Top AI expert 'completely terrified' of 2024 election, shaping up to be 'tsunami of misinformation'

DonPiano , 6 months ago

The word they’re looking for is “shitnami”.

BoneALisa , 6 months ago

I believe this wholeheartedly. I work for an mcsp, and we have a client who runs a chain of “news” sites. They are buying a bunch of AI server equipment for their racks and we are almost 100% certain its to pump out garbage for the election.

FarFarAway , 6 months ago

Maybe an unpopular opinion, but I feel like anything produced by AI should be somehow watermarked at the source. At this point there’s only a handful of companies. It wouldn’t be too hard to have them all insert something into the final product that is easily identifiable. Something like a microscopic signature in a corner, with model info and date produced…idk. Not anything that ruins the image, but something that can be seen by anyone, if looked for.

If nothing else there should be a large push to inform the public of telltale features to look for (i.e. too many appendages) to help them determine if it’s created by AI or not. While not fool proof, if it can discount even a portion of the misinformation, imo, it’s worth an effort.

To me, it seems irresponsible of the companies running the AI to just unleash it upon the world without training us humans to understand what we’re looking at. Letting us see how realistic everything is while letting us know its been produced by AI, at least helps us to comprehend the scope of the matter and adapt to the situation at hand. Esp for those who don’t fully grasp what AI can and cannot do.

FlaminGoku , 6 months ago (edited 6 months ago)

I appreciate this take and think it’s a great idea. You have everything written on an immutable distributed ledger (dare i say blockchain) so that no matter what is created and shared, it can be traced back.

You still allow it’s capabilities to evolve but you always will be able to confirm with a check.

It will be similar to the pictures of diseased lungs and hearts on cigarettes. People will still “buy” the “news” even though it’s fake.

At this point though, you can run a deepfake off a laptop, there would need to be a complete fork for existing code with heavy regulation.

wahming , 6 months ago

The technology is open source. Anybody can run it themselves and disable the watermarking.

Human , 6 months ago

I initially thought this was the way to go too, but imo theres a problem: the only individuals who could produce high-level unwatermarked content would be those with access to GPU clusters—state actors and corpos, who would undoubtedly use it to manipulate the masses that have been trained to trust the watermark

I think in the best-case scenario, we’re just going to have to ride out a couple of very strange years while people adjust to a new reality. Shits gonna get weird

FarFarAway , 6 months ago

You have a point. I sometimes definitely forget to consider the flip side of the coin.

nutsack , 6 months ago

a lot of the bad actors here would probably not be complying with such a policy. there is no way to enforce it.

tsonfeir , 6 months ago

Should, maybe, is-no.

thejml , 6 months ago

This was going to be true, AI or not. There’s no reason for them NOT to try to dupe you into voting for them… or at least against the other person. That’s been the way it’s been since the beginning. It’s definitely been ramping up the last 30-60 years, and tech will 100% be leveraged to those ends where it can be because they’d be dumb not to. They want to be in office. Whatever gaslighting they can do, they’ll do.

Without some sort of monitoring or accountability it’s just going to get worse. But even if they had fines for misinformation, they’ll just do some math to find out if the fine is worth it. If they put out an ad that says something about the other side that drives voters to them and they get caught, the voters likely won’t see a retraction. Their views likely won’t change back, so the fine doesn’t do anything but increase the cost of the ad and may still be worth it.

autotldr Bot , 6 months ago

This is the best summary I could come up with:

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That could look like persuasive text messages, false announcements about voting processes shared in different languages on WhatsApp, or bogus websites mocked up to look like official government ones in your area, experts said.

Faced with content that is made to look and sound real, “everything that we’ve been wired to do through evolution is going to come into play to have us believe in the fabrication rather than the actual reality,” said misinformation scholar Kathleen Hall Jamieson, director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania.

But pro-democracy advocates argue the takeover has shifted what once was a flawed but useful resource for news and election information into a largely unregulated echo chamber that amplifies hate speech and misinformation.

Twitter used to be one of the “most responsible” platforms, showing a willingness to test features that might reduce misinformation even at the expense of engagement, said Jesse Lehrich, co-founder of Accountable Tech, a nonprofit watchdog group.

“I’m worried that in 2024, we’re going to see similar recycled, ingrained false narratives but more sophisticated tactics,” said Roberta Braga, founder and executive director of the Digital Democracy Institute of the Americas.

In Colorado, Secretary of State Jena Griswold said informative paid social media and TV campaigns that humanize election workers have helped inoculate voters against misinformation.

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The original article contains 1,764 words, the summary contains 218 words. Saved 88%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!