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> So a nefarious actor could deploy a fleet of AI bots to comment in various internet forums, to both argue down dissenting opinions, as well as build the impression of consensus for whatever point they are arguing.

And the dissenting opinion will be able to do the same.

Twelve year old kids will be running swarms of these for fun, and the technology will be so widely proliferated that everyone will encounter it daily.

"Is that photoshopped?" will morph into "Is that AI?"

It'll be so commonplace, it'll cease to be magic.

I don’t disagree, but fools will still be fooled. And there are a lot of fools. I do wonder what it means for the future of the internet. I don’t think net good is coming out of this.

Realistically it means Facebook style log in on all sites worth commenting on. The only way to prevent legions of bots, and the only way govs can keep enemy psyops at bay, will be online persona's tied to real life identitys.

Looking at the WorldCoin discussion on HN. Some people are willing to sell their online accounts tied to real life identities.

But fb is full of bots

Centuries ago, some people had the same concerns about the printing press. If "fools" fell for religious heresies then their souls could be damned to hell for all eternity, at least according to leading experts at the time.

It will become even harder to find trustworthy content online. There will be lots more rabbit holes for people to fall into once it becomes commonplace to fake not just individual users but whole communities.

I really wonder what this will do to human culture as a whole, in the long term. So far we have relied on cultural artefacts and practices being mostly the work of other humans (directly or through tools). We are about to find out what happens when that is no longer the case.

> And the dissenting opinion will be able to do the same.

if they have the money

> Twelve year old kids

pfft

Shortbets 5 years. This is so going to happen.

>It’s completely within the realm of expectation that you could have a nation-state level initiative to propagandize your enemy’s populace from the inside out. Basically 2015+ Russian disinformation tactics but massively scaled up. And those were already wildly effective.

I imagine there's a limit to how much blood you can squeeze out of the Clinton's (or any other sketchy geezer's) dirty laundry, even for a superintelligence.

> Russian disinformation tactics but massively scaled up. And those were already wildly effective.

Russian disinformation's success in the 2016 election is massively over hyped for the usual partisan sour grapes reasons.

You cannot move the world with six figures of Facebook ads, if you could, everyone would spend a lot more money on Facebook ads.

People have voted with 130 billion dollars a year that Meta ads are an effective means of influence

How many Electoral College votes did those ads change in 2016?

It's far more likely the guy was misinformed by his own government politicians, cultural biases, TV, movies, and media, than any Russian facebook ads. But the matrix is strong.

Yes, this is the annoying thing about that story. They were definitely trying very hard, and they likely had some effect, but ultimately they just didn't have that much influence, likely significantly under a 0.1% swing. The whole Comey thing was significantly more influential and I believe the consensus is that even that wouldn't have changed the results.

Of course, nations still have a right to sovereignty and to be upset when another nation interferes in their internal affairs. I really hope the American public remembers how it felt going forward.

I see disinformation tactics more broadly as a long term effort undermining the idea that there is anything trustworthy. While there may be specific outcomes that an adversary might favour, the pollution of reasonable discourse alone is a win.

It's perfectly possible for "both sides" to see that as a plus.