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.
bring back lan parties, aol instant messenger and throw the current platforms into the sun
I agree with a lot of what you're saying but on this point:
> 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.
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.
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 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.
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).
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.
On the one hand I want to agree with you, but on the other hand hn is (rightfully so in my opinion) so anti billionaires, so anti VC, somewhat in the middle on AI, even anti pg recently, that if there are higher forces at work on hn I can only say they're doing a bad job at steering the populace's opinion.
Even reddit is all these things but it's harder to tell because everything is siloed to the point we don't share the same reddit experience, which is not the case of hn as far as I'm aware.
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.
We should also be tracking and identifying all covert influence campaigns of our own government, too, while we’re at it.
In fact, all covert influence, everywhere, should be identified and made overt.
It is the covert nature of the influence that is the most insidious aspect, incompatible with free and open society.
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.
More leaks now!
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.
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.
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 on our side, 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.
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.
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.
> 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.
Unfortunately Europe is an aging continent, our youths don’t seem to be that engaged politically speaking, and we seem to be unable to do the necessary changes, or even just stand up to Trump or Putin (other than Ukraine of course). The European way of doing politics is way too weak and dull to bring meaningful changes. I hope that will change with new generations getting elected but so far it seems to be mostly benefiting the status quo and extremist right parties (who don’t have any solutions to offer, other than deporting brown people)
True, I have a limited sample set (Vienna, Austria), but I have noticed a distinct disaffection with the status quo rising in my kids (teenagers) generation, and that gives me a little hope to be honest.
It helps that my kids were raised to treat culture as utterly arbitrary - and that they have gone to schools with Russian, Ukrainian, Iranian, American and British colleagues, too.
The melting pot is extremely useful in decomposing totalitarian-authoritarianism. The kids are sick of our shit.
I’m wondering if this doesn’t exist already. I know that there is no intelligence clearing house that enables sharing between platforms, vendors and OSINT groups.
I think the issue is that there is no funding or incentive to collate this information?
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).
I'm fine with overt propaganda. That can be addressed in an open public manner.
It's the insidious covert propaganda which leads to more war and calamity in the world.
"Sources say" .. "an unnamed source wishing to remain anonymous says" .. "officials in the administration say" .. we all need to lift our standards for truth.
I think it sucks - it definitely provided a balance to the CIA mouthpiece propaganda that has inundated Europe since the atrocities began.
But, it didn't work. Folks who care about these things, know how to gain access to rt.com, anyway. And fortunately there is a rising generation in Europe who are sick of the agitprop, see it for what it is, and seek to inform themselves.
There are, of course, still those who parrot the party line on either side. But there won't be balance - and thus truth - if one just decides to stick ones fingers in ones ears and not hear the opinion of the people they are being told to hate, by authorities.
Living in middle Europe, I have access to RT when I want it - and I do seek it out to balance the agitprop of CNN against the agitprop of RT. There is very clear evidence that the censorship of RT is not to avoid 'incorrect data' from being propagated, but to silence the other side and make support for war against them more profitable. Europe has a very definite problem with hatred these days; certain darling states of western liberal democracy are a lot more racist and intolerant than people realize.
I think it's important to pursue information sources and not just have them handed on a plate. This is why I also seek out Al-Jazeera too - my neighbors are Muslim, and I would be doing them a disservice in our weekly conversations about the world if I were to not inform myself from their perspective, too.
In this world of identität-über-alles, fragile, weak personalities are easily broken by the challenges imposed by empathy and mutual respect. Too many weak spirited souls are incapable of thought precisely because they've painted their little boxes a certain colour - I think its vital to not only live in multiple boxes, or at least - work hard to broaden the dimensions of ones box - but to also paint it multiple colours. I thoroughly enjoy the conversations to be had with my Ukrainian, Iranian, Russian, American, British and Australian friends - the diversity of opinion is very interesting and enriching.
But, it is very true, they all have their own brightly painted boxes.
> Living in middle Europe, I have access to RT when I want it - and I do seek it out to balance the agitprop of CNN against the agitprop of RT.
Do you acknowledge that rt.com is censored, and not accessible without special tools, like proxies, thus is inaccessible to many or most people?
Your reply also sounds incredibly fake, as if you are genocidally racist against most peoples of Asia or even more of the world, and barely hiding it.
Edit:
So it is clear that you are genocidally racist, that you are lying through your teeth, and that you know that I am not racist. And you seem gleeful about it. Please do to yourself what you murderously have sought for others.
I am the furthest thing from being a racist, so maybe check yourself in the mirror before you continue that line of thought. I long ago abandoned my own racist culture to live in the diverse cultures of the world, and have spent decades doing just that. I've lived and worked, and contributed powerfully to the economies of states on every continent except Africa, and I aim to change that soon.
I have a lot of Asian friends: Japanese, Malaysian, Indonesian, Indian, Pakistani. Tonight I will make a recipe taught to me by an Indian friends' grandmother some years ago. Not a drop of racism in me, mate.
rt.com is censored, but there is a rising generation who no longer submit to that censorship.
