Hacker News Reader

Comment by perarneng | Hacker News Reader

If you apply 2nd order thinking to this story it's easy to see how dangerous AI in combination with social media is. It's worrying that so few care about this issue. How is it possible to have reliable elections or a functioning democracy if people are this easily manipulated and fooled. It was always easy to fool some people but social med powered by AI makes it ridiculously easy and cheap to do mass social engineering. One single person can affect so many potential voters.

View on HN

> if people are this easily manipulated and fooled.

They always were. Problem is that people generally think the others are the ones being manipulated. Partially true...

"marketing works, on you, even when you understand how marketing works"

Did we have a functioning democracy before AI? Before social media? Before smartphones?

Yes.

Our democracy did actually function better before AI, social media and smartphones than it does now.

Everything was not always as bad as it is now. I know that's heresy and thoughtcrime to suggest, but it is true. Things weren't always perfect in the past, but in many ways they were better.

Indeed they were; I lived through it too. So, logically, the solution seems to be: get rid of AI, social media, and smartphones?

These aren't the problem, the systems of power and capitalism using them to exploit people are the problem.

AI is useful in niche circumstances but we could absolutely stand to get rid of 99% of its "use cases."

Social media enables people to network and communicate in ways that would drastically harm freedom of expression if it were removed, and it's so ill defined that banning or regulating it could creep into banning or regulating most communication on the web. Same with smartphones - having a communication and computing device on hand is useful, the problems aren't with the existence of the devices themselves.

The problem with an AI MAGA influencer isn't that social media exists, or that cellphones exist, or even that AI exists, it's whatever deeper cultural and social problems allow MAGA to be a thing in the first place, and AI to be influential. Just banning all the modern things is an easy solution but not necessarily the correct one. I think that we can still have a modern computing and communications infrastructure including social media and smart phones and a working democracy as well.

if people are this easily manipulated and fooled

AI detection probably needs to be added to computer literacy curricula (maybe it is, and it is just too late for adults). Of course, it is a political strategy of Republicans (probably conservatives in general) to suppress access to education, as the Republicans enjoy a growing advantage with white non-college grads.

https://news.gallup.com/poll/248525/non-college-whites-affin...

Meh. The Internet has always had a high noise floor, AI here just takes an existing problem and makes it slightly worse.

No, the problem is that AI takes an existing problem and makes it massively worse. Because there is basically no limit to the amount of plausible-sounding drivel that AIs can spew, they can drown out all other voices in a way that regular shills and propagandists couldn't. Even organized rings couldn't produce the same volume that AIs can.

Sure, the internet had, say 20% noise back before spam, shills, and propaganda took over. Now it has 50% noise, maybe even 80%. It's still (barely) usable. But what happens when the noise is 99% of the content? 99.9? That's not "making it slightly worse", that's a phase change that makes it completely unusable.

It never had to sound plausible. AI didn't cause MAGA to believe Haitian's were eating people's pets. AI didn't cause them to believe that schools were buying kitty litter for furries. It's a population who has been conditioned over decades to believe the most wild shit as long as it comes from one of their "trusted sources" and anything that is counter to that is the "liberal media". Fox News et al are far more damaging to our society than generative AI is.

I think their use of the word “plausible” was in reference to a comparison to content generation in the pre-LLM era, which was limited to GANs and Markov chains.

far more than "slightly"

Instead of prosecuting the real abusers, you suggest prosecuting the tools they use? AI is a tool, social media is a medium.

The mass social engineering is nothing new. The whole hierarchies of human relations are based on deception.

It is legal to produce beer. It is legal to operate a bar. And we have a concept of a nuisance business that can result in fines or shutdown if your business constantly attracts egregiously bad behavior.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com