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Comment by gizmodo59 | Hacker News Reader

how is this news? Adversarial country using AI to generate fake news goes way before AI.

It’s news because it still needs to be called out. Not everyone recognizes AI-generated content, but even if everyone did, calling it out serves a real social purpose.

Why does it have to be an adversarial country? Why does it have to be a country at all? Couldn’t it be the mayor of some town? Or a PR team at a fast food franchise group? Or one of SBF’s polycule members?

The notion we only see this news when it is calling out a country with which the federal government is in conflict makes me question to veracity and intent of the article itself, more than the content of it.

And what do you call it when a country acts in adversarial ways to its own citizens? Call it cynical, but it sure seems like there's a lot of that in the world right now.

You call it a country :P

Well it’s mostly other entities running influence campaigns.

Thats true.

But this article is about the influence campaigns presumably tun by the Iranian government.

This is classic FUD, Fear Uncertainty and Doubt.

It’s designed to make the reader question which articles they have read recently that are Iranian propaganda, and sow doubt about future articles that seem to benefit Iran.

This amount of FUD always seems to increase around election time…

It's a well-researched article that lays out evidence, not suspicions. It includes OpenAI's own investigation into accounts that were found generating op-eds for Iranian propaganda. It shows the route by which these op-eds entered into smaller publications, namely by a pacifist NGO in Oregon, and neither then NGO nor the publications saw them as propaganda, despite the origins of the op-eds.

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