Chatbot Propaganda

Astral Codex Ten has, as if often the case, a calm and rational take on this: Mostly Skeptical thoughts on the Chatbot Propaganda Apocalypse. For example

4: Propagandabots Spreading Disinformation Is Probably The Opposite Of What You Should Worry About

News articles about this problem always start with the same scenario: what if someone made a propagandabot to spread COVID disinformation, ie the most unpopular topic in the world, which every government and social media corporation and AI corporation is itching to censor?

Here’s a crazy thought: maybe the side that has 10x more people on it and 100x more support from the relevant actors is the one that will win the race to use this technology. You can already get an off-the-shelf chatbot that mouths liberal pieties; I’m not sure there are any that are much good at disinformation production. The liberal-piety-bots will be on version 10.0 before the first jailbroken disinformation-bot comes out.

He looks at various scenarios where chatbots could do Very Bad Things on social media. He also quickly realises the steps we take to prevent Very Bad Things might ultimately be worse than the VBT's themselves. To take a recent example, government efforts to censor some types of Covid information created a backlash in which some people stopped believing the government when they said the sky is blue. None of these things is static. The interaction of people's voluntary actions plus their response to government* recommendations plus their response to (various) expert advising plus their response to government mandates plus their response to other people's responses to everything above is so fluid that it defies easy measure. Plus, social scientists and government agencies were maybe not the people you wanted to have in charge of that anyway. 

Plus I recommend reading what he says about getting spam from Nancy Pelosi, that just won't go away.

Covid is only the beginning, of course.  It gets more complicated every year. Except...is disinformation more of a problem than in Pick a Country/Pick a Century/Pick a Topic? Maybe.  Maybe finally yes, after all the times we have previously invoked the nothing-new-under-the-sun argument. 

I keep recalling from a prepper thread over a decade ago a person from South America who had been through an actual societal breakdown while being on the wrong side of an insane government. He stated in the strongest terms that what is key in those situations, much more than your weapons, alarm systems, and canned food is a network of people you have great certainty you can rely on. It does not fix everything, witness the Ukrainian Famine of 1932-33, but a stash of rifles, gold fragments, and water filters wasn't getting you through that either. So too with whatever imagined apocalypse you see from AI and swollen government and nefarious actors. If you have a network of people you can trust, you can, in the direst emergency, at least decide that the older children and young parents will get the food and have people you love around you as you go. Lots of humanity never had those choices.

And most likely, the biggest problem of your next decade will be something medical that happens to us or a near relative. Wine will still gladden the heart. Young people will still fall in love. Music will continue to inspire, chatbots be damned.

*And it very much matters what level of "government" we are talking about.  Not only local, county, state, federal, but school district/ WHO.