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Comment by bhouston | Hacker News Reader

How long until OpenAI's ChatGPT is astroturfing all debates on social media? Many in a year or two most posts to reddit will just be ChatGPT talking to itself on hot button issues (Israel-Palestine, Republican-Democrat, etc.). Basically stuff like this but on steroids, because ChatGPT makes it way cheaper to automate thousands of accounts:

* https://www.cnn.com/2019/05/06/tech/facebook-groups-russia-f...

* https://www.voaafrica.com/a/israeli-firm-meddled-in-african-...

I sort of suspect AI-driven accounts are already present on social media, but I don't have proof.

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in 2013, Reddit community managers cheerfully announced that Eglin Air Force Base, home to the 7th Special Forces Group (Airborne)'s Psychological Operations team, was the "most Reddit addicted city" https://web.archive.org/web/20150113041912/http://www.reddit...

all debates on social media have already been astroturfed to hell and back by professional posters for many years, but LLMs are certainly going to function as a force multiplier

Reminds me, I haven't seen a video of a dog greeting a returning soldier in ages. I was convinced that it was neverending.

All of the top 3 cities are places with a low official population and a large working population - Eglin's official pop is 2.8k, but has 80k workers. It's the "most Reddit addicted" city because of an obvious statistical artifact.

yeah most "working cities" host air force munitions directorates actively engaged in researching psychological warfare on social networks too

https://scholar.google.com/citations?view_op=view_citation&h...

if you want some entertaining reading go ahead and browse through Eduardo Pasiliao's research at your working city there:

https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=Caw-nkAAAAAJ&hl=en

I'll summarize it for you: computational propaganda with an emphasis on discerning and disrupting social network structure.

> Eglin Air Force Base, home to the 7th Special Forces Group (Airborne)'s Psychological Operations team

Which unit?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eglin_Air_Force_Base

Garrison for:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/7th_Special_Forces_Group_(Unit...

Which is Army and part of:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1st_Special_Forces_Command_(Ai...

Whose psychological operations unit is based out of North Carolina. Doesn't track with Eglin.

I wonder if that's a fluke or exit node for a large number of Unclass networks that a lot of bored LCpl Schmuckatellis are using.

Not just social media, but traditional media as well. As an example, British tabloid 'The Mirror' is using AI to write some of its news articles, and apparently nobody bothers to proofread them before release.

https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/world-news/vladimir-putin-adds...

This piece of "journalism" released a couple of days ago claims Finland is in the process of joining NATO, while it already joined nearly a year ago. This is obviously caused by utilization of a LLM model with training data limited to time before Finland was accepted. At least at the end of the article they mention AI was utilized, and included an email where you can complain about factual errors.

It absolutely is. I know of independent researchers doing some side project work on various social media platforms utilizing chatGPT for responses and measuring engagement.

It may become another good reason to leave social mass-media and allow smaller or actual friends only communities to spring up.

Why waste billions of kilo joules of energy running AI systems for that, when you'll get legions of dirt cheap technical labor in the developing world, who'll do it for you for far less and at massive scale, with better acerbic language?

Its not about saving money. Doing it like this means you just created a new private contractor environment to invest in.

I think part of the problem is that LLMs seem to be quite effective at producing messages adhering to ulterior motives, catch attention, reinforce emotions etc.

The GPT-4 release documentation has some examples of this in its addendum. ChatGPT also seems to be good at writing advertisements. Without the strong guardrails, I wouldn't bet on one or two persons instructimg a GPT-4-scale model perfoming worse at manipulating debates than 10 or 100 humans without AI.

Well, ChatGPT's English is very, very good.

> but I don't have proof.

Turing test achieved. I don't know if the internet will lose its appeal because of this. Could be that in the future, to use an online service, you'll need to upload a human UUID.

> Could be that in the future, to use an online service, you'll need to upload a human UUID.

Nothing would make the internet lose appeal to me faster than having to do something like that.

Me too. And I can't help but think, this would be a net benefit to humanity.

Maybe? But it would mean that I couldn't use the internet anymore. Which might also be a net benefit to humanity.

Yep, I'm saying that we'd be better off if we spent less time on this, and more time making community in meatspace. If the enshittification of the internet is what gets us there, well, that's the hero we deserve.

Could still be copy-pasted. How about a brain implant that captures and outputs thoughts with a signed hash? Not that I would like to see that future.

Wouldn't stop much. Human UUIDs would be sold on the black market to spammers and blackhats.

"Need $500? Rent out your UUID for marketing!"

Well at least those UUIDs could be blocked permanently. Sort of like a spamhaus setup. Although it would be very dystopian that you rent out your UUID because you are poor and then you end up being blocked from everything. Sounds like Black Mirror.

That idea has a name, the "Dead Internet Theory"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Internet_theory

Lets be real, chat gpt is overqualified for that task.

Yeah for reddit and twitter randos who pop up to lambast you when you talk about a controversial topic, a self-hosted Mistral LLM would work great.

Already seen in the wild from colleagues.

Nice deflection at the end there, but I sniff military AI.

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