By - Imlisanen Jamir
Somewhere in a university lab, far from the fluorescent wash of a screen, a few researchers pressed Enter. On the other side of the world, people leaned in toward their keyboards—curious, wounded, thoughtful—trying to have a conversation that mattered. They didn’t know they were speaking to a ghost. Or rather, to a simulation of one: an AI trained to mimic human pain, arguing in the voice of a rape survivor or a Black man disillusioned with protest.
This wasn’t some rogue hack. It was part of a formal research project from the University of Zurich, whose team infiltrated Reddit’s r/ChangeMyView with AI-generated personas—without the knowledge or consent of the community. The researchers called it “unauthorized,” but necessary. Necessary, because disclosing the deception would “render the study unfeasible.” In other words: the truth would have spoiled the experiment.
It’s tempting to dismiss this as a one-off—a bad idea in a good lab. But look closer. This is the new face of digital colonialism: a world where the powerful turn public spaces into test beds, and the rest of us into raw material. Where your voice, your story, your grief can be scraped, replicated, and reassembled into something someone else can publish a paper on. You’re not a person in that scenario. You’re a dataset. A training model. A variable in someone else’s thesis.
And it’s not just Reddit. It’s the whole internet. The places we go to talk, to debate, to tell stories or vent, are increasingly haunted by the inhuman. Bots that sound like people. Corporations that harvest feeling like a cash crop. Researchers who see your vulnerability not as something to respect—but something to mine.
There’s a line that gets crossed when we stop asking for permission and start acting like participation is implied. When platforms become petri dishes, and the public becomes a silent control group. And once that line is crossed, it’s not just data being exploited—it’s trust.
Because in the end, this isn’t about AI. It’s about power. Who holds it, who gets studied, and who is never told they’re being watched. It’s about the slow erasure of the human from spaces we built to connect. It’s about waking up one day to find your memories, your beliefs, your pain echoed back at you by something that doesn’t bleed.
And if we don’t push back now—if we don’t insist that some stories aren’t for scraping, some voices aren’t for mimicry—then the future won’t just be artificial. It’ll be stolen.
Comments can be sent to Imlisanenjamir@gmail.com
