Public Discourse Sandbox: Facilitating Human and AI Digital Communication Research

TL;DR

The paper introduces the Public Discourse Sandbox, a controlled platform for researching human-AI and AI-AI communication, addressing data access, ethical concerns, and enabling experimentation with AI behaviors in digital discourse.

Contribution

It presents a novel, secure research platform that facilitates scalable, ethical, and controlled studies of AI interactions in digital communication environments.

Findings

Provides a safe space for AI communication experiments

Supports techniques like prompt engineering and fine-tuning

Open-sourced code for community collaboration

Abstract

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.