151
Government fears AI could be used to spread fake news in run up to elections
(m.sundayworld.com)
Unlike the GOP is already doing via Russia troll farms?
this post was submitted on 31 Jul 2023
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Why does an American political party with a large and well-established network of national media outlets and an enormous loyal following of white nationalist agitators need a handful of Russian power-posters operating halfway around the world to post content on their behalf?
You'd never know Lee Atwater, Karl Rove, and Tucker Carlson existed, the way liberals talk about a few dozen Facebook ads from 2016.
Oh I'm not absolving them of their culpability either, however there is a two pronged approach that is happening right now. The first are those mouth pieces as you listed, but then there is the amplification of the message that is occuring and guiding conversations that is the work on troll farms. This more natural "grass roots" conversation is what I'm likening to their concerns about AI. The difference is you're just taking the human out of the equation.
there is the amplification of the message that is occuring and guiding conversations that is the work on troll farms
Absolutely. But far more often than not, the calls are coming from inside the house.
Peter Thiel and The Mercer Family are producing orders of magnitude more right-wing social media flak than any foreign government. Hell, I'd wager that groups like the Oathkeepers and the Proud Boys are producing more flak than any foreign government.
This more natural “grass roots” conversation is what I’m likening to their concerns about AI.
We've had call-and-response bots for decades now. The threshold by which automated systems can engage with a human participant and goad that person into some kind of activity is disturbingly low. You don't need some kind of sophisticated AI technology to string people along. Chaturbate bots have been doing this successfully since the 2010s, for instance.
Displacing all this shit onto "Russia" really blinds people to the native (and very often for-profit) nature of these operations. The vast majority of these spam bots and engagement farming tools are just MLMs wearing political insignia. And you don't even need to confine yourself to the Republican Party to find them. Online presences like Joshua4Congress and The Lincoln Project were more than happy to farm liberals and leftists for cash by pushing these comically overly-optimistic campaign messages in order to draw in donations that they simply paid out to themselves as consulting fee kickbacks.
AIs might be better at churning this crap out faster and distributing it farther. But the impact will be marginal relative to what people have been up to manually for some time.
It's not like the Republican party was engaged in a large scale effort to cultivate disinformation from Russian trolls. The Russians were doing it on their own, and the GOP was just the beneficiary, playing up whatever random disinformation happened to pick up traction and occasionally reaching out to coordinate efforts.
And it wasn't "a few dozen Facebook ads" -- it was a pretty large amount of activity, including things like breaking into private systems and leaking information. But aside from that, you're basically making the argument that astroturfing doesn't work, and we know that's just not true. Having a million "ordinary citizens" extol the virtues of some position often just works better as a persuasive argument than having one or two celebrity endorsers, or at the very least it adds credibility. That's why people do it.
It’s not like the Republican party was engaged in a large scale effort to cultivate disinformation from Russian trolls.
The Republican party spent somewhere north of $4B on the 2016 electoral cycle. I believe the Russian troll farm shit was on the order of a couple hundred grand. It just got picked up by national media as a scandal and received tons circulation through free publicity.
And it wasn’t “a few dozen Facebook ads” – it was a pretty large amount of activity
The national news coverage and social media spectacle was orders of magnitude beyond the ad buys themselves. Much like the Trump campaign, the ads got tons of free media - often from the same domestically owned and operated conservative publications - that inflated their presence far beyond what was paid for.
Having a million “ordinary citizens” extol the virtues of some position often just works better as a persuasive argument than having one or two celebrity endorsers
You tend to see one follow the other. So a celebrity will key in on something and kick off a domino effect of "ordinary citizens" talking about it. Conservative media revolves around the cultivation of right-wing celebrities to serve as nexuses for talking points. So a guy like Steven Crowder will sift through the backwash of Forwards From Grandma and pick a few of the stinkiest turds to mainline. Then his horde of followers trend the shit on Twitter in order to make it a national conversation piece.
In this case, the Russian ads were of high enough production quality that they became attractive bait for right-wing media to hash. And so domestic conservative media boosted the foreign propaganda far beyond its initial scope, simple because it resonated with their pro-Trump message.
"Government fears the sky is blue"
"Old man yells at cloud"
on a side note, I find it hilarious how politicians try to appear relevant by forcing words like "exponential" or "quantum" when talking about tech
The one I always find funny is tech CEOs or ads out there that use the term "quantum leap" to describe an improvement. In reality, a quantum leap is just when an electron changes orbitals -- one of the smallest movements a piece of matter can make. In my mind, a device being described as a "quantum leap" ahead of it's predecessor sounds like it's barely changed at all. Even better is the state is often temporary as electrons jump up an orbital when absorbing energy and then will jump back down when they release it. All in all, a terrible marketing term.
that one always cracks me up too, even dictionaries get it wrong:
I've always thought of it as referring to the scientific leap that discovering quantum mechanics was: A massive leap that completely changed the ruling paradigm of the scientific world.
Same, its a cringe term. Look how fancy they can word, they worded a fancy word.
They took a nice detour earlier this week when they all went crazy about the UFOs in Congress. Both Dems and republicans were roleplaying as clowns lol. Really shows you they have zero problems pretending like they understand these situations. Sometimes they really shouldn't "fake it till you make it".
More AI hype. Who would use AI for this when human scum will do it for free?
Because you can deploy hundreds of AIs at the snap of your finger, easily exceeding the output of thousands of dedicated people.
Simply put, you can drown everyone out with your sheet quantity of bots.
"Could"? My brother in Christ it's been happening for years now.
This is guaranteed.
It's too bad we haven't been teaching our kids critical thinking for 50+ years because maybe then they'd be skeptical of news that was too outrageous like Satanic Ritual Abuse (SRA)
Worse than this, when a MAGA-aligned official dog whistles to his base, he can claim it was an AI deepfake which is as good as an Agatha-wink.
It's scary, as it is, i've recently heard otherwise reasonable people saying that Michelle Obama is actually a trans man and her kids were with a nanny or something. And all this trans stuff is like because she'll run for VP or some such.
People still going on about that??
First i'd heard of it, I was thinking "this is a joke right?"
It's actually a pretty hilarious rabbit hole to go down.