this post was submitted on 18 Sep 2023
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The logical end of the 'Solution to bad speech is better speech' has arrived in the age of state-sponsored social media propaganda bots versus AI-driven bots arguing back

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[–] [email protected] 89 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Shit. I could have told them to just block lemmygrad for like $100 😂🤣😂

[–] [email protected] 22 points 1 year ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Sold! $190 to watch to two of y'all fight Russian and Nazi sympathizers. I'm selling this on pay-per-view

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

i would consider tuning into that, what you charging for a front seat to the action?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago
[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

Best I can do is an upvote.

Please tell me how to block a full instance

[–] [email protected] 63 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Just a reminder, LLMs are not designed to provide truth, but rather naturally sounding word generation.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

We can certainly argue over what they're designed to do, and I definitely agree that's the goal of them. The reality though is that on some level it is impossible to separate assertions from the words that describe them. Language itself is designed to communicate ideas, you can't really create language without also communicating ideas, otherwise every sentence from an LLM would just look like

"Has Anyone Really Been Far Even as Decided to Use Even Go Want to do Look More Like"

They will readily cite information that was fed to them. Sometimes it is on point, sometimes not. That starts to be a bit of an ethical discussion on whether it is okay for them to paraphrase information they were fed, and without citing it as a source of the info.

In a perfect world we should be able to expand a whole learning tree to trace back how the model pieced together each word and point of data it is citing, kind of like an advanced Wikipedia article. Then you could take the typical synopsis that the model provides and dig into it to judge for yourself if it's accurate or not. From a research standpoint I view info you collect from a language model as a step down from a secondary source and we should be able to easily see how it gets to that info.

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[–] [email protected] 40 points 1 year ago (5 children)

After WWII in Germany, the cool young people knew you couldn't trust anyone over 30.

Nowadays, cool people need to understand that you can't trust anything bland and sanitized-sounding on the internet. For the rest of our lives, your personhood is on trial with everything you say.

It could tear society apart before we even know it's happening.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago

For the rest of our lives, your personhood is on trial with everything you say.

bravo, man really well said

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

This was why I was so furious about Elon Mask's blue checkmark debacle. He had a chance to prove that a gigantic part of the internet was a) human and b) non-duplicate. I was really shocked by how badly an apparently smart person fucked it up. Not so smart, it turns out.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

EM loses the ability to infuriate you when you understand him as a narcissist.

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[–] [email protected] 26 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

Ah yes, American truths like "Iraq has WMDs and that's why invading them is the fair and just thing to do," "abortion is bad for human rights," "the US isn't collecting all of your internet traffic because that would be a violation of privacy," and "this CIA-funded coup of a democratically-elected government will definitely help spread democracy around the world."

This researcher has built a pro-America AI disinformation machine for $400. I expect that, like most American media, it will start citing "independent think tanks" like Atlantic Council (which, coincidentally, is staffed mostly by ex-US intelligence and receives funding from US intelligence agencies) and use reports gathered by "independent sources" such as the US 4th PsyOps Airborne (which, per their recent recruiting videos, admits to orchestrating large-scale protests including Euromaidan, Tiananmen Square, and others).

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago (17 children)

Have you seen any tweet this bot generated that would contain misinformation? Because I haven't.

What is the context for Iraq WMDs? I haven't seen it anywhere in the article?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Is anyone arguing that, at the time of the Iraq War, it wasn't considered a "truth" in America that Iraq was developing WMDs and that anything to the contrary was considered disinformation?

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago

What makes you say that this new disinformation machine is pro-America?

[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 year ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

That's way worse than I imagined. Like 400$ seems like to much money spent

[–] JohnDClay 9 points 1 year ago (2 children)

So is it against Russian disinformation, or is does it make anti Russia disinformation? I'd hope the former, it's easy enough to refute Russia with correct information.

[–] Draghetta 8 points 1 year ago

I know it’s taboo but hear me out - you could read the article and find out

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

Per the article, it’s the latter.

The tweets, the articles, and even the journalists and news sites were crafted entirely by artificial intelligence algorithms, according to the person behind the project, who goes by the name Nea Paw and says it is designed to highlight the danger of mass-produced AI disinformation.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago

This is the best summary I could come up with:


Russian criticism of the US is far from unusual, but CounterCloud’s material pushing back was: The tweets, the articles, and even the journalists and news sites were crafted entirely by artificial intelligence algorithms, according to the person behind the project, who goes by the name Nea Paw and says it is designed to highlight the danger of mass-produced AI disinformation.

Mitigations are possible, such as educating users to be watchful for manipulative AI-generated content, making generative AI systems try to block misuse, or equipping browsers with AI-detection tools.

In recent years, disinformation researchers have warned that AI language models could be used to craft highly personalized propaganda campaigns, and to power social media accounts that interact with users in sophisticated ways.

Renee DiResta, technical research manager for the Stanford Internet Observatory, which tracks information campaigns, says the articles and journalist profiles generated as part of the CounterCloud project are fairly convincing.

“In addition to government actors, social media management agencies and mercenaries who offer influence operations services will no doubt pick up these tools and incorporate them into their workflows,” DiResta says.

The CEO of OpenAI, Sam Altman, said in a Tweet last month that he is concerned that his company’s artificial intelligence could be used to create tailored, automated disinformation on a massive scale.


The original article contains 806 words, the summary contains 215 words. Saved 73%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago (4 children)

OpenAI is so concerned that AI will do x and y bad thing but still pour all these resources into developing it further.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago

There are other endeavors where a great deal of the effort is put into making it safe. Space travel for example.

I wish that was the case for AI development. AI safety is a notoriously underfunded, understaffed and still overall neglected field.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (2 children)

OpenAI isn't responsible for what Russians do with it anymore than any company is for how users use their product

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (10 children)

If someone knows that what they're about to create is going to do harm like this, they shoulder some of the responsibility for those consequences. They dont just get to wash their hands of it as if they had no idea.

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

In that case, would you object to the posting of detailed schematics on the internet for the creation of nuclear weapons?

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

That concern is feigned, for PR.

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago

So this is why Elon is suddenly more upset than usual about bots

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

The Federal Election Commission has said it may limit the use of deepfakes in political ads.

Any use of deepfakes should serve as immediate disqualification/termination for any political candidate, and any donations immediately reversed.

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (16 children)

Honestly, if you look at it in a vacuum, this looks pretty similar to what the other side is doing.

It's a bot that draws from its own side's narratives and pushes that line.

Take away Russia from the picture and think about how often our media pushes a spin on other subjects that isn't exactly the truth.

Doesn't look so much like "social media propaganda bots versus AI-driven bots arguing back" as much as propaganda bots on both sides spewing whatever their masters want us to see.

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Only $400? Where can I buy one?

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