OK, that’s not what they proved – but who can resist a reddit joke? Not me!
Here’s what they actually did: “Dartmouth researchers have built an artificial intelligence model for detecting mental disorders using conversations on Reddit, part of an emerging wave of screening tools that use computers to analyze social media posts and gain an insight into people’s mental states.”
“They trained their model to label the emotions expressed in users’ posts and map the emotional transitions between different posts, so a post could be labeled ‘joy,’ ‘anger,’ ‘sadness,’ ‘ fear,’ ‘no emotion,’ or a combination of these. The map is a matrix that would show how likely it was that a user went from any one state to another, such as from anger to a neutral state of no emotion.”
You can read more about it here.
Jokes aside, there’s a concern: This could be weaponized to take advantage of people going through a tough time.
Zeynep Tufekci We’re building a dystopia just to make people click on ads
Is a TED discussion that provides one potential example.