Top AI expert ‘completely terrified’ of 2024 election, shaping up to be ‘tsunami of misinformation’::“I can’t prove that," says Oren Etzioni, professor emeritus at the University of Washington. “I hope to be proven wrong. But the ingredients are there.”
This is the best summary I could come up with:
That could look like persuasive text messages, false announcements about voting processes shared in different languages on WhatsApp, or bogus websites mocked up to look like official government ones in your area, experts said.
Faced with content that is made to look and sound real, “everything that we’ve been wired to do through evolution is going to come into play to have us believe in the fabrication rather than the actual reality,” said misinformation scholar Kathleen Hall Jamieson, director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania.
But pro-democracy advocates argue the takeover has shifted what once was a flawed but useful resource for news and election information into a largely unregulated echo chamber that amplifies hate speech and misinformation.
Twitter used to be one of the “most responsible” platforms, showing a willingness to test features that might reduce misinformation even at the expense of engagement, said Jesse Lehrich, co-founder of Accountable Tech, a nonprofit watchdog group.
“I’m worried that in 2024, we’re going to see similar recycled, ingrained false narratives but more sophisticated tactics,” said Roberta Braga, founder and executive director of the Digital Democracy Institute of the Americas.
In Colorado, Secretary of State Jena Griswold said informative paid social media and TV campaigns that humanize election workers have helped inoculate voters against misinformation.
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Had this in Argentina last year and I could bet even the “debate” was highly AI scripted
Edit, funny thing, it was not cheap… they estimate 15 kM US$
If anything it’s highlighting problems that already existed like the rollback of the Fairness Doctrine. If it was still in effect you would have more legal ground to stand on. Now they can lie, shrug and say ‘we’re just entertainers’ and they do it from Maddow to Carlson
This was going to be true, AI or not. There’s no reason for them NOT to try to dupe you into voting for them… or at least against the other person. That’s been the way it’s been since the beginning. It’s definitely been ramping up the last 30-60 years, and tech will 100% be leveraged to those ends where it can be because they’d be dumb not to. They want to be in office. Whatever gaslighting they can do, they’ll do.
Without some sort of monitoring or accountability it’s just going to get worse. But even if they had fines for misinformation, they’ll just do some math to find out if the fine is worth it. If they put out an ad that says something about the other side that drives voters to them and they get caught, the voters likely won’t see a retraction. Their views likely won’t change back, so the fine doesn’t do anything but increase the cost of the ad and may still be worth it.
the volume of actual AI misinformation is going to pale in comparison to the volume of people trying to use AI misinformation as a boogeyman to scare you into voting a certain way.
