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Somewhat agree with your take. A good example is Twitter: it’s trivial even for a non-state actor to automate a bot farm to post hundreds of thousands of disinf

Somewhat agree with your take. A good example is Twitter: it’s trivial even for a non-state actor to automate a bot farm to post hundreds of thousands of disinfo tweets, create “connections”, retweet each other, etc. this is happening today at a massive scale. However, where I can see a model like ChatGPT making a difference is creating a tsunami of seemingly in-depth content both in public (Wikipedia) and private (buying 10K domain names) spaces. Generating fake research papers, interviews, blog posts, reviews… at a scale that until now required an unattainable amount of human supervision. How much content would it take to flood the more visible part of the internet?

cwkoss 4y ago
Fair point. But hasn't SEO blogspam already flooded every inch of the visible part of the internet already? Can't partisans already get 5-10 pundits to write articles advocating a questionable concept to add a veneer of credibility for a couple thousand bucks? I'm not sure what frontiers of the visible part of the internet remain. It will certainly become more economical to do this sort of nefarious stuff, but I suspect democratizing misinformation production will lead to the development of better media literacy at a rate that outpaces that misinformation drowning out people who are earnests trying their best to find and present the truth.
- fanso99 4y ago
  In my experience blogspam has been primarily used for commercial purposes (selling stuff and/or ads). Political disinfo at a new scale could pose very interesting new challenges. In a similar way we saw a paradigm shift when Cambridge Analytica employed political targeting at a new scale. Before that anyone could hire a savvy social media manager to target specific groups, but automating this process proved to be a different beast. How soon our society will adapt to this, or how we will even react is yet to be seen. I don’t have high hopes for this to be a fast and painless process.
commandlinefan 4y ago
> to post hundreds of thousands of disinfo tweets If that's true, then they've been doing it for a long time now... has it actually made a difference? There have been a lot of news items that were accused of being disinfo that have since turned out to be absolutely true, but I have yet to have seen an example of actual disinfo that took hold and altered any meaningful course of events.

cwkoss 4y ago

Fair point. But hasn't SEO blogspam already flooded every inch of the visible part of the internet already? Can't partisans already get 5-10 pundits to write articles advocating a questionable concept to add a veneer of credibility for a couple thousand bucks? I'm not sure what frontiers of the visible part of the internet remain. It will certainly become more economical to do this sort of nefarious stuff, but I suspect democratizing misinformation production will lead to the development of better media literacy at a rate that outpaces that misinformation drowning out people who are earnests trying their best to find and present the truth.

fanso99 4y ago
In my experience blogspam has been primarily used for commercial purposes (selling stuff and/or ads). Political disinfo at a new scale could pose very interesting new challenges. In a similar way we saw a paradigm shift when Cambridge Analytica employed political targeting at a new scale. Before that anyone could hire a savvy social media manager to target specific groups, but automating this process proved to be a different beast. How soon our society will adapt to this, or how we will even react is yet to be seen. I don’t have high hopes for this to be a fast and painless process.

commandlinefan 4y ago

> to post hundreds of thousands of disinfo tweets If that's true, then they've been doing it for a long time now... has it actually made a difference? There have been a lot of news items that were accused of being disinfo that have since turned out to be absolutely true, but I have yet to have seen an example of actual disinfo that took hold and altered any meaningful course of events.