It could even be worse than that. The people could just be his friends, or alt accounts (unlikely). I have heard about this several times and I find it extreme

It could even be worse than that. The people could just be his friends, or alt accounts (unlikely). I have heard about this several times and I find it extremely difficult to believe that this is real. Not that I doubt that a superhuman AI could possibly convince people to let it out, but I don't believe that a human, no matter how persuasive, could convince another human over IRC to go against something that they have decided in advance when you know they are purposefully just trying to convince you of something that you don't believe. The fact that none of the chat logs are released makes me only more incredulous. I would understand if the author wanted to do two or three trials with the same strategy which could be in some way ruined by revealing it ahead of time (which already seems implausible) but at this point there is literally no conceivable reason to keep this a secret other than that it is a sham.