“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."

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.”

  • that guy@lemmy.worldEnglish
    443·
    2 years ago

    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

    • wahming@monyet.ccEnglish
      28·
      2 years ago

      The technology is open source. Anybody can run it themselves and disable the watermarking.

    • daltotron@lemmy.worldEnglish
      7·
      2 years ago

      They already do that, it’s just invisible to the naked eye, and is only identifiable to other AIs, which can pretty easily classify between real and fake. Adversarial networks.

      The distinction between what’s real and what’s fake, as always, will just end up coming down to who has the most resources, and who has the luxury of constructing their own reality. It’s an arms race, both algorithms need active maintenance in order to supercede each other.

    • just_change_it@lemmy.worldEnglish
      114·
      2 years ago

      I pinky promise to watermark my ai works!!!

      Come on. If I use an ai tool to generate something and incorporate it to a released product… how is that any different than googling for an idea and incorporating it into my released product? Why is a search aggregator: a thing that takes all the information you allow it to off of a site and presents it to the public ANY different? You’re using an algorithm to get an output that you desire based on an input.

    • Human@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
      6·
      2 years ago

      I initially thought this was the way to go too, but imo theres a problem: the only individuals who could produce high-level unwatermarked content would be those with access to GPU clusters—state actors and corpos, who would undoubtedly use it to manipulate the masses that have been trained to trust the watermark

      I think in the best-case scenario, we’re just going to have to ride out a couple of very strange years while people adjust to a new reality. Shits gonna get weird

    • nutsack@lemmy.worldEnglish
      4·
      2 years ago

      a lot of the bad actors here would probably not be complying with such a policy. there is no way to enforce it.

    • grayman@lemmy.worldBanned from communityEnglish
      13·
      2 years ago

      I bet you’re also the kind of person that thinks putting up “no guns” signs keeps bad people from shooting innocent people.

    • FlaminGoku@reddthat.comEnglish
      14·
      2 years ago

      I appreciate this take and think it’s a great idea. You have everything written on an immutable distributed ledger (dare i say blockchain) so that no matter what is created and shared, it can be traced back.

      You still allow it’s capabilities to evolve but you always will be able to confirm with a check.

      It will be similar to the pictures of diseased lungs and hearts on cigarettes. People will still “buy” the “news” even though it’s fake.

      At this point though, you can run a deepfake off a laptop, there would need to be a complete fork for existing code with heavy regulation.

  • Siegfried@lemmy.worldEnglish
    3·
    2 years ago

    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$

      • Siegfried@lemmy.worldEnglish
        6·
        2 years ago

        15 billions, sorry… I got horribly lost in translation… in spanish billions is millions of millions and plural nouns in acronyms are marked with double letters. Like EEUU its Estados Unidos (united states).

      • Siegfried@lemmy.worldEnglish
        2·
        2 years ago

        Massa’s campaign was paid with money from the state. Here, during elections, the state pays part of the campaign of every party, but they went way above that number with the candidate of the ruling party

  • thejml@lemm.eeEnglish
    2·
    2 years ago

    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.

  • serial_crusher@lemmy.basedcount.comEnglish
    1·
    2 years ago

    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.

  • silvercove@lemdro.idEnglish
    1·
    2 years ago

    America interfered with every election in the world. I’m not too sad that theybare getting a taste of their own medicine.

  • BoneALisa@lemm.eeEnglish
    1·
    2 years ago

    I believe this wholeheartedly. I work for an mcsp, and we have a client who runs a chain of “news” sites. They are buying a bunch of AI server equipment for their racks and we are almost 100% certain its to pump out garbage for the election.