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8 years ago I used NLP to generate fake user profile bios for a social media company (not one you've heard of). The SEO/marketing guys went nuts over it and st
by kradroy 8y ago
8 years ago I used NLP to generate fake user profile bios for a social media company (not one you've heard of). The SEO/marketing guys went nuts over it and started using it for everything. It was super effective and they had the money to scale it. Eventually Panda came out and hosed the rankings on the blogs/domains they used it for.
Around the same time I discovered https://narrativescience.com/ https://narrativescience.com/ and read about how they accomplished the same task. It was essentially similar to what I had done - write tons of templates, like Mad Libs, and then algorithmically fill in the blanks. Mine sometimes generated nonsense (e.g. "I love Mozart! I saw him in concert last year."). But for our purposes, or rather the purposes the marketing people came up with, it didn't matter much.
I saw the list of Narrative Science's investors and noted that In-Q-Tel was on there. Then I asked myself why the CIA's R&D funding arm would want that. The answer was obvious - to generate misinformation to spread to adversary orgs/states. Drown the real message in a sea of lies and your foes will waste more resources trying to find the truth.
- tomjakubowski 8y agoThis is a stab in the dark but the pattern fits: did the social media company no one has heard of happen to be TuneWiki?
- acct1771 8y agoHate to be the one to tell you this...they're doing it domestically (in their own country) as well.