To be honest, I don't see how the downvotes are controversial at all. It was an AI masquerading as a human and commenting on 10-20 posts per minute for half a day. Testing or not, well-intentioned or not, that was confusing and disruptive to many "innocent bystanders" on the blockchain.

So, the AI comments should be removed and then the downvotes can be removed. Simple, and everyone is made whole - or as close to that as possible.

And, I notice that comments are being deleted, so hopefully this will soon be in the rear-view mirror. As you allude to, one mistake doesn't negate the other good things that have been done by this team.

Moving forward, though, it spurs another important question. Is it possible to use an AI, ethically, in a similar manner in order to spur organic activity - which was apparently the goal of this experiment? Instead of impersonating a human, suppose the bot commenter said something like this:

Hi, I'm an AI, and my analysis suggests that this post might be a good one for stimulating conversation. Here are some insightful topics and questions that emerge from your article. People might want to discuss these in the replies:

Append a list of suggested topics/questions

• And suppose it commented far less than 10 or 20 times per minute.
• And suppose that it set beneficiary settings to burn some/all of its rewards.

For example, I'm reminded of @trufflepig, or even @realrobinhood. IMO, automation can be a useful companion on this blockchain, but automatons should not masquerade as humans, and they shouldn't flood the blockchain.

Clearly, the first implementation was not the right way to go about it, but maybe there are other approaches that would accomplish a similar goal to what the AI bot intended without raising the ire of the community or making the blockchain look like a spam factory?