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Comment by evolvingstuff | Hacker News Reader

I suspect in the near future there will be a number of cases where individuals will intentionally release a bunch of AI "chaff", in the sense that having a very large number of bad videos/texts about them, of which many are clearly false, will disguise the actual bad behavior. I'm not sure what term/phrase will be used for this particular tactic, but I am absolutely certain one will arise.

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This almost certainly already happens, just without AI. For one example look at the surfeit of UFO stories, many of which can be plausibly attributed to state efforts to cloud intelligence about actual classified air and space technology

This was a plot point in the 2019 Neal Stephenson novel Fall; or, Dodge In Hell. In an effort to prove information on the internet was unreliable a massive spam/defamation campaign was launched on a person -- to the point that the information was unbelievable and it was obviously fake.

In the novel, despite several attempts from different parties to encourage people to think more critically about what they read on the internet, highly sensational AI generated content radicalizes and stupefies the population.

I think you'll also see this as a defensive measure from some forward-leaning targets of deepfakes.

First, it's awful that this could be even considered as needed in the future, and developers behind the open source projects should consider the future they are enabling. It's not all just harmless tech.

So with that in mind, I've spoken to people who have theorized about releasing preemptive deepfake porn of themselves. This is due to the currently awful but very much existing trend of revenge porn, and possible expansions of the theme that w/ deepfakes. Can't blackmail someone via embarrassment if it is all plausibly deniable.

For example, I was in a con with a presenter who was a leading advocate against revenge porn, and the the call got zoom-bombed. Awful stuff. I could see someone on the receiving end of that treatment going full nuclear in the manner I described, in the off chance those sort of measures ended the threat finally.

This (minus the AI part until now) is pretty much the strategy of political operator Steve Bannon, who pithily summarized it as 'flood the zone with shit'. Think of all those junk 'news' sites that are just barely curated content farms using automated 'spinners' to pump out content, rage farming pundits etc.

This kind of happened in The Office, where Michael Scott spread a rumor about everyone to cover up the fact that he was about to get caught gossiping inappropriately about a co-worker.

This is already a thing but it's more for people with money right now.

There are a lot of 'reputation management services' whose job is to flood out bad press and replace it with anything else.

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