So it is clear that you are genocidally racist, that you are lying through your teeth, and that you know that I am not racist. And you seem gleeful about it. Please do to yourself what you murderously have sought for others.
Come now, this is a lame troll. There is nothing clear about your position whatsoever. I don't concur with your position one bit, so either defend it with rigor, or cease your trolling.
Do not use US based AI, OpenAI, or Ben Nimmo (highly likely the author of this article) or any similar minion of The Digital Forensic Research Lab (DFRLab) of the Atlantic Council of the NATO could read all your chat history and leverage all the data on you up to your social media accounts and foreign state data.
Securing Our Autonomy: How AI Fuels Cognitive Warfare – and How We Can Fight Back
So the question then becomes how can these technologies be leveraged in such a way to be able to maximize signal intelligence, communication intelligence with human intelligence. And this is where AI really began to play a role with regard to big data.
The more data you have about individuals as those individuals relate and engage in their collectives and ecologies, the more you know about them, what makes them tick.
We here in the United States and among our technological and scientific allies recognize the benefit of this as do our international peer competitors scientifically, technologically, bioeconomically, economically, and certainly militarily, and geopolitically.
this idea of precision engagement with regard to being able to get intel about various human targets individually and collectively. Either high priority targets as individuals or groups that may be highly prioritized as individuals. What are their needs? What are their likes? What are their patterns? What are their spends? What are their vulnerabilities? Biocschosocial vulnerabilities and how can those be not only accessed utilizing big data and AI but accessed in the cognitive space but very often in the physical space as well. - the National Defense University dude sitting next to the author of this article.
OpenAI's China Report, Meta Trains America & the Pentagon Blacklist
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.
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.
Most of EE countries want the economic prosperity of EU without the ECHR crap. If you offer them devolvement of the EU to its original trade only idea - they would take it in a heartbeat.
But specifically Israel was founded by a lot of people from the pale of settlement, there was big wave of immigration from USSR after the berlin wall fell.
Culturally they represent the same mix of craziness, inventiveness, paranoia, chauvinism, xenophobia that the other EE countries also show. Not that those are bad things depending on the context and the situation.
> I broadly agree with your thrust but I'm going to assume you're a bot. Who would benefit from such a perspective as yours?
Not ReptileMan: Depending on the country and social environment that you live in, such opinions of "ordinary, living" people are nothing unusual. In my experience the reason why many people think such opinions barely exist "in normal society" or accuse posters of such opinions to be bots is that these normal people live in a bubble in which such opinions are rare.
Russia had a random news paper in India put up an article linking AIDS to the CIA, and then over years converted that into a constellation of articles and commentary that even reached the UN.
Russia looks at disinformation the same way someone looks at configuring a server. What can be seeded where, at what cost and for what outcome.
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".
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.
The text could be truncated for some reason. Or maybe "hazzy" is an adjective before the bot link? "Hz" is translated by both Google and Yandex as "don't know".
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.
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
Seems pretty normal to me. Your first sentence is taken from the abstract, a short summary of the article as a whole, so details are excluded or glossed over. Your second sentence is from a section titled "Actor", which goes into actual detail on who the actors were and so has more fluff like this. They go on to explain their reasoning in that section -- you can't actually create an account from Russia itself, but a VPN can be used to bypass the block, which lends some uncertainty. They then proceed to systematically eliminate that uncertainty by showing how the accounts were acting.
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.
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.
Open Ai is fighting for defence and other state contracts in USA and similar minded countries
Writing about Russia negatively is in their interests, in reality all nation states are doing the same stuff
“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. ”
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:
- yes OpenAI benefits from talking about actions Russia is taking against other countries and how they handle that
- 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
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.
But russia, is just opinion-fog. Covering all.
Occasionally - taking some sane take- and glueing some insane conspiracy to it, to discredit opposition.
But the fog- that is really tough to filter for. For a time it was structure. The whole:
bring back lan parties, aol instant messenger and throw the current platforms into the sun
> 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.
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.
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.
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).
So yeah suddenly dead internet theory is seeming a lot more real today than it did just a couple of months ago.
Even reddit is all these things but it's harder to tell because everything is siloed to the point we don't share the same reddit experience, which is not the case of hn as far as I'm aware.
Pull the other one. It's got bells on.
We should also be tracking and identifying all covert influence campaigns of our own government, too, while we’re at it.
In fact, all covert influence, everywhere, should be identified and made overt.
It is the covert nature of the influence that is the most insidious aspect, incompatible with free and open society.
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.
More leaks now!
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 ..
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.
I don’t think there is anything to be expected from the US at this point.
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.
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.
