The headline should be "OpenAI publicly admits it supported Iran influence operation despite the sanctions"
They supported it by banning them? That doesn’t make much sense to me.
Disrupting a covert Iranian influence operation
111–120 of 155 posts
Re: Disrupting a covert Iranian influence operation
#112Wow. What a high value target. [0] I mean. I get that low rent actors will use low rent services to try to generate political garbage. Is there any evidence that this is actually having a measurable or meaningful impact? Who exactly is fooled by these sites? And is it the sites that are the problem or the relative lack of sophistication in American education when it comes to political corruption? [0]: https://niothin…
My guess is that these sites are used to generate headlines that will be then shared by bots. Most people will never get pass that headline, the site is there to create the illusion of a real news source for those few who actually click the headline (but will probably never read the entire article because TL;DR). These healines are designed to reinforce certain bias and keep people inside their echo chambers, and that does have an impact.
Re: Disrupting a covert Iranian influence operation
#113Earlier 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.
> 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.
Re: Disrupting a covert Iranian influence operation
#114Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's a good thing for them to report this, but for a company that decided against watermarking their output they are kind of complicit. I know they might lose their teens and college demographic if they do it, but if it's truly this world-changing tool that they claim than not watermarking is scraping the serial number off the guns they're selling.* * Maybe a shitty analogy
How exactly would they watermark textual content?
with fonts and typos.
Re: Disrupting a covert Iranian influence operation
#115I wonder if it would be possible to get a list of countries that can have influence operations using ChatGPT and countries that can't.
Why stop at countries? Is it possible to get a list of organizations that are running influence, propaganda, and astroturfing operations using ChatGPT, and its ilk?
We could start with OpenAI itself. The raw output of the models is clearly manipulated by the company, leading to politically biased results. Which many of their users naively take as 'truth' because they think it's artificial intelligence.
Re: Disrupting a covert Iranian influence operation
#116One area that OpenAI did not comment on, was the likelihood that the AI-generated content here was itself used in the training data for a later model. Let's say the OpenAI engineers are working on ChatGPT 5 and spent last month scraping Teorater and X/Twitter, where this material ended up. How does OpenAI know that the new model is not poisoned? This isn't just OpenAI's problem of course. Anyone training on the open…
Given recent advancements, buying Twitter solely for its use as a data source seems prescient, given only the first party has additional metadata to identify bot replies.
... if the actual purchase hasn't been such a cluster$&@$ so as to thoroughly disabuse the notion there was some master plan.
Re: Disrupting a covert Iranian influence operation
#117Earlier quoted context omitted.
Reddit especially is full of LLMs. I would imagine there are ones from every major country plus several privately funded ones.
Yeah, all of the major subreddits are gamed, especially subs like r/politics. Even going back to the 2016 election it was clear that much of the activity on there was not genuine.
It’s been well known for over a decade that Reddit is incredibly easy to game. So while LLMs may seem useful, a well run political campaign can easily afford to astroturf the site while paying good money to their staff.
Re: Disrupting a covert Iranian influence operation
#118CNN 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.
There is a pro Russian bot that someone used prompt injection to prove it was a bot. https://www.reddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/comments/1dlg8ni/...
How do you distinguish a real bot, from a human pretending to be a bot?
Re: Disrupting a covert Iranian influence operation
#119Earlier quoted context omitted.
Reddit especially is full of LLMs. I would imagine there are ones from every major country plus several privately funded ones.
they are here as well.
Can they be drawn out, I wonder, when the context is too thin for them to catch...
GMOs are dangerous for reasons beyond immediate health implications. Israel has been determined in the world's highest court to be plausibly committing genocide. The tech industry is complicit in war crimes right now. Media consolidation is a massive and immediate threat, as are climate change and AIPAC.
... Or is it like what the park ranger said about the overlap between people and bears?
Re: Disrupting a covert Iranian influence operation
#120Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
Do you have examples in mind of successful foreign manipulation of US politics?
Not sure if you're serious, but just in case:
Have you ever heard of AIPAC? Rupert Murdoch? The UAE?
Chainsaw dismembering princes getting a free pass with their weapons purchases?
If you're only into corporate news, there's Russia in 2016 scapegoating for terrible decisions from the DNC.