts from people seeking mental health support are still potentially quite sensitive, and some folks on Twitter were concerned about data going back to OpenAI - I assume that GPT-3 can run internally though? In which case I suppose the privacy risks would be the same as when people choose to use the system at all. (4/n)

But I think that even outside of privacy concerns, a lot of people just don't like the idea of such sensitive content potentially being used to train AI without their consent, which is something that we should know from the backlash against Crisis Text Line. (5/n)

In fact, a lot of people are upset about being "experimented on" without their consent regardless of the context. Even though this is sometimes framed as "it's just A/B testing!" when it happens on a platform/product, sensitive contexts (e.g. mental health, emotion) are a special case. (We actually found this when studying reactions to the Facebook emotional contagion study: https://cmci.colorado.edu/~cafi5706/UnexpectedExpectationsNMSPreprint.pdf ) (6/n)

I do think that maybe they found something interesting with this experiment! (Hard to tell from a quick Twitter thread.) But this is such a sensitive context that I would have expected clarifications about ethics and care to be front and center, and seeing a lot of responses from people who are upset definitely illustrates that. (7/7)

@cfiesler what do you think was (might be) interesting?

@danmcquillan I mean I do think whether we like it or not we'll get to a point where AI is strongly involved in just these kinds of things - hopefully with consent - so understanding how that could impact people's experiences could be important. There are also definitely ways of doing that kind of research ethically.