Friday, March 30, 2018

Shilling

I never ever thought about the idea of people being paid to pretend to be real people online until around 2016.  If I did, I never really thought it could be that bad.  I figured that companies may go online and pay for reviews of their products once in a while.  I could see how easy that was.  I never thought about the bigger ideas like, creating distrust in our governments, in our scientists, and influencing elections.

One idea that keeps coming back to me is not only how AI can make this worse, but also how we might need AI to fight this.

There are going to be certain campaigns at the root of these things that should be noticeable with the right kind of program, something that can see the right phrases in the right areas of the world.

For example, it should detect when there's an abnormal amount of people suddenly invading certain comment sections or active areas of the internet.

People can be pushing lots of different campaigns out there

-  Climate change denial

-  Pro gun

-  Who to vote for

-  Smear campaigns

-  Justifying wars

-  Influencing public opinion about war (encouraging it)

The last one in particular is a scary prospect.  What if you put a lot of money in to influencing a country to go to war?  How effective is propaganda?  At what point do people say, wait a second, why the fuck is this your agenda?  Who does that?

We can find where it comes from.  The internet leaves many trails, even now, AI can scour over the 2016 election propaganda and find who did what.

I read a comment where someone said they've seen an abnormal amount of people trying to say that North Korea shelling South Korea "wouldn't be that bad".  I thought, what if someone like Putin would want America to go to war with North Korea so they could step in, act like the peace makers and use that as an argument to release sanctions.  Ever since the new administration took office, it's seemed like they've been pushing for a war.

They need to know that you can't try to control people anymore, the internet is more advanced then anything before it and these dumb old fucks that think they can convince people of what to do are going to be exposed and dragged through the muds of history.

It's only a matter of time.

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