Of course people will try to poison - sorry, influence - the information well

If you control the information people receive then you can - in part at least - control what they believe and how they think. It’s known as propaganda and Orwell’s 1984 is only a description of a well known tactic and strategy:

A pro-Israel messaging website badged with the name of a thinktank that does not exist has published more than half a million words in nine days, built on a commercial platform that promises to optimize content so that AI chatbots will cite it.

…

The site is one part of a broader effort, financed by tens of millions of dollars from the Israeli government and routed through third parties including the European advertising group Havas Media, to prime chatbots to make Israel’s arguments for it.

Whether we agree with anyone at all in this story isn’t the point. Which is that if there’s a new source of information then people will attempt to influence it. For there are people out there who wish to influence what people believe and how they think therefore they will attempt to influence the information flow. This is just obvious. All that’s new here is that influencing the stochastic parrots that are AIs needs to be done in a different manner than influencing the stochastic parrots who write the newspapers.

This is why any form of press regulation - over what may and may not be said - and any form of restriction upon free speech - save libel and incitement to immediate violence - is so pernicious. Precisely because there always are those who will try to influence what is said so as to etc, so giving anyone at all the power to decide what may be said just provides that nexus that makes achieving that power so much easier.

The best that can be done is that everyone gets to shout. And, of course, everyone gets to shout back. Say, at The Guardian’s reporting on climate change which might, in the opinion of some deluded few, not be wholly balanced as to reality. Perhaps? Or those who would steal one twentieth of everyone’s money - sorry, we mean a 5% wealth tax - turn up as 6 different groupuscules so as to magnify the social prominence of two blokes typing furiously.

Inserting assertions into the AI training sets, attempting to do so, is just the latest stage of this same old battle. If you influence what people know then you change their thinking. Oh, one more little point. If you think that people The Guardian approves of are not also doing this exact same thing then we’ve this lovely, hardly used, bridge you might be interested in…..

Tim Worstall