The CIA probably realizes it doesn't need to fund rebel groups [1] or use local journalists/clergy [2] to instigate a regime change these days - they can just flood a target country's social media with AI-generated propaganda.
I've noticed a huge surge in negativity and pessimism on English-language social media within the last year or so, roughly corresponding with to the spread of LLM tech. I do wonder whether these people are mostly just bots.
This seems to be happening in English-language meat space too, so I don't think it's bots. I'm not sure what happened. The trend started in 2023 and seems to be ongoing, though I imagine people will get over it soon. I've heard it suggested that people are just in a funk about the economy, at least in the U.S.
I've noticed this as well, across pretty much all of social media that I use. I can't quite place my finger on it, whether it's just a reflection of the state of the collective feelings of people, or if it's mass manipulation. At this point it could be both.
There was a period of time last year where TikTok really wanted me to see the Canadian government as an unmitigated disaster. Just endless scrolls of random mouth frothers screaming about it.
Not opining on the matter specifically; just that TikTok had a very clear opinion on what I ought to think.
Comments like this, doing the exact thing they said they aren't open to, will surely convince them astroturfing doesn't exist!
Being serious, comments like this make me trust the Canadian government more. It sounds like how American conservatives discuss cities they've never been to. And they tend to be surprisingly good inverse indicators when it comes to actually being in the cities. I'd bet Canadian hospitals are better than what I've got now, solely going off of this discussion.
It’s not really about deciding if one trusts the government or not. That’s an oversimplification of one’s civic responsibility to study the issues and make informed decisions. The main harm astroturfing does is convert everything into black and white oversimplifications. It turns people into unthinkers. They pick a side and then act like it’s some sort of battle against the other side.
I do not pick sides. The only things I see are changes in quality of life. One must be blind not to see where it is going.
As for "informed decisions" - I do make those based on what I see and do not need help from TikTok or anything else. HN is about the only social media I participate in when I need a quick brake from working on computer.
Of course! I didn't actually rewrite my framework just to counter someone on the internet. I said that more to call out the low effort response as fitting an extremely predictable pattern of uninformed people trying to pose their drive-by hot take as fact, and the unreliability of said information in practice
Yes Russia did have some accounts and bought ads on US social media some years ago, but analysis showed it had marginal effect. They are outsiders on US run social media platforms. The real power is in the hands of those running the social media platforms that can suppress or send viral what they want with a few adjustments. That certainly happened and continues still now aided by AI.
There were several, but the Hamilton 68 hoax is one where censors claimed many accounts were Russian bots but were actually mostly American. Twitter found a relatively small amount of the identified accounts to be actually tied to Russia. https://search.brave.com/search?q=hamilton+68+hoax
Many people probably only remember all the news from MSM about the Russian bots but never saw this reveal that it was a hoax as it was not reported much in the MSM.
Oh thank you for the sweet compliment. However, I am probably older than you and have studied psychological operations and cognitive warfare for many years. I am not sure of what point you are trying to make about Russia by sending a US state media article about China.
Idc how old you are or what you studied if you can’t make a point with evidence. You can’t even read well since the title and article clearly mention it includes Russian influence operations.
“ Russian anti-Ukraine network spoofed Washington Post and Fox News
Separately, Meta said on Tuesday that it was continuing to take down fake accounts and ban fraudulent websites connected to a Russian influence operation aimed at eroding support for Ukraine.”
My point is obvious; that you think Russian influence operations were some one-off from years ago is a naive uneducated farce. They are over a decade long and continuous, somehow missed by all your age and studying.
I generally do not engage with people who call me a child nor spend much time on state propaganda designed to garner support for more censorship and war with other countries, but I will point out some glaring flaws in this narrative.
Try to create a fake Facebook account. If it is not shutdown in a day or two, try to gain a significant following. Then try posting information favorable to Russia or China and test how many people actually receive it through the Facebook filters. Now try scaling this by creating many fake accounts. I can tell you with high certainty, that you and even a small army of people will not be able to reach many people or have much persuasion influence.
The second problem here is attribution. The claim is that these were Russian or Chinese accounts. Any of us savy with the internet know how easy it is to proxy our traffic through foreign IP addresses and leave the right fingerprints. If Russian or Chinese state actors created these accounts, you would have no way of knowing who or where they are.