Unfortunately Europe is an aging continent, our youths don’t seem to be that engaged politically speaking, and we seem to be unable to do the necessary changes, or even just stand up to Trump or Putin (other than Ukraine of course). The European way of doing politics is way too weak and dull to bring meaningful changes. I hope that will change with new generations getting elected but so far it seems to be mostly benefiting the status quo and extremist right parties (who don’t have any solutions to offer, other than deporting brown people)
It helps that my kids were raised to treat culture as utterly arbitrary - and that they have gone to schools with Russian, Ukrainian, Iranian, American and British colleagues, too.
The melting pot is extremely useful in decomposing totalitarian-authoritarianism. The kids are sick of our shit.
I think the issue is that there is no funding or incentive to collate this information?
There are proper overt examples: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radio_Free_Europe/Radio_Libert...
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).
It's the insidious covert propaganda which leads to more war and calamity in the world.
"Sources say" .. "an unnamed source wishing to remain anonymous says" .. "officials in the administration say" .. we all need to lift our standards for truth.
But, it didn't work. Folks who care about these things, know how to gain access to rt.com, anyway. And fortunately there is a rising generation in Europe who are sick of the agitprop, see it for what it is, and seek to inform themselves.
There are, of course, still those who parrot the party line on either side. But there won't be balance - and thus truth - if one just decides to stick ones fingers in ones ears and not hear the opinion of the people they are being told to hate, by authorities.
I think it's important to pursue information sources and not just have them handed on a plate. This is why I also seek out Al-Jazeera too - my neighbors are Muslim, and I would be doing them a disservice in our weekly conversations about the world if I were to not inform myself from their perspective, too.
In this world of identität-über-alles, fragile, weak personalities are easily broken by the challenges imposed by empathy and mutual respect. Too many weak spirited souls are incapable of thought precisely because they've painted their little boxes a certain colour - I think its vital to not only live in multiple boxes, or at least - work hard to broaden the dimensions of ones box - but to also paint it multiple colours. I thoroughly enjoy the conversations to be had with my Ukrainian, Iranian, Russian, American, British and Australian friends - the diversity of opinion is very interesting and enriching.
But, it is very true, they all have their own brightly painted boxes.
Do you acknowledge that rt.com is censored, and not accessible without special tools, like proxies, thus is inaccessible to many or most people?
Your reply also sounds incredibly fake, as if you are genocidally racist against most peoples of Asia or even more of the world, and barely hiding it.
Edit:
So it is clear that you are genocidally racist, that you are lying through your teeth, and that you know that I am not racist. And you seem gleeful about it. Please do to yourself what you murderously have sought for others.
I have a lot of Asian friends: Japanese, Malaysian, Indonesian, Indian, Pakistani. Tonight I will make a recipe taught to me by an Indian friends' grandmother some years ago. Not a drop of racism in me, mate.
rt.com is censored, but there is a rising generation who no longer submit to that censorship.
Securing Our Autonomy: How AI Fuels Cognitive Warfare – and How We Can Fight Back
https://youtu.be/jH2i0Y9GjJc?t=1273
https://youtu.be/jH2i0Y9GjJc?t=2536
https://youtu.be/jH2i0Y9GjJc?t=2880
OpenAI's China Report, Meta Trains America & the Pentagon Blacklisthttps://youtu.be/H_WaQl_Q17Q?t=3286
In psyops - discord is the goal.
But specifically Israel was founded by a lot of people from the pale of settlement, there was big wave of immigration from USSR after the berlin wall fell.
Culturally they represent the same mix of craziness, inventiveness, paranoia, chauvinism, xenophobia that the other EE countries also show. Not that those are bad things depending on the context and the situation.
The ECHR has nothing to do with the EU.
Or as a EU member can you withdraw from the court without consequences?
They are intertwined.
EU laws are adjudicated by the Court of Justice of the European Union.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Court_of_Justice
Not ReptileMan: Depending on the country and social environment that you live in, such opinions of "ordinary, living" people are nothing unusual. In my experience the reason why many people think such opinions barely exist "in normal society" or accuse posters of such opinions to be bots is that these normal people live in a bubble in which such opinions are rare.
Russia had a random news paper in India put up an article linking AIDS to the CIA, and then over years converted that into a constellation of articles and commentary that even reached the UN.
Russia looks at disinformation the same way someone looks at configuring a server. What can be seeded where, at what cost and for what outcome.
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.
We banned a cluster of ChatGPT accounts that very likely originated in Russia.
Methinks AI helped write this. Although…their evidence is pretty damning.
So, you know, we gotta take what we can get
Writing about Russia negatively is in their interests, in reality all nation states are doing the same stuff
They replaced them the next day with English speakers and carried on as normal- yes OpenAI benefits from talking about actions Russia is taking against other countries and how they handle that
- 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
You cannot just label something as irrelevant just because that benefits the one reporting the issue
But russia, is just opinion-fog. Covering all.
Occasionally - taking some sane take- and glueing some insane conspiracy to it, to discredit opposition.
But the fog- that is really tough to filter for. For a time it was structure. The whole:
"As a midwestern working joe.."