Disrupting a new covert influence campaign from Russia
openai.com
openai.com
bring back lan parties, aol instant messenger and throw the current platforms into the sun
> i remember within the first like minute disney dropped the latest tron trailer on youtube, it was absolutely flooded with "i'm not ready" "omggggg" caliber comments from seemingly real looking youtube profiles.
Disney is too much of a faceless corporation to both with something like that. Especially since, why would anyone be convinced a trailer is good from an astroturfed comment? You're looking at the same content. It's different from a HN comment from an apparent expert who's supposedly verifying that an article is true.
The final nail in the coffin is that I've met plenty of people who really who react like that to a new Disney video.
The only pushback I would see within a fairly well-run place like Disney is that they might question whether different forms of fake buzz are effective, and worth the potential risk of being exposed if they do it too much.
This scares me because the stuff that screams "THIS COMMENT WAS WRITTEN BY CLAUDE" has gotta be the tip of the iceberg. There must be much more of these comments that are better-prompted and using better-tuned model pipelines to make them less detectable. (Probably even just the lazy garbage is harder for me personally to detect if you just pass the prompt to GPT instead of Claude, it's just that I've read so much Claude output that I'm attuned to it).
So yeah suddenly dead internet theory is seeming a lot more real today than it did just a couple of months ago.
Even reddit is all these things but it's harder to tell because everything is siloed to the point we don't share the same reddit experience, which is not the case of hn as far as I'm aware.
We should also be tracking and identifying all covert influence campaigns of our own government, too, while we’re at it.
In fact, all covert influence, everywhere, should be identified and made overt.
It is the covert nature of the influence that is the most insidious aspect, incompatible with free and open society.
So yeah, let’s start at home by disassembling the national security apparatus which allows covert influence to be wielded against The People. After all, anything less than full exposure is hypocrisy.
More leaks now!
Perhaps there will be an application of LLM’s towards identifying covert influence, which we can apply to a corpus and identify its true authorship. This would be pretty useful for a lot of things, eh ..
Close to nothing happened after Snowden leaks. The republican party has been able to convince pretty much everybody that the Mueller report was a hoax, a report that very explicitly found collusion between Russia and US operatives close to Trump, so bad that his own guys went to prison. The 2nd trump admin destroyed the cyber monitoring apparatus and might have let Russian hackers access citizens data.
I don’t think there is anything to be expected from the US at this point.
If there is hope, it is that Europes' youth will continue their current awakening and start holding their governments accountable for the support of genocide and war that their parents have been propagating for decades.
Yeah, there's not much hope. But the rest of the world long since turned away from any hope that the US would lead the way for justice. What we have now is war criminals calling for more war against other war criminals. The "War is Peace" crowd have the mic.
Unfortunately Europe is an aging continent, our youths don’t seem to be that engaged politically speaking, and we seem to be unable to do the necessary changes, or even just stand up to Trump or Putin (other than Ukraine of course). The European way of doing politics is way too weak and dull to bring meaningful changes. I hope that will change with new generations getting elected but so far it seems to be mostly benefiting the status quo and extremist right parties (who don’t have any solutions to offer, other than deporting brown people)
It helps that my kids were raised to treat culture as utterly arbitrary - and that they have gone to schools with Russian, Ukrainian, Iranian, American and British colleagues, too.
The melting pot is extremely useful in decomposing totalitarian-authoritarianism. The kids are sick of our shit.
There are proper overt examples: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radio_Free_Europe/Radio_Libert...
Russia is just the current boogeyman, where you can call anything you don't like "russian propaganda" (like fighting for workers rights in US a few decades ago was just "commies", same for trying to stop the war in vietnam... "commies" everywhere).
It's the insidious covert propaganda which leads to more war and calamity in the world.
"Sources say" .. "an unnamed source wishing to remain anonymous says" .. "officials in the administration say" .. we all need to lift our standards for truth.
I think the issue is that there is no funding or incentive to collate this information?
Pull the other one. It's got bells on.