As we saw in the Hamilton 68 hoax, the accounts that were banned were mostly Americans with dissident views rather than Russians.
Sweet summer child is a term for naivety. -1 for your understanding of the world around you. Almost no one in US and Japanese state departments want war. They would be very pleased with Russia and China not invading their neighbors for conquest though, as would most decent people. If you never defend yourself against conquest you don’t have a state.
Then your pass at manually creating a Facebook account as an hour long side job presenting as evidence completely sidesteps the fact that it’s not remotely the equivalent of Russian state level resources, nor is it even remotely close to just Facebook properties with their levels of inauthenticity countering. Cue X, 4chan, French politicians, YouTube, indy sites like ZeroHedge, etc.
Then your ridiculous handwave of “fake” typical of uneducated retorts to experts whose entire job and training is analyzing, determining, and reporting these issues. Ya, I remember these asinine arguments well when people like you were on HN deriding the Guccifer 2.0 DNC hack as having no evidence it was the Russian state. No surprise how that turned out. They were wrong, Guccifer 2.0 was Russia duh.
There is much more to these stories than you seem to know. It somewhat evidences the effectiveness of propaganda and censorship in this country. Wikipedia is written by the CIA. NPR and Japantimes are state affiliated media that weave narratives to their interest. If more Americans were allowed to hear the Russian perspective of the story, Ukraine would not be quite such a disaster today. I suggest widening your information sources to include independent media and foreign (non NATO) media sources. We should aspire to truth by looking at issues from many angles.
Creating counter-spam doesn't "fix" that, it just helps destroy the public space.
> If everybody always lies to you, the consequence is not that you believe the lies, but rather that nobody believes anything any longer. [..] And a people that no longer can believe anything cannot make up its mind. It is deprived not only of its capacity to act but also of its capacity to think and to judge. And with such a people you can then do what you please.
> Institutions are burning the public's faith in them at the precise moment in history when we have developed the capacity to replace them with algorithms.
> A revolution is coming, and if you thought human judgment was bad, just wait until you see what replaces it.
I don't get why the standard should be the deception of "the other", who is also crooked.
Why not do good things one can be honest about? Instead of maintaining several identities and narratives and a constant uphill battle in quicksand of one's own making, one could just build on top of previous achievements. It would be much more effective, it would make the US rich and respected in the world. But it would make some individuals less insanely wealthy [0], so that's not an option. It's like the drunk looking for the key under the lamp post instead of where it was lost.
[0] Oxfam just reported that the 5 richest people doubled their fortune in the last 3 years while 5 billion got poorer.
And another powers are not? Especially in recent age. russians are conquering neighbouring countries and simultaneously threating with nuclear attack. They play same game quite differently.
The best brains don't go work for the CIA or the DoD, or at least they don't stay. It's not an environment in which you can strive and do your best work. Nothing against what they do, I'm ex-military, but the culture in these institutions just doesn't cut it for the Vibes required. In addition, one's career is much better served working in the free market than submitting yourself to the government's arbitrary levelling/career ladder.
The government is just structurally incapable of attracting this type of top A+ talent at scale. They get and keep smart people but not the smartest people. For this, they absolutely need to use industry relations.
Just picture yourself in a position to work at either OpenAI, or GE, the DoD or GM. The average tech worker will much prefer the hip SV company than the old quasi-government dinosaur corporation or the government's agency.
I'm sure the environment is fine, it's just a question of economics. The comp for mere software engineers these days is more than the commander in chief gets paid. Usually what organizations like USDS try to do to attract coders is get them interested in a "tour of duty" where they rough it for a few years on a major general's salary before going back to their old jobs generating text, managing cat videos, and getting people to click on ads. It's a busted system.
Hell of a dataset, but less of the talent. Takes a very specific type of person to get to the front of the AI field, then take a government salary using your knowledge for (what could be) war and surveillance, likely against any public interest in alignment.
I’d say talent? Outside of OpenAI no team has been able to release a model as capable as GPT-4, and I’m unsure if the CIA has been prioritizing LLM experts in their hiring.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran%E2%80%93Contra_affair
2. https://www.intelligence.senate.gov/sites/default/files/hear...