My two cents: > He warned of the dangers of the use of artificial intelligence “to circulate tendentious opinions and false data that could poison public debat

My two cents: > He warned of the dangers of the use of artificial intelligence “to circulate tendentious opinions and false data that could poison public debates and even manipulate the opinions of millions of people, to the point of endangering the very institutions that guarantee peaceful civil coexistence”. The current relation between AI and opinion manipulation is actually more nuanced than what I think the Pope perceives. On the one hand, large companies use algorithms (some falling under AI) to shape conversations on their platform, and do so with intentions that cannot easily be called immoral. On the other hand, the primary purveyors of manipulative content that weaken civil society exploit the algorithms in ways their design did not anticipate or intend. Example: FB's algorithm for surfacing content is not clearly immoral, but malicious groups SEO content that is harmful to civil society when deployed large-scale, so that the content is deployed large-scale on the platform. Edit, addendum: I think the Pope's understanding of the relationship between AI and manipulative content is influenced by the news cycle's reporting on matters such as GPT-2, deepfakes, Musk's wild claims about AI. My understanding is that AI being used for clearly immoral ends is not widespread in SV companies. On the other hand, reporting on Xinjiang frequently describes facial recognition and other AI technologies being used to surveil, discipline, control and punish the lives of minorities there. If there is a current and successful user of AI technologies for clearly immoral ends, that would be the PRC in West China. If there should be an audience to which technological advances enables > a new “form of barbarism” where the law of the strongest prevails over the common good it would be to the PRC.