For the context: I think, English was the most commonly taught foreign language in the Soviet Union, and later in Russia. But, because nobody had access to the genuine English media, whatever we had to read or listen to was produced by Russian speakers who also never heard or never read genuine English, well, perhaps outside of very outdated prose from the 19th century or even earlier.
-- How much watch?
-- Six watch.
-- Such much?!
-- For whom how...
-- MGIMO finished?
-- A-a-a-ask!
https://www.jpost.com/international/internationalrussia-ukra...
In psyops - discord is the goal.
But specifically Israel was founded by a lot of people from the pale of settlement, there was big wave of immigration from USSR after the berlin wall fell.
Culturally they represent the same mix of craziness, inventiveness, paranoia, chauvinism, xenophobia that the other EE countries also show. Not that those are bad things depending on the context and the situation.
The ECHR has nothing to do with the EU.
Or as a EU member can you withdraw from the court without consequences?
They are intertwined.
EU laws are adjudicated by the Court of Justice of the European Union.
Not ReptileMan: Depending on the country and social environment that you live in, such opinions of "ordinary, living" people are nothing unusual. In my experience the reason why many people think such opinions barely exist "in normal society" or accuse posters of such opinions to be bots is that these normal people live in a bubble in which such opinions are rare.
Russia had a random news paper in India put up an article linking AIDS to the CIA, and then over years converted that into a constellation of articles and commentary that even reached the UN.
Russia looks at disinformation the same way someone looks at configuring a server. What can be seeded where, at what cost and for what outcome.
Securing Our Autonomy: How AI Fuels Cognitive Warfare – and How We Can Fight Back
https://youtu.be/jH2i0Y9GjJc?t=1273
https://youtu.be/jH2i0Y9GjJc?t=2536
https://youtu.be/jH2i0Y9GjJc?t=2880
So the question then becomes how can these technologies be leveraged in such a way to be able to maximize signal intelligence, communication intelligence with human intelligence. And this is where AI really began to play a role with regard to big data.
The more data you have about individuals as those individuals relate and engage in their collectives and ecologies, the more you know about them, what makes them tick.
We here in the United States and among our technological and scientific allies recognize the benefit of this as do our international peer competitors scientifically, technologically, bioeconomically, economically, and certainly militarily, and geopolitically.
this idea of precision engagement with regard to being able to get intel about various human targets individually and collectively. Either high priority targets as individuals or groups that may be highly prioritized as individuals. What are their needs? What are their likes? What are their patterns? What are their spends? What are their vulnerabilities? Biocschosocial vulnerabilities and how can those be not only accessed utilizing big data and AI but accessed in the cognitive space but very often in the physical space as well. - the National Defense University dude sitting next to the author of this article.
We banned a cluster of ChatGPT accounts that very likely originated in Russia.
Methinks AI helped write this. Although…their evidence is pretty damning.
You can notice one more example of original language leak in the quote from a report ("And she needs politicians...") where Germany is referred to as "she", because in Russian "Germany", as many other countries, has a female gender, so we call it "she", not "it". In English I usually see people using "it" for countries.
So, you know, we gotta take what we can get
Writing about Russia negatively is in their interests, in reality all nation states are doing the same stuff
“We banned a cluster of ChatGPT accounts that very likely originated in Russia. The operators prompted in Russian to generate social media comments that were posted on Substack, Telegram, X, Facebook and LinkedIn. Most of the comments they generated were in English, and the operators instructed ChatGPT to hide any linguistic clues that they were Russian. ”
But russia, is just opinion-fog. Covering all.
Occasionally - taking some sane take- and glueing some insane conspiracy to it, to discredit opposition.
But the fog- that is really tough to filter for. For a time it was structure. The whole:
"As a midwestern working joe.."
- yes OpenAI benefits from talking about actions Russia is taking against other countries and how they handle that
- and also, Russia is one of the worst actor in the politics and has been non stop active for more than a decade to destroy democratic systems from the inside
You cannot just label something as irrelevant just because that benefits the one reporting the issue