Wow. So on the one hand, this seems to be clearly a breach of ethics in terms of experimentation without collecting consent. That seems illegal. And the fact that they claim to have reviewed all content produced by LLMs, and still allowed AI to engage in such inflammatory pretense is pretty disgusting.

On the other hand.. seems likely they are going to be punished for the extent to which they are being transparent after the fact. And we kind of need studies like this from good-guy academics to better understand the potential for abuse and the blast radius of concerted disinformation/psyops from bad actors. Yet it's impossible to ignore the parallels here with similar questions, like whether unethically obtained data can afterwards ever be untainted and used ethically afterwards. ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nazi_human_experimentation#Mod... )

A very sticky problem, although I think the norm in good experimental design for psychology would always be more like obtaining general consent, then being deceptive afterwards about the actual point of the experiment to keep results unbiased.