i think a lot of people don't realize how far not just nation-states are willing to go, but bajillionaire entities are willing to go to control any given narrative now that AI is so accessible. ig comments, tiktok comments, reddit comments, hn comments, on seemingly innocuous and harmless content, just out there trying to look real and game the perception. these entities are well aware that people go to comments and discussion for "the real tea" and yeah. marketing behemoths offer "social media engagement" packages to entities like disney to push trailer hype. flood youtube and other socials with fake content engagement. 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.<p>bring back lan parties, aol instant messenger and throw the current platforms into the sun
I am, for some reason, quite active commenting on Reddit. And lately the number of comments I see that are obviously Claude has skyrocketed. These are just engaging in normal innocuous comment threads about the day to day stuff I care about (tech, my local region, stuff like that). But obviously they are building organic-looking profiles that can then be exploited to push manipulative content later.<p>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).<p>So yeah suddenly dead internet theory is seeming a lot more real today than it did just a couple of months ago.
It's funny how so many of the Reddit bots - and actually the bots on X as well - are so bad at their job of looking real. When it's a short comment, they're so often using the "The real X is Y" format, or else "X really said Y", and just kind of repeating whatever the post was about.
I agree with a lot of what you're saying but on this point:<p>> 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.<p>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.<p>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.
i mean maybe? i wouldn't put it past them personally. producers allocate kind of a lot of budget to the marketing channels and late night talk shows for the cast to try and generate buzz, i think i'd be zero percent surprised disney was willing to burn money engaging in fake content if that's what "the industry" showed to be effective. there was a smaller budget film and by small i mean not disney-wallet that did terribly because it's marketing firm shit the bed on the social media engagement it promised, and that led to a lawsuit. basically all their bots only engaged with themselves on the movies instagram page. this stuff absolutely exists, and on the tron trailer point: sure, again maybe. but the vid was up for like.. literally a minute, like im not even certain any of the commenters would have finished the trailer by the time they had commented. and it was an early morning drop iirc.
><i>Our mission is to ensure that artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity.</i><p>Pull the other one. It's got bells on.
We should be tracking and identifying all covert influence campaigns, from all states - not just Russia - and collecting a registry of these efforts for wide public distribution.<p>We should also be tracking and identifying all covert influence campaigns of our own government, too, while we’re at it.<p>In fact, all covert influence, everywhere, should be identified and made overt.<p>It is the covert nature of the influence that is the most insidious aspect, incompatible with free and open society.<p>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.<p>More leaks now!<p>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 ..
> We should be tracking and identifying all covert influence campaigns, from all states - not just Russia - and collecting a registry of these efforts for wide public distribution.<p>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.<p>I don’t think there is anything to be expected from the US at this point.
I'm in the camp that the US government is the biggest threat to world peace there is, so the anti-Russia agitprop is not really my thing. Sure, all imperialist war criminals should be prosecuted .. but there's a long, long list of those to prosecute <i>on our side</i>, which is committing far greater atrocities, and yet nobody is doing anything effective about it. Our liberal democracies are failing at reigning in our imperialist war criminals.<p>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.<p>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.
Why just covert?<p>There are proper overt examples: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radio_Free_Europe/Radio_Liberty" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radio_Free_Europe/Radio_Libert...</a><p>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).
Does it seem strange that Russia would go with Israel to astroturf credibility?
No, Israel has maintained relations with the Kremlin and has refused to impose sanctions against them, as well as rejected calls to send military aid to Ukraine.
Evangelical Christians are the target audience. They are strong supporters of Israel because of their interpretation of the bible.
If you want to understand Israel - think of it as Eastern European country that is geographically misplaced. Kremlin knows how to pass convincingly as them. And Israel is a wedge issue.<p>In psyops - discord is the goal.
It depends on who your target audience is.
Even as a speaker of the language I haven't a single bloody clue what a "hazzy" is. Is ChatGPT normally this bad at being prompted in one language to generate text in another, or is this an operator fuckup, I wonder?
Could it be "hazy", which is supposed to mean "cloudy"? The word "cloudy" is often used in Russian for "unclear", "vague", for example, one could say: "Western countries are awaiting a cloudy perspectives due to discarding traditional values".<p>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.
In the quote provided in the article, it's used as a noun: "unhackneyed perspective on hazzy". And literally the only thing I can think of is the acronym "hz", which is a rough equivalent of the English "idfk". Like someone prompted the bot to tell them the channel gives a perspective on "something, I don't know what". But even this is a stretch of stretches.
mixing languages results in huge hallucination increase from my experience
Why didn't Russia just use local models?
Because they want to influence the mainstream outside of their frontiers.
Russian propaganda operations are not centralized, I'm sure some of them are using other models and for this one, the guy in charge decided to use ChatGPT
Why didn't they used any Chinese open models?
They very likely also do that
Maybe they were not as good at the time, or the contractor just used to use ChatGPT. Also ChatGPT can be used without a phone number registration, unlike Chinese models.
How do you know they didn't?
How many user do the Chinese open models have and how many users do OpenAI have?
This got me mixed feelings. I don't support such campaigns. Still I would prefer my AI tool to behave more like a notepad app and less like a government or a corporate censor.
Ideally our government would regulate this, but our government is an absolute dumpster fire intent on destroying respect for America and gives no care for what’s best for its people.<p>So, you know, we gotta take what we can get
<i>We recently banned a cluster of ChatGPT accounts originating in Russia</i><p><i>We banned a cluster of ChatGPT accounts that very likely originated in Russia.</i><p>Methinks AI helped write this. Although…their evidence is pretty damning.
unfortunatly it appears to me that Russia has gone from doing good service providing a reasonable counter narative to the US/west, has become lazy and resorted to promoting convienient irrational and extreamist naratives present at the fringes of western societies, but worse for them and us, is that they are now consuming the excess product and activly meddling, not that our various 3 and 4 letter agencys are refraing from operating there, but it's all tedious and evil mean spirited, lacking any identifiable moral or cultural basis, just a dirty fight for power on both sides.
Open Ai is fighting for defence and other state contracts in USA and similar minded countries<p>Writing about Russia negatively is in their interests, in reality all nation states are doing the same stuff<p><pre><code> “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. ”
</code></pre>
They replaced them the next day with English speakers and carried on as normal
You have to be able to keep two different things in your mind:<p>- yes OpenAI benefits from talking about actions Russia is taking against other countries and how they handle that<p>- 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<p>You cannot just label something as irrelevant just because that benefits the one reporting the issue
Joke aside, it is really hard to determine by goal- as russia has not these "talking" points chinese operators have. If you know the talking points handed of the month- you can very easily spot chinese propaganda.<p>But russia, is just opinion-fog. Covering all.<p>Occasionally - taking some sane take- and glueing some insane conspiracy to it, to discredit opposition.<p>But the fog- that is really tough to filter for. For a time it was structure. The whole:<p>"As a midwestern working joe.."