Unsurprisingly, Reddit as a site of study or data source is on the rise. The first 2 papers we encountered were published in 2010, with a jump to 17 in 2013, and 230 in 2019.
I also think it's really interesting that though computing and related disciplines make up the largest number of journals represented in our dataset of Reddit papers, medicine and health is next - even (just) above social science.
But WHAT is actually being studied so much on Reddit related to health? The answer seems to be mental health, which is the top keyword above the obvious ones, right above machine learning (and there's definitely some overlap there); depression also appears in the top 20 keywords.
We also see r/depression as the most studied subreddit just below news-related subreddits and the popular r/AskReddit. r/depression, r/SuicideWatch, r/anxiety, r/bipolarreddit and r/opiates also appear in the top 20.
We also did some very high-level of analysis of ethics-related aspects in these 700+ Reddit papers. Some highlights:
- IRB or other review is rarely mentioned, nor is consent
- 28.5% used direct quotes, 2.4% paraphrased & 9.4% included usernames
- 7.4% mentioned sharing datasets
We also looked to see whether research was being shared back to the Reddit community - i.e., whether there were mentions of these papers anywhere on Reddit. Interestingly, almost 30% were, but rarely FROM the researchers or TO the subreddit where data was collected from.
Given the finding from @moduloone and I (in this OTHER @SocialMedia_Soc paper (journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.11…) that suggested that most Twitter users would want to READ a paper that includes their tweets as data - I actually suspect this would be even stronger on Reddit.
Anyway, there is far more detail in this exceedingly descriptive paper, with a handful of implications and thoughts from us at the end. And you probably won't be surprised to hear that we're digging much more closely into the research ethics side now. :)
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This is a bad headline. But the findings themselves (about teen girls' perspectives of how multiple social media platforms impact their well-being) are interesting! Let me tell you what they actually are. 🧵 washingtonpost.com/education/2023…
This report (commonsensemedia.org/research/teens…) is based on a demographically representative national (U.S.) survey of 1,300 girls age 11-15, in which they were asked about their perceptions of how different social media platforms and specific design features impact their well-being.
First, it really is troubling that almost half (45%) of the girls in their sample said that they feel “addicted” or use TikTok for a longer period than they intended at least weekly. This is higher than other platforms (e.g. Snapchat is 37%, YouTube is 34%).
The @huggingface GPT detector works very well on ChatGPT-created text. I ran 5 student essays and 5 ChatGPT essays for the same prompt through it, and it was correct every time with >99.9% confidence. huggingface.co/openai-detecto…
So re: deception use cases (e.g. cheating)...
... it's also against OpenAI's TOS to pass off outputs as being generated by humans. So though people keep telling me "it will get 'smart' enough to fool the detectors!" I would expect @OpenAI to release its own detector in response to ethical concerns.
Clarification: This GPT detector WAS developed by OpenAI as part of the release. I just saw the demo that’s hosted on HuggingFace! github.com/openai/gpt-2-o…
So I give a lot of advice to PhD applicants. My video about statements of purpose has 60k views on YouTube. Anyway, I asked #ChatGPT to write a statement of purpose for admission to our PhD program. And... it was pretty darn good. But there are some VERY important cautions:
The first version I gave it was very specific: our PhD program, a specific type of research experience and interest, and the names of three specific faculty members. It came back with this as part of the statement. If I read this I would 100% think it was a real applicant. But...
Next I gave it the same prompt, but instead of faculty names, just said "the applicant should mention three faculty members by name and describe how their research interests relate to the applicant."
The three faculty named here are all at different universities, none at mine.
ChatGPT says that its own creation was unethical, and then makes a number of suggestions for mitigating harm, none of which appear to be in place. (Maybe the TOS suggestion, which is the least useful one anyway, if cheating falls under the broad umbrella of "deception.")
Since ChatGPT does say that it is "trained to decline inappropriate requests" and one of its second suggestions for mitigating cheating might have fallen into this category, I fed it 10 algebra problems from a worksheet I found online. It gave great answers to all of them!
I do think it's great that when ChatGPT solves math problems, it provides thorough explanation. There are tons of algebra solvers online that just give you the answer. So though you could argue it's bad to also provide "show your work," I see this as helping people learn.
On the topic of students using ChatGPT, this is an essay assignment for my tech ethics & policy class. ChatGPT picked "I, Robot." I then used the same prompt but specified "Ex Machina." Decent essays... with identical final three paragraphs, including fabricated citations. So...
If one student thinks of using ChatGPT to write their essay by giving it the assignment prompt, another student might as well. Resulting in nearly identical essays. Also you'd have to find real sources to cite to replace the bogus ones.