4 ms·

This thing really does scare me and fascinate me at the same time. There's so many nefarious things you could do with this... Generate fake news. spam google.

This thing really does scare me and fascinate me at the same time. There's so many nefarious things you could do with this... Generate fake news. spam google. etc. One valuable use could be to generate comedy and parody. You could also make it to sabotage others too. You could set it lose on nazi forums and have them argue with bots constantly.

nprateem 7y ago
True. Authors at The Onion should be afraid.
lopmotr 7y ago
I think people are over-worried about fake material. We've been able to say lies since we became human. We've been able to print lies since printing. We can already edit photos. People routinely make fake screenshots of messages to defame others. Newspapers sometimes print fake stories based on lies given by their sources or which they fail to vet. But provenance still exists to prove things, not how convincing it looks.
- narrator 7y ago
  If you wanted to run a propaganda department though, you needed to be a government or a large news organization. Now it will be within the reach of 4chan.
- ben_w 7y ago
  If evidence alone was enough, there wouldn’t be any debate about antivaxxers, climate change, the Iraq WMDs, the 9/11 and moon landing conspiracies, Holocaust denial, the correct way to bring peace to the Israel/Palestine conflict, the safety of being white in a Muslim community or being black around an American cop, Brexit, any of the Assange drama, or if Snowden was acting appropriately by leaking what he leaked. And those are just the disagreements I’ve witnessed. Just because lies and propaganda have always been around, it doesn’t mean they were never a problem.
  - jfoster 7y ago
    To take an optimistic view, it may eventually teach people to more critically evaluate anything they read.
- AJ007 7y ago
  The problem is going to be the volume, and how long it takes the reader to figure out what is going on. You can look at a photo and quickly realize something is wrong. With this, you may need to read a few paragraphs or even start reading through what else the "author" has written. That is effectively a denial-of-service attack on human comprehension. Consider the issue of fake reviews: sometimes fake reviews are really obvious. Sometimes they aren't. Often the best way to pick out the fakes is to analyze all of the other reviews the user has written. That is going to become harder. For very technical topics, where the reader comes with a strong background knowledge in that topic, picking out the fake material isn't too difficult. I suspect for the hazier things where the writers are more or less stating opinions, like politics, it is going to be incredibly difficult (for a human reader) to separate the bots from real people.

nprateem 7y ago

True. Authors at The Onion should be afraid.

lopmotr 7y ago

I think people are over-worried about fake material. We've been able to say lies since we became human. We've been able to print lies since printing. We can already edit photos. People routinely make fake screenshots of messages to defame others. Newspapers sometimes print fake stories based on lies given by their sources or which they fail to vet. But provenance still exists to prove things, not how convincing it looks.

narrator 7y ago
If you wanted to run a propaganda department though, you needed to be a government or a large news organization. Now it will be within the reach of 4chan.
ben_w 7y ago
If evidence alone was enough, there wouldn’t be any debate about antivaxxers, climate change, the Iraq WMDs, the 9/11 and moon landing conspiracies, Holocaust denial, the correct way to bring peace to the Israel/Palestine conflict, the safety of being white in a Muslim community or being black around an American cop, Brexit, any of the Assange drama, or if Snowden was acting appropriately by leaking what he leaked. And those are just the disagreements I’ve witnessed. Just because lies and propaganda have always been around, it doesn’t mean they were never a problem.
- jfoster 7y ago
  To take an optimistic view, it may eventually teach people to more critically evaluate anything they read.
AJ007 7y ago
The problem is going to be the volume, and how long it takes the reader to figure out what is going on. You can look at a photo and quickly realize something is wrong. With this, you may need to read a few paragraphs or even start reading through what else the "author" has written. That is effectively a denial-of-service attack on human comprehension. Consider the issue of fake reviews: sometimes fake reviews are really obvious. Sometimes they aren't. Often the best way to pick out the fakes is to analyze all of the other reviews the user has written. That is going to become harder. For very technical topics, where the reader comes with a strong background knowledge in that topic, picking out the fake material isn't too difficult. I suspect for the hazier things where the writers are more or less stating opinions, like politics, it is going to be incredibly difficult (for a human reader) to separate the bots from real people.