Public Discourse Sandbox: Facilitating Human and AI Digital Communication Research

Fuente: arXiv
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Auteurs principaux: Radivojevic, Kristina, Reinking, Caleb, Whitfield, Shaun, Brenner, Paul
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2025
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author Radivojevic, Kristina
Reinking, Caleb
Whitfield, Shaun
Brenner, Paul
author_facet Radivojevic, Kristina
Reinking, Caleb
Whitfield, Shaun
Brenner, Paul
contents Social media serves as a primary communication and information dissemination platform for major global events, entertainment, and niche or topically focused community discussions. Therefore, it represents a valuable resource for researchers who aim to understand numerous questions. However, obtaining data can be difficult, expensive, and often unreliable due to the presence of bots, fake accounts, and manipulated content. Additionally, there are ethical concerns if researchers decide to conduct an online experiment without explicitly notifying social media users about their intent. There is a need for more controlled and scalable mechanisms to evaluate the impacts of digital discussion interventions on audiences. We introduce the Public Discourse Sandbox (PDS), which serves as a digital discourse research platform for human-AI as well as AI-AI discourse research, testing, and training. PDS provides a safe and secure space for research experiments that are not viable on public, commercial social media platforms. Its main purpose is to enable the understanding of AI behaviors and the impacts of customized AI participants via techniques such as prompt engineering, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), and fine-tuning. We provide a hosted live version of the sandbox to support researchers as well as the open-sourced code on GitHub for community collaboration and contribution.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2505_21604
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Public Discourse Sandbox: Facilitating Human and AI Digital Communication Research
Radivojevic, Kristina
Reinking, Caleb
Whitfield, Shaun
Brenner, Paul
Computers and Society
Artificial Intelligence
Human-Computer Interaction
Social media serves as a primary communication and information dissemination platform for major global events, entertainment, and niche or topically focused community discussions. Therefore, it represents a valuable resource for researchers who aim to understand numerous questions. However, obtaining data can be difficult, expensive, and often unreliable due to the presence of bots, fake accounts, and manipulated content. Additionally, there are ethical concerns if researchers decide to conduct an online experiment without explicitly notifying social media users about their intent. There is a need for more controlled and scalable mechanisms to evaluate the impacts of digital discussion interventions on audiences. We introduce the Public Discourse Sandbox (PDS), which serves as a digital discourse research platform for human-AI as well as AI-AI discourse research, testing, and training. PDS provides a safe and secure space for research experiments that are not viable on public, commercial social media platforms. Its main purpose is to enable the understanding of AI behaviors and the impacts of customized AI participants via techniques such as prompt engineering, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), and fine-tuning. We provide a hosted live version of the sandbox to support researchers as well as the open-sourced code on GitHub for community collaboration and contribution.
title Public Discourse Sandbox: Facilitating Human and AI Digital Communication Research
topic Computers and Society
Artificial Intelligence
Human-Computer Interaction
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.21604