“The Supply of Disinformation Will Soon Be Infinite; Disinformation campaigns used to require a lot of human effort, but artificial intelligence will take them to a whole new level.”

Renee DiResta for The Atlantic:

In the past, propaganda needed human hands to write it. Eager to create the illusion of popularity, authorities in China began hiring people in 2004 to flood online spaces with pro-government comments. By 2016, members of the “50-cent party”—after the amount that its members were said to be paid per post—were putting up an estimated 450 million social-media comments a year. Similar comment armies, troll factories, and fake-news shops in the Philippines, Poland, Russia, and elsewhere have attempted to manipulate public opinion by flooding online spaces with fake posts. One 2018 “opinion-rigging” operation in South Korea spearheaded by a popular blogger used a combination of human commenters as well as an automated program to post and boost comments critical of a particular politician. Seoul police noted the volume of two days of activity: “They manipulated about 20,000 comments on 675 news articles, using 2,290 different IDs from January 17 to 18.” In the quaint early days of social-media manipulation, such efforts were limited by human constraints. That will soon no longer be the case.

Writing tweets, comments, and entire articles for a fake media outlet is time consuming. The GU agents who ran “Alice Donovan” and the imaginary ISMC team got sloppy. They plagiarized others’ writing and recycled their own; the stolen profile photos cemented investigators’ conviction that they were fake. In many other influence operations, the need to produce high volumes of text content means that researchers regularly observe repetitive phrasing from manipulative accounts. Advances in AI-generated content will eliminate those tells. In time, operators far less sophisticated than the Russian government will have the ability to robo-generate fake tweets or op-eds. The consequences could be significant. In countries around the world, coordinated propaganda campaigns in print as well as social media have sown social unrest, pushed down vaccination rates, and even promoted ethnic violence. Now imagine what happens when the sources of such postings are untraceable and the supply is essentially infinite.

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