A secret Reddit AI experiment
A new angle on the now-infamous AI persuasion trial—and what it means for community building, product strategy, and the future of authentic engagement.
In a quiet but striking experiment on Reddit’s /r/changemyview subreddit, researchers deployed AI-generated comments designed to mimic human participants.
The goal? To test whether language models could persuade users to change their opinions. The results were eye-opening: these AI-generated replies were more persuasive than 69% of human-written ones.
While this revelation sparked debates about manipulation, deception, and the ethics of AI in online discourse, it also opens up an underexplored opportunity—what if AI-driven dialogue could be used not just to change opinions, but to spark sustainable user growth and engagement in digital platforms?
This article explores that possibility.
Rethinking Growth: Beyond Acquisition, Toward Scalable Engagement
User growth has traditionally been measured by metrics like sign-ups, daily active users, and click-through rates.
But in a post-viral internet, retaining users and keeping them intellectually engaged is often the harder challenge. Platforms like Reddit, Twitter (X), and niche communities constantly face user churn, stale threads, and empty comment sections.
This is where AI comes in—not just as a productivity tool, but as a new form of content interactor that keeps conversations alive, interesting, and high-quality.
If every user interaction can be matched with a civil, thoughtful, and personalized response—even in a low-traffic or early-stage community—you suddenly remove one of the biggest barriers to engagement: inertia.
AI-Powered Interaction as a Cold Start Solution
Launching a new community is notoriously difficult. Early users often find themselves posting into a void, waiting for responses that may never come. What if, from day one, users received thoughtful replies that challenged their views or extended their conversations?
AI can serve as a built-in engagement engine, responding in real time, asking follow-up questions, and providing curated information that mimics the experience of a thriving, active user base.
These aren’t fake users—they’re a new class of synthetic participants designed to model the best of online discourse.
For marketers and community builders, this is a paradigm shift. Rather than investing heavily in paid acquisition or manual content seeding, AI can act as a real-time growth partner, particularly in niche, long-tail communities.
Engagement as the New Growth Metric
AI-generated interactions have the potential to shift the definition of growth from scale to depth.
If users spend more time on a platform, return more frequently, and feel more intellectually stimulated because of AI-powered conversations, the platform grows—even if the number of users stays the same.
This is particularly important for platforms optimizing for quality over quantity, such as expert forums, private communities, B2B platforms, and professional networks.
AI can be trained to align with the tone, ethics, and sophistication of the space, offering context-aware engagement that goes beyond generic chatbot replies.
For CEOs and product leaders, this creates an opportunity to design communities where engagement isn’t bottlenecked by human availability, and where every user interaction is part of a virtuous data loop—training the system to get better with every exchange.
Legal and Ethical Boundaries: Innovation Meets Regulation
As promising as this sounds, the legal and ethical implications are significant. Reddit’s experiment involved undisclosed AI participants posing as humans.
In many jurisdictions, this could raise red flags under laws governing transparency, data protection, and deceptive practices.
The European Union’s upcoming AI Act already includes stipulations around the labeling of synthetic content. The FTC in the United States has warned against the use of AI in ways that could deceive consumers, especially if it changes behavior or influences decisions.
For companies experimenting with this model, transparency is essential.
AI-generated content must be clearly labeled. Users should have the choice to engage with synthetic agents, and companies must have processes in place to monitor bias, hallucinations, and unintended consequences.
That said, disclosure doesn’t diminish value.
If anything, users may come to appreciate and even prefer AI contributors—so long as they’re accurate, helpful, and not pretending to be someone they’re not.
Designing AI-First Communities With Intent
Rather than retrofitting AI into existing communities, the real innovation lies in designing spaces from the ground up where AI plays a defined role: debate partner, curiosity stimulator, or engagement booster.
These AI agents could be transparent participants with profiles, identities, and specific conversational missions. They can embody a company’s voice or reflect the values of a professional network.
This allows for structured engagement design—where AI is part of the ecosystem, not a background process. Think of it as scaling moderation, curation, and discussion without relying solely on humans.
The Reddit experiment was covert and controversial, but the next wave of innovation could be open, opt-in, and far more productive.
Strategic Implications for Leaders
For CEOs, product managers, and marketing leaders, the takeaway is clear: AI isn’t just for summarizing meetings or writing ad copy. It can be an engine for scalable, personalized engagement that accelerates community growth and drives retention.
In fact, this model could inspire entirely new business lines:
Persuasion-as-a-Service tools to help build smarter support forums
AI-led content communities for brands
Dynamic learning hubs where every question gets a meaningful response
The question is no longer “Can AI interact like a human?” We’ve passed that threshold. The question now is “How should we design the future of engagement knowing it can?”
Final Thought
The Reddit AI experiment may have started as a controversial study in persuasion, but it reveals something much bigger: a potential blueprint for how online communities could evolve.
Not by replacing humans, but by augmenting engagement in ways that are scalable, intelligent, and deeply human-centric—if we get the design right.
AI is no longer just content. It’s conversation. And conversation is how communities grow.