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Ironically, this line of critique is itself ... a misinformation play of sorts: Where were they when US media was waging an industrial-scale misinformation cam

Ironically, this line of critique is itself ... a misinformation play of sorts: Where were they when US media was waging an industrial-scale misinformation campaign about non-existent Russian AI bots on Twitter? The ones who were supposedly secretly fielding GPT-4 quality bots to make Americans vote for Trump? In that, simply put - these are straw-man claims that are being attacked here. As to why - it's pretty obvious if one follows the event chronology of the broader story. Simply put: that the troll farms existed is a matter of forensic record, beyond dispute. But the narrative at the time was always in that formulation - "troll farms", i.e. essentially an MTurk operation. And yes, aspects of that narrative (specifically in regards to its actual effect on the election) were at the time speculative, and yeah, apparently lacking substance. However - specific claims about them being "AI bots" didn't come until much later in the hype cycle, and were quite marginal (nowhere near "industrial-scale" as alleged above). And the claim about "secretly fielding GPT-4 quality bots" seems particularly strange, since GPT itself became known to the broader public until long after the election bots mania had arced and passed.

revelio 3y ago
Quite marginal? Here is a video compilation of just cases where MSNBC promoted just the Hamilton 68 dashboard, which supposedly tracked "Russian linked" bot and troll activity. It's 11 minutes of clips: https://www.racket.news/p/eleven-minutes-of-media-falsehoods https://www.racket.news/p/eleven-minutes-of-media-falsehoods These people couldn't stop talking about Russian bots. Listen for yourself and you'll see the claim is made regularly. Later it was discovered that these hundreds of accounts were all ordinary westerners, and the Hamilton 68 people admitted that they'd never really had a reason to think they were Russian. That's just one TV channel, referring to one source of misinformation! There are far far more such clips available. This sort of thing was totally normal outside the media too. Look at how many papers have come from academics writing about this supposed widespread problem: https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=%22social+bots%22+OR+%22twitter+bots%22&btnG=&oq=%22social+bots%22 https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=%22s... Over 14,000 papers on bots that don't really exist! And that's just a tiny fraction of the misinformation pumped into society regularly. Again, if Hinton actually cared about misinformation, he'd have cared about that. He doesn't. Like everyone else claiming to care, he's simply a bitter partisan, hence his comment about Biden at the end of the interview. My point is that these claims all revolved around the idea that the internet was being flooded with bots that spoke and thought just like Americans, so similarly that people couldn't tell they weren't human and would even be highly persuaded by them. Yet the tech to do that didn't exist at the time. People who observed this fact were of course attacked as spreading misinformation themselves, which is why the whole concept is just a joke idea.
- lisasays 3y ago
  Yet the tech to do that didn't exist at the time. Right. Long and short of it is, even though a lot of people were talking about "bots" at the time, they weren't really thinking too much about what that meant, technically. Or even whether these "bots" were actually just literal rooms of people typing garbage from a script (by far the likeliest explanation - save for those which have since been verified as "authentic" right wing troll accounts). Either way -- none of this was ever an "AI risks" story. That is -- nothing for people Hinton to be concerned about, let alone to have to answer to.
  - revelio 3y ago
    It was an AI misinformation story, so you'd think it'd be in his new wheelhouse. But we all know what "misinformation" means when people like that say it. They don't mean it literally.
    - lisasays 3y ago
      It was a "Russian influence" story by every narrative I remember. But hey, you can remember it any way you want. It's a free country after all.

revelio 3y ago

Quite marginal? Here is a video compilation of just cases where MSNBC promoted just the Hamilton 68 dashboard, which supposedly tracked "Russian linked" bot and troll activity. It's 11 minutes of clips: https://www.racket.news/p/eleven-minutes-of-media-falsehoods https://www.racket.news/p/eleven-minutes-of-media-falsehoods These people couldn't stop talking about Russian bots. Listen for yourself and you'll see the claim is made regularly. Later it was discovered that these hundreds of accounts were all ordinary westerners, and the Hamilton 68 people admitted that they'd never really had a reason to think they were Russian. That's just one TV channel, referring to one source of misinformation! There are far far more such clips available. This sort of thing was totally normal outside the media too. Look at how many papers have come from academics writing about this supposed widespread problem: https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=%22social+bots%22+OR+%22twitter+bots%22&btnG=&oq=%22social+bots%22 https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=%22s... Over 14,000 papers on bots that don't really exist! And that's just a tiny fraction of the misinformation pumped into society regularly. Again, if Hinton actually cared about misinformation, he'd have cared about that. He doesn't. Like everyone else claiming to care, he's simply a bitter partisan, hence his comment about Biden at the end of the interview. My point is that these claims all revolved around the idea that the internet was being flooded with bots that spoke and thought just like Americans, so similarly that people couldn't tell they weren't human and would even be highly persuaded by them. Yet the tech to do that didn't exist at the time. People who observed this fact were of course attacked as spreading misinformation themselves, which is why the whole concept is just a joke idea.

lisasays 3y ago
Yet the tech to do that didn't exist at the time. Right. Long and short of it is, even though a lot of people were talking about "bots" at the time, they weren't really thinking too much about what that meant, technically. Or even whether these "bots" were actually just literal rooms of people typing garbage from a script (by far the likeliest explanation - save for those which have since been verified as "authentic" right wing troll accounts). Either way -- none of this was ever an "AI risks" story. That is -- nothing for people Hinton to be concerned about, let alone to have to answer to.
- revelio 3y ago
  It was an AI misinformation story, so you'd think it'd be in his new wheelhouse. But we all know what "misinformation" means when people like that say it. They don't mean it literally.
  - lisasays 3y ago
    It was a "Russian influence" story by every narrative I remember. But hey, you can remember it any way you want. It's a free country after all.