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Disrupting a covert Iranian influence operation
81–90 of 155 posts
Re: Disrupting a covert Iranian influence operation
#82CNN just did a piece on private Israeli groups doing the exact same thing. It is pretty scary the shear scale of this. Literally any entity or group can spin up a ton of bots and use any AI service locally or otherwise, to attempt to sway public opinion.
Reddit especially is full of LLMs. I would imagine there are ones from every major country plus several privately funded ones.
Re: Disrupting a covert Iranian influence operation
#83Nothing like 900 million articles about secret Iranian plots from government entangled dystopian megacorps and the pundits who love them, soon after the US starts moving troops into the Middle East to defend the progress of an ongoing genocide.
I suppose this is a great opportunity for the people whose entire income comes from the fact that the US overpays insiders to supply its own military; if Trump wins, he gets to play tough and have the papers start his term praising him to the skies for starting a war with Iran, he'll also be able to blame everything on the last administration and work closely with the people who replace Netanyahu. If Harris wins, she's made no promises and has no beliefs, and will be aided by the press in blaming Gaza on Iran.
OpenAI itself is surely running larger covert influence operations in order to affect US legislation and elections.
> Similar to the covert influence operations we reported in May, this operation does not appear to have achieved meaningful audience engagement. The majority of social media posts that we identified received few or no likes, shares, or comments. We similarly did not find indications of the web articles being shared across social media.
Sounds like Russian Facebook ads.
Re: Disrupting a covert Iranian influence operation
#84Earlier quoted context omitted.
It is clear to me that Russia, Iran, North Korea are playing a zero-sum game. Anything that creates chaos in US politics (or European politics) is in their interest. Donald Trump represents chaos.
They want to sow discord. Manipulating US politics in any meaningful way is difficult to do. It's easier to divide and conquer and turn your enemy against itself. In my opinion the West is already doing a good enough job at polarising itself, doesn't need much help from the enemy.
> Manipulating US politics in any meaningful way is difficult to do.
Well empirically it's actually pretty cheap and easy. What's expensive and hard are the countermeasures against it.
To manipulate politics you mainly need to generate fake social proof. To do it effectively you mainly need to target a relatively small number of counties in battleground states.
Re: Disrupting a covert Iranian influence operation
#85The only thing noteworthy about this is how small-scale this is, and that the perpetrators don't even bother/have the means to set up their own infrastructure.
The noteworthy thing is that OpenAI is reporting it. They’re signaling that they are proactively monitoring and investigating this activity, and that they’re willing to work with federal agencies while self-policing their negative externalities. This is all part of an ongoing conversation with lobbyists about “safe AI,” and it’s ultimately done to show that OpenAI is making an effort to mitigate the risks that regula…
> and it’s ultimately done to show that OpenAI is making an effort to mitigate the risks that regulators claim it creates.
I’d go one step further — the subtext is that only Open AI is willing to do this, and that LLMs are just too dangerous to open source/not another with regulation that only big companies have the resources to adhere to.
Re: Disrupting a covert Iranian influence operation
#86From a Google search it looks like this is one of the articles in question: https://teorator.com/index.php/2024/08/12/x-censors-trumps-t... I requested the Internet Archive grab this copy: https://web.archive.org/web/20240816210620/https://teorator....
Looks exceedingly good to be Ai-generated. Also, it appears to be slightly pro-Trump, which doesn't sound like in Iran's interest.
Looks more like early phase 'reputation building' content aimed at creating channels through which they can direct more inflammatory content later. AI is good for producing large volumes of bland material, which might be useful as camouflage.
Re: Disrupting a covert Iranian influence operation
#87This is as much an indictment of ChatGPT as it is of the Iranians. According to OpenAI, their product produces output that no one in their right mind would want to read for any purpose.
How is that a bad thing for OpenAI though? It depends on the prompting, I wouldn’t count the ability to generate useless/stupid/misleading content when prompted to do this as a negative.
I think the point is, nobody likes slop. The fact that slop failed to promote the enemy doesn't mean that slop is inherently good.
Re: Disrupting a covert Iranian influence operation
#88Earlier quoted context omitted.
Really? Trump has always been much weaker in diplomacy with nations that are historically antagonistic to the US. He'll have a meeting with their leader, let them flatter him, and come away convinced that they're "very nice" and make a lot of concessions. He's basically an admirer of Putin at this point.
The Abraham accords were and are a good development he implemented. The Obama administration in 2015 attempted to bribe Iran into not enriching uranium by effectively paying them $100 billion.
Calling the JCPOA a $100 billion bribe seems unnecessarily reductive.
The crux or the deal was a lifting of sanctions on Iran in exchange for an enforced freeze on nuclear programs. The general philosophy was that a non-Nuclear Iran engaged in the international economy was more likely to drive towards normal and peaceful relations than an isolated nuclear power. According to IAEA accounts the nuclear program freezes were effective.
As part of the lifting of sanctions, Iran did get access to frozen Iranian overseas assets on the order of $100 billion, sure. But characterizing a diplomatic agreement to lift sanctions in exchange for cooperation on nuclear proliferation as a 'bribe' seems unnecessarily pejorative.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joint_Comprehensive_Plan_of_Ac...
Re: Disrupting a covert Iranian influence operation
#89speaking of influence operations, the strawberry dude and 'lily' just did one of those twitter voice group chat things where everyone tried to guess if lily was an ai or not. there just happened to be a worldcoin rep in the room...
Re: Disrupting a covert Iranian influence operation
#90From a Google search it looks like this is one of the articles in question: https://teorator.com/index.php/2024/08/12/x-censors-trumps-t... I requested the Internet Archive grab this copy: https://web.archive.org/web/20240816210620/https://teorator....
Looks exceedingly good to be Ai-generated. Also, it appears to be slightly pro-Trump, which doesn't sound like in Iran's interest.
It may be trying to get Trump supporters on their side before trying to influence them