The year is 2016. Under close scrutiny by CCTV cameras, 400 contractors are working around the clock in a Russian state-owned facility. Many are experts in American culture, tasked with writing posts and memes on Western social media to influence the upcoming U.S. Presidential election. The multimillion dollar operation would reach 120 million people through Facebook alone.
Six years later, the impact of this Russian info op is still being felt. The techniques it pioneered continue to be used against democracies around the world, as Russia's “troll factory” — the Russian internet Research Agency — continues to fuel online radicalization and extremism. Thanks in no small part to their efforts, our world has become hyper-polar, increasingly divided into parallel realities by cherry-picked facts, falsehoods, and conspiracy theories.
But if making sense of reality seems like a challenge today, it will be all but impossible tomorrow. For the past two years, a quiet revolution has been brewing in AI — and despite some positive consequences, it’s also poised to hand authoritarian regimes unprecedented new ways to spread misinformation across the globe at an almost inconceivable scale.
In 2020, AI researchers created a text generation system called GPT-3. GPT-3 can produce text that’s indistinguishable from human writing — including viral articles, tweets, and other social media posts. GPT-3 was one of the most significant breakthroughs in the history of AI: it offered a simple recipe that AI researchers could follow to radically accelerate AI progress, and build much more capable, humanlike systems.
But it also opened a Pandora’s box of malicious AI applications.
Continue reading: https://www.thestar.com/opinion/contributors/2022/08/29/the-future-of-malicious-artificial-intelligence-applications-is-here.html
Six years later, the impact of this Russian info op is still being felt. The techniques it pioneered continue to be used against democracies around the world, as Russia's “troll factory” — the Russian internet Research Agency — continues to fuel online radicalization and extremism. Thanks in no small part to their efforts, our world has become hyper-polar, increasingly divided into parallel realities by cherry-picked facts, falsehoods, and conspiracy theories.
But if making sense of reality seems like a challenge today, it will be all but impossible tomorrow. For the past two years, a quiet revolution has been brewing in AI — and despite some positive consequences, it’s also poised to hand authoritarian regimes unprecedented new ways to spread misinformation across the globe at an almost inconceivable scale.
In 2020, AI researchers created a text generation system called GPT-3. GPT-3 can produce text that’s indistinguishable from human writing — including viral articles, tweets, and other social media posts. GPT-3 was one of the most significant breakthroughs in the history of AI: it offered a simple recipe that AI researchers could follow to radically accelerate AI progress, and build much more capable, humanlike systems.
But it also opened a Pandora’s box of malicious AI applications.
Continue reading: https://www.thestar.com/opinion/contributors/2022/08/29/the-future-of-malicious-artificial-intelligence-applications-is-here.html
