The coming automation of propaganda

#1

Post by donara » Fri, Aug 09, 2019, 9:13 AM UTC

The coming automation of propaganda
warontherocks.com

Re: The coming automation of propaganda

#2

Post by FakeComments » Fri, Aug 09, 2019, 11:48 PM UTC

I’d argue that we saw automated propaganda at least three years ago — and there’s a case Facebook et al have been engaging for at least a decade.

Re: The coming automation of propaganda

#3

Post by rrggrr » Fri, Aug 09, 2019, 11:58 PM UTC

This is old news BUT hasn't reached it's Apex by a long shot. Candidates that are aggressively transparent, speak with brutal truth, and accept it may cost them an election... They will ironically be hard to beat long haul in this environment.

Re: The coming automation of propaganda

#4

Post by IIAOPSW » Sat, Aug 10, 2019, 12:16 AM UTC

I never got around to finishing the Muller Report, but from what I recall and what was made public, Russia's influence campaign was largely traditional and human powered.

Here's a bitter pill for everyone. If it turns out that a large fraction of people really can have their opinion changed by bots that wouldn't even pass a Turing test, maybe its time to rethink the idea that everyone gets to vote.

Re: The coming automation of propaganda

#5

Post by joe_the_user » Sat, Aug 10, 2019, 12:19 AM UTC

The idea is that something like the (formerly) OpenAI text generator could be used to enhance "boiler room" propaganda operations.

The idea is one person could decide on a message and hundred of articles pushing the message could be generated.

Maybe that would work. Maybe you'd see so much of this people would start to get more selective. Maybe it wouldn't matter because people believe what suits them rather than just being conditioned.

Re: The coming automation of propaganda

#6

Post by olivermarks » Sat, Aug 10, 2019, 12:26 AM UTC

'As U.S. policymakers remain indecisive over how to prevent a repeat of the 2016 election interference' Was this ever proven? all I ever heard about was conspiracy theories around 100k of Facebook ads and Cambridge Analytica being accused of various things. Nothing concrete was ever seriously discussed and the Mueller team findings were inconclusive.

Re: The coming automation of propaganda

#7

Post by roywiggins » Sat, Aug 10, 2019, 12:31 AM UTC

At this point you could probably generate qanon posts with a Markov chain, no deep learning required.

Re: The coming automation of propaganda

#8

Post by basementcat » Sat, Aug 10, 2019, 12:36 AM UTC

IIAOPSW wrote: post #4

I never got around to finishing the Muller Report, but from what I recall and what was made public, Russia's influence campaign was largely traditional and human powered. Here's a bitter pill for everyone. If it turns out that a large fraction of people really can have their opinion changed by bots that wouldn't even pass a Turing test, maybe its time to rethink the idea that everyone gets to vote.

> Here's a bitter pill for everyone. If it turns out that a large fraction of people really can have their opinion changed by bots that wouldn't even pass a Turing test, maybe its time to rethink the idea that everyone gets to vote.

It isn't clear to me if this is necessarily a bitter pill as much as a possible direction for education reform. If unsophisticated bots are able to efficiently disseminate information to a wide audience, would it be possible to (using analogous techniques) vastly decrease the cost and increase the scalability of public education?

Re: The coming automation of propaganda

#9

Post by im3w1l » Sat, Aug 10, 2019, 12:42 AM UTC

Imagine you go to an online forum and that there is a 99.99% chance that a given message was written by a bot. Imagine further they are sufficiently well written you can't tell from the post itself whether it was made by a bot or not How would people respond to that?

Well the obvious consequence is that you have to stop paying attention to random posts. You have to depend on something outside of the forum itself to find a list of people to pay attention to. That will be your friends and your family. And then it will be whatever media tells you to pay attention to.

Getting out of your filter bubble will be impossible because as soon as you step out you are faced by an onslaught of bots.

Maybe you could travel around IRL and acquire a diverse list of voices that way. But realistically only the elite could afford that.

Actually lets be even more cynical. Say you go traveling, meet someone. You add them on a social network. But it's not them it's a bot. And they get a few bucks for selling your eyeballs.

But then we can even further imagine that you follow them with a fake account too, and so the eyeballs were actually worthless.

Re: The coming automation of propaganda

#10

Post by mynameishere » Sat, Aug 10, 2019, 12:44 AM UTC

IIAOPSW wrote: post #4

I never got around to finishing the Muller Report, but from what I recall and what was made public, Russia's influence campaign was largely traditional and human powered. Here's a bitter pill for everyone. If it turns out that a large fraction of people really can have their opinion changed by bots that wouldn't even pass a Turing test, maybe its time to rethink the idea that everyone gets to vote.

Does it matter if a bot passes the Turing test?

What if I had a bot that merely said the following:

"Democratic candidate XYZ wants to give free healthcare to illegal immigrants with your tax dollars."

Such a bot would not pass the Turing test, but it would be speaking the truth (for many of the candidates) and that truth would be relevant to many voters' interest. So what?

I think people need to understand that the real problem from the media's point of view is that decades ago, they controlled 99 percent of the discourse. Now they control...95 percent. And they don't like it. So...Russia Russia Russia Squirrel! Russia Russia Russia Squirrel!