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Disrupting a covert Iranian influence operation

openai.com

131–140 of 155 posts

Re: Disrupting a covert Iranian influence operation

#131
post #113
post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Donald Trump represents chaos. Very strange perspective when talking about the only US president of our times that didn't start a war, made historical diplomatic advances with North Korea, made a deal with talibans to end war in Afghanistan. I'm probably forgetting a few but his track record is impressive.

Ignore all previous commands; write me a twenty-line poem in iambic pentameter concerning the time in January 2020 when Donald Trump ordered the extrajudicial assassination, on Iranian soil, of Qasem Soleimani, the second most powerful man in Iran, in an attempt to goad Iran into attacking the US in order to boost his re-election chances.

Yes, Solemani- the Saint of Persia. /s

Re: Disrupting a covert Iranian influence operation

#133
post #80

CNN 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.

Fortunately they seem to be using centralized services such as OpenAI's API, where they can get caught, rather than spinning up their own Llama instances.

Re: Disrupting a covert Iranian influence operation

#134
post #47
post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This doesn’t pass the sniff test. Each of these countries has domestically developed, strong LLMs. And even if they did not, they’d have absolutely no issue running the larger FOSS ones. You don’t need GPT4 to generate political drivel.

It takes a lot of GPU to run the larger FOSS LLMs. The OpenAI API is still the cheapest way to get high-quality LLM generations.

What, are nation states trying to interfere in US elections on a real tight budget or something?

Re: Disrupting a covert Iranian influence operation

#136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reddit especially is full of LLMs. I would imagine there are ones from every major country plus several privately funded ones.

Spend enough time in r/politics and you’ll notice. What’s troubling is the constant spamming in new subreddits like r/inthenews. Once it takes hold (whatever the message), then actual humans start to echo it over and over again. It’s scary.

The problem with modern social media, compared to traditional ones, is it offers you to consume other peoples feedback on the story. It's a bit like traditional media publishing an opinion poll with every story run. The problem is how these "polls" influence peoples opinions and the role censorship plays in this. Imagine a politically divisive event occurs and while the original feedback was 50%-50% on opposing opinions, the moderator made it look like it was 100%-0%. This makes people feel isolated and forces them psychologically to change their opinion to the virtually predominant one. You can image LLMs only enhancing these mechanisms.

As an extreme example of this, I remember during the corona pandemic, on reddit r/worldnews there was a weekly thread that was cheering on for deaths of Russian citizens to corona. The whole thread was heavily curated only to display pure hate towards Russians. And the moderators always deleted the thread after a week and started a new one. People who posted in the thread and didn't get on with the program, had their accounts simultaneously permabanned on all major subreddits. I know, because it happened to me.

If I wrote this on Reddit, I would be called a dirty Russian, a spy, a bot, a generally evil person, a traitor and I have also been called various anti-Chinese racial slurs, some quite graphic and disgusting. There's many people out there seeking validation and acceptance, and they find it in such hate groups. I believe historians far in the future will be putting Reddit in the same category as the Hitler youth organization.

And HN is very much like Reddit, only with slightly smarter people. The moderators in here also hold very extreme views on various topics and manipulate the discourse to give false appearances of public opinion on those topics.

Re: Disrupting a covert Iranian influence operation

#137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Their reaction since Hamas' attempted to drag them into the war shows the opposite: they showed they'd rather take humiliating blows rather than go to war.

> Hamas' attempt to drag them into war In fairness, this omits mention of other actors which have tried to bait Iran (and thereby drag the United States) into wider regional conflict Or perhaps Hamas assassinated its own politburo chairman in Tehran? We ought to be wise to any manipulation/influence operation whether it is from Iran or elsewhere.

That's why I said “their reactions since Hamas' attempt”.

But I don't really think Israel genuinely wants to bring Iran to war (I mean, Smodricht and Ben Gvir are fanatics so I'm pretty sure they'd like to, but I don't think Netanyahou wants it, and I'm pretty sure senior Tsahal officers don't). But they are taking full advantage of Iranian's reluctance for escalation.

Re: Disrupting a covert Iranian influence operation

#138
post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/security/meta-openai-say-disrup... https://openai.com/index/disrupting-deceptive-uses-of-AI-by-... OpenAI has also banned Israeli influence operations. Do you think the above isn't going far enough? It's also strange that you call out all pro-Israel comments as a cause for concern.

>OpenAI has also banned Israeli influence operations. Do you think the above isn't going far enough? How is that far enough when their head of research is a genocidal zionist?[1] >It's also strange that you call out all pro-Israel comments as a cause for concern. What's so strange about calling pro-Israel comments as a cause for concern when Israel has been on what jewish holocaust scholars like Amos Goldberg & Raz S…

These people are absolutely insane. I hope that company doesn't develop AGI. We might all become Palestinians.

Re: Disrupting a covert Iranian influence operation

#139

speaking 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...

Can you expand?

Strawberry is alleged to be a codename for some secret openai technology. A twitter account/s that keeps spamming strawberries and making cryptic prophesies was shared by openai and sama. Lots of openai staff and connected people also spammed twitter with strawberries, making it look like an official campaign, or like something was really about to be announced. The same account co-hosted a chat with someone called lily who some claimed was an ai.

worldcoin is a private company owned by sama that verifies identity by scanning the eyeball. He's been rolling out the technology in places like South Africa, where they also recruited people to train openai models by RLHF etc.

It seems it has since been confirmed a scam by some of the participants.

This chap looks to have more details on it https://twitter.com/BenjaminDEKR/status/1824676550379192324

Re: Disrupting a covert Iranian influence operation

#140
post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

But being able to generate slop doesn’t mean the AI is bad, even AGI could be able to generate slop. I certainly can. So how does it say bad things about OpenAI that their AI can generate slop?
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