AI makes it cheap and easy to create propaganda at scale.

The logical end of the ‘Solution to bad speech is better speech’ has arrived in the age of state-sponsored social media propaganda bots versus AI-driven bots arguing back

  • chaircat@lemdro.idEnglish
    102·
    1 year ago

    Great, now take the same freedom fighter bots and tell them to argue IP policy on social media online. We can hear all about the right minded ways to think about intellectual property and how all the comments around here are misinformation.

    It’s like people lose their minds when you throw an enemy into the sentence. I don’t think these people crafting propaganda bots are heroes, even if they are on “my” team. Go down this road, and you can throw away forums like Lemmy, it’ll just be bots arguing with bots.

    • FuglyDuck@lemmy.worldEnglish
      8·
      1 year ago

      Not to mention, it’s very probable there not on the side of truth, but rather more propaganda.

    • Cleverdawny@lemm.eeEnglish
      24·
      1 year ago

      Please quote me as to where I called bot programmers heroes

      For the record, I don’t particularly like bots of any kind. That being said, troll farms are obviously malicious and negative as well, and far more pernicious than bots designed to make counter arguments to those troll farms. Context matters, and if social media orgs - including Lemmy - can’t find a way to combat troll operations, then I don’t see the further harm in someone boring out the truth to combat vicious propagandists out to apologize for fascists.

      • etuomaala@sopuli.xyzEnglish
        31·
        1 year ago

        Hm. Yeah, banning bots would be better, but it would be more expensive than fighting troll farms with AI. That is valid. Still, I consider AI counter arguments a temporary solution.

        • Cleverdawny@lemm.eeEnglish
          13·
          1 year ago

          The best solution is organized and effective administrative enforcement, but neither reddit nor Twitter or Facebook are interested in doing that, and lemmy is incapable of doing it even if they wanted to

            • Cleverdawny@lemm.eeEnglish
              13·
              1 year ago

              Yes, that’s my point. There’s no capability within Lemmy to effectively screen out bad actors. It’s all dependent on volunteer admins, and when you’re trying to play whack a mole with malicious instances and people bouncing their accounts around between legitimate instances, it becomes basically impossible.

              Not saying that the fediverse is a bad idea. I like it. But this is a key potential downside, and if lemmy and other fediverse clients become popular enough, we will see widespread botting, and it will be an issue.

              • etuomaala@sopuli.xyzEnglish
                1·
                1 year ago

                I agree. And defending against bots will be difficult. But not impossible. Trust exists in real life. It can exist online. The solution to establishing trust in real life changes with scale, but the highest level, there is democracy. It works on millions of people. The fediverse can try to find a new solution, but it may be easier and faster just to replicate democracy online. This includes many of the tasks a real democracy has to undergo, like:

                • photo IDs
                • municipal, provincial, and federal elections
                • supreme courts, regular courts, judges, laws, and punishments
                • public news service

                At this point, paid full-time civil servants are required. They can’t just be volunteers! How are they paid? Uhoh, now we need taxes.

                After all that, it is probably easier to just piggyback on the trust established by existing democracies, requiring a valid photo ID from a functioning democracy in order to sign up. I think that is a pretty good solution. However, no democracy in the world has an official online service in place that web servers could use to reliably validate such government photo IDs. So unfortunately, this solution is impossible for now.

                IDK, what solutions do you have?