#Lesson9: He says it's "fake news".......Is the garb of "fake news" real ? Noise Vs Signal in age of Disinformation
It is not the truth....you need to verify facts...who is custodian of facts? Who is the gatekeeper for the truth ?
Sample this incident in the age of GPT-3 (a signal of the coming of “Age of Disinformation”) where the supply of generated text will become infinite combined from previously written intelligent articles thereby leading to a new order witnessed as a discrete incident noticed in 2017.
“A flood of derivative articles generated from originals (using AI like GPT-3) will become weapons of mass destruction for humanity by submerging the facts(quasi-truths) with fake news(disinformation)”
This is the threat and this is the challenge
INCIDENT 1:
“Purely digital personas controlled by Russian-intelligence agents.” going by the name
Here is Post-Mortem cum diagnosis cum apology by CounterPost on sourcing content from this fictitious Sophia Mangal( allegedly controlled by Russian Agencies - as per FBI)
In depth apology : https://www.counterpunch.org/2018/01/05/ghosts-in-the-propaganda-machine/
“AI-generated content will continue to become more sophisticated, and it will be increasingly difficult to differentiate it from the content that is created by humans.”
GPT-3 can put words together based on probabilities, it can prompt whenever the author is stuck to express a concept on how it would answer a question.
“The AI’s output tends to ramble a bit and can become somewhat nonsensical if it goes on for too long, but this is a problem humans face as well; it’s why freshman philosophy students have TAs and publications have editors. But given a prompt, GPT-3 can produce any number of unique takes, which a person can quickly and easily polish and post.”
In the past, propaganda needed human hands to write it. While the AI output requires some human editing, it generally produces enough useful material that a manipulator’s job would be much easier, and the content likely significantly harder to detect.
“But the most interesting question that it raises is how people will react and adapt to unreality. If you knew that vast quantities of text on the internet -comments, tweets, articles -was written by fake people, would you care?”
Establishing content provenance?
Notes on possible pathways…
It is going to be a matter of concern for readers on internet and that is potentially where blockchain and bitcoin ledger will help in creating original authored content tied to a verified identity locking it in time.
There is a slightly middle option: a platform more like dating, or WeChat; less yelling into the void, for others to hear; more double-opt-in chatrooms. That could get weird fast: Ad-driven for low income, paid for the wealthy. Confirmation bubbles is a side effect of this pathway.
What has been the response of humanity to previous artificial curation takes like algorithmic recommendations to shopping(amazon) ,music(spotify) or movies( netflix) instead of social recommendations from real friends? The masses have willingly submitted themselves showed indifference to these algorithmic (artificial) curations. Well they are expected to follow suit for fake articles, fake movies, fake music and even fake books (I see a problem with the word….fake…..rather “synthetic” or “artificially” produced articles, movies, music and even books will enter our day to day lives.)
This newsletter piece was summarised from the following sources
In depth Analysis: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/09/future-propaganda-will-be-computer-generated/616400/
✍ I wrote an article for The Atlantic on the age of AI-generated media and text, and how society will adapt to increasing unreality. Since I’ve been playing with GPT-3 for a few weeks, I used it to generate some of the writing in the article (verbatim) 💻theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/…
The apology written after investigation to it’s readers https://www.counterpunch.org/2018/01/05/ghosts-in-the-propaganda-machine/
The coming age of “fake movies” or “AI generated Movies”
