AI makes it cheap and easy to create propaganda at scale.

The logical end of the ‘Solution to bad speech is better speech’ has arrived in the age of state-sponsored social media propaganda bots versus AI-driven bots arguing back

  • @Cleverdawny@lemm.eeEnglish
    -2•9 months ago

    Please quote me as to where I called bot programmers heroes

    For the record, I don’t particularly like bots of any kind. That being said, troll farms are obviously malicious and negative as well, and far more pernicious than bots designed to make counter arguments to those troll farms. Context matters, and if social media orgs - including Lemmy - can’t find a way to combat troll operations, then I don’t see the further harm in someone boring out the truth to combat vicious propagandists out to apologize for fascists.

    • @etuomaala@sopuli.xyzEnglish
      2•9 months ago

      Hm. Yeah, banning bots would be better, but it would be more expensive than fighting troll farms with AI. That is valid. Still, I consider AI counter arguments a temporary solution.

      • @Cleverdawny@lemm.eeEnglish
        -2•9 months ago

        The best solution is organized and effective administrative enforcement, but neither reddit nor Twitter or Facebook are interested in doing that, and lemmy is incapable of doing it even if they wanted to

          • @Cleverdawny@lemm.eeEnglish
            -2•9 months ago

            Yes, that’s my point. There’s no capability within Lemmy to effectively screen out bad actors. It’s all dependent on volunteer admins, and when you’re trying to play whack a mole with malicious instances and people bouncing their accounts around between legitimate instances, it becomes basically impossible.

            Not saying that the fediverse is a bad idea. I like it. But this is a key potential downside, and if lemmy and other fediverse clients become popular enough, we will see widespread botting, and it will be an issue.

            • @etuomaala@sopuli.xyzEnglish
              1•9 months ago

              I agree. And defending against bots will be difficult. But not impossible. Trust exists in real life. It can exist online. The solution to establishing trust in real life changes with scale, but the highest level, there is democracy. It works on millions of people. The fediverse can try to find a new solution, but it may be easier and faster just to replicate democracy online. This includes many of the tasks a real democracy has to undergo, like:

              • photo IDs
              • municipal, provincial, and federal elections
              • supreme courts, regular courts, judges, laws, and punishments
              • public news service

              At this point, paid full-time civil servants are required. They can’t just be volunteers! How are they paid? Uhoh, now we need taxes.

              After all that, it is probably easier to just piggyback on the trust established by existing democracies, requiring a valid photo ID from a functioning democracy in order to sign up. I think that is a pretty good solution. However, no democracy in the world has an official online service in place that web servers could use to reliably validate such government photo IDs. So unfortunately, this solution is impossible for now.

              IDK, what solutions do you have?