AI TOOLS         
         are chasing
  the Post-Truth
                in the
INFORMATION          
                         ECOSPHERE

Ever-more sophisticated AI is chasing the Post-Truth in the information ecosphere ad helping social media platforms drive out the fake news merchants and dangerous conspiracy theorists.

The risk is that we will find ourselves in a not-so-distant future where the web and social networks are full of generated images and texts, suspended between the credible and the ridiculous (or disturbing), and human users, those left behind, can only maintain an air of skepticism, never being sure of interacting with real content.

GPT-3 is a computer model based on neural networks which is already capable of generating good-quality human-like text. The consequences this could have on a cultural, social and political level are enormous, and go far beyond the age-old problem of fake news.

Source:[2]  Source:[2.5]

Rapid-fire advancements in artificial intelligence could help misinformation thrive in the year ahead, a new report is warning. That’s according to the Top Risk Report for 2023, an annual document from the U.S.-based geopolitical risk analysts at the Eurasia Group.

Resulting technological advances in artificial
intelligence (AI) will erode social trust, empower
demagogues and authoritarians, and disrupt businesses
and markets                           , the report said.

This year will be a tipping point for disruptive technology’s role in society. A new form of AI, known as generative AI, will allow users to create realistic images, videos, and text with just a few sentences of guidance.

Large language models like GPT-3 and the soon-to-be-released GPT-4 will be able to reliably pass the Turing test—a Rubicon for machines’ ability to imitate human intelligence. And advances in deepfakes, facial recognition, and voice synthesis software will render control over one’s likeness a relic of the past. User-friendly applications such as ChatGPT and Stable Diffusion will allow anyone minimally techsavvy to harness the power of AI.

These advances represent a step-change in AI’s potential to manipulate people and sow political chaos. When barriers to entry for creating content no longer exist, the volume of content rises exponentially, making it impossible for most citizens to reliably distinguish fact from fiction. Disinformation will flourish, and trust—the already-tenuous basis of social cohesion, commerce, and democracy—will erode further.

This will remain the core currency of social media, which—by virtue of their private ownership, lack of regulation, and engagement-maximizing business model —are the ideal breeding ground for AI’s disruptive effects to go viral.

Disinformation and misinformation have already made a splash on the geopolitical stage, even without a leg-up from artificial intelligence, but now people with political goals might find themselves especially empowered by these rapid advancements.

Demagogues and populists will weaponize AI for narrow political gain at the expense of democracy and civil society.

We’ve already seen the likes of Trump, Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro, and Hungary’s Viktor Orbán leverage the power of social media and disinformation to manipulate electorates and win elections, but technological advances will create structural advantages for every political leader to deploy these tools — no matter where they sit on the political spectrum.

Political actors will use AI breakthroughs to create low-cost armies of human-like bots tasked with elevating fringe candidates, peddling conspiracy theories and “fakenews”, stoking polarization, and exacerbating extremismand even violence — all of it amplified by social media’s echo
chambers.
                      Source:[7]  Source:[8]

Images of Pope Francis wearing an oversized white puffer jacket took the internet by storm in March 2023, with many online admitting they thought the photos were genuine. The fake images, which originated from a Reddit post captioned “The Pope Drip,” were created with Midjourney, a program that generates images from users’ prompts.
The tool is similar to OpenAI’s DALL-E. These AI models use deep learning principles to take in requests in plain language and generate original images after they’ve been trained and fine-tuned with vast datasets. The fake images were soon cross-posted to Twitter, where posts from influencers and celebrities exposed the papal puffer to the masses. The original Reddit post had been posted in the r/midjourney subreddit, but devoid of that context on Twitter, many were duped into believing the images were real.

Model Chrissy Teigen admitted she had been taken in by the fake Francis:

I thought the Pope’s puffer jacket was real and didn’t give it a second thought. No way am I surviving the future of technology.

Images generated by Midjourney earlier went viral on Twitter when Bellingcat founder and journalist Eliot Higgins posted a thread of fake images of former U.S. president Donald Trump getting arrested. Higgins was later banned from Twitter and the word “arrested” is now banned as a prompt from Midjourney.

Montreal-based computer scientist Yoshua Bengio, known as one of the godfathers of AI, suggested that governments and other groups could use these powerful tools to control people as WEAPONS OF PERSUASION.

What about the abuse of these powerful technologies? Can they be used, for example, by governments with the intentions to control their people, to make sure they get re-elected? Can they be used as weapons, weapons of persuasion, or even weapons, period, on the battlefield?
,he asked.

What’s inevitable is that the scientific progress will get there. What is not is what we decide to do with it.

Source:[22]