Back when I was more politically active, what became immediately obvious was the sheer number of bots, trolls, and foreign agents who circulated the discussions around various political discussions online. Many of them were on payroll from various organizations or governments - I caught one on my YouTube channel once, and the housing advocacy non-profits I worked with sent out a notice that there were evidence that Russia may have been meddling with their affairs since it was a hot-button issue in the States. (They loved NIMBYs because they were greedy, short-sighted, and irrational - more than willing to sacrifice society's health for personal gain. Oh, and they vote!)
The foreign adversary's goal in this sort of situation isn't really to generate "deep fakes" with Artificial Intelligence as many believe (that's expensive and takes actual skill) - their role is mainly to disrupt civil dialogue, spread fear, and create animosity between political groups to prevent the political system from functioning as a whole. (aka. "poisoning the well") Unfortunately, given the state of things in general right now, I think it's actually working.
Why not? It costs practically nothing and during times when people are struggling and looking to point fingers at each other to begin with - it's remarkably easy to do. (That paid troll on my livestream channel even confessed to me at one point - he was actually an American desperate for money who was probably paid to "localize" their agenda - a classic trick that has been used since the Cold War.)
With GPT and other AI tools, all of this has gotten a easier - a LOT easier - mainly because most LLMs are optimized for English, which actually puts Western countries at a disadvantage when it comes to issues like these. The problem foreign interventionalists have when doing their "job" is that because they're not native speakers, their "performance" is often not very good...there are some hilarious examples of that out there that you can look up. 😂 So that's why a lot of places just choose to hire locals to do that sort of "work" for them instead. When you have a ton of people desperate for money because of inflation and unemployment like we do here, finding people is not hard - against a society that has basically exploited and forsaken them, the qualms they might have for doing such a thing are probably minimal.
But with AI tools, even that might not even be necessary anymore, since you can now get answers that sound half-way convincing in a "tone" that a lot of people find "reassuring". (Personally, I don't, but probably because I'm more aware of the stuff that goes on behind the scenes.) In political applications, AIs do not have to be smart, accurate, or even correct - it just needs to speak English. The data itself? Long-term, the model practically poisons itself via "Mad Cow AI" - even if the system is 99% accurate if you copy it enough times the data eventually degrades into incoherence because .99^infinite = 0. A system that feeds back only into itself, eventually destroys itself.
Now when you put these sorts of serious questions in front of your average tech CEO, how do they respond? They don't have a clue. Most of them probably aren't even aware of it, judging by the sorts of things they talk about during panels and conferences. Mostly because their role is to raise money by telling investors what they want to hear - story after story of exaggerated claims, most of them completely disconnected from the realities of how these tools are actually used on the ground. I'm afraid that the United States is already losing the war on AI - not because other countries are doing so great, but that the models we have now have been self-defeating from the start. Foreign organizations have already been injecting dummy data into the LLMs and the idea that people seem unconcerned about removing attribution and sources from the newly "created" ideas is...not encouraging, to say the least. We are destroying context and history - and with it, meaning, in it of itself. We were already living in an post-truth society, but AI models will take that idea to new heights, and we don't really know what will happen if it goes too far.
So it'd be naive to assume that isn't happening right now as we speak - and, although there are a few brave souls out there trying to raise awareness around this stuff, it's already too late for this coming November's election cycle. We're just going to see who wins in the race to bottom we have going on right now.
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But it wouldn't be a post by me if it didn't have a solution, would it? During my political days (YIMBY, YangGang) I advocated for zoning policy reform and UBI as means of easing the pressures on people as a whole - a population less desperate is harder to "turncoat", after all. While I still believe in these causes, unfortunately the political system is too far gone for that to even matter now. So after a spending a few years in those movements I went back to crypto because I honestly thought it would be an easier path to make a dent in the system itself.
Despite all of the scams and silly projects that emerged during the last few years, crypto (the blockchain, more specifically) still has one thing going for it - it's an immutable record (with an actual timestamp), which can be both sourced and verified. With it - attribution, validation, and ordering ideas and events in a historical timeline once again becomes possible. I know they're experimenting with "information filters/aggregators" that try to make sense of the data after it's been generated, but that's never been known to work, and won't this time, either - the data needs to be legible from the beginning to end, not after the fact.
We can actually fix all of this in one cycle, if we really wanted to. But the tech industry up until now has been very reluctant to accept the importance of these things - especially regarding ideas related to copyright - which they fought every step of the way. "Information wants to be free!". Meh. "Information wants to be worthless", more like. 🙄 We need to focus on quality over quantity, not patting ourselves on the back just because we squirted out some drivel off of some prompt off of someone else's back.
I'm actually optimistic, long-term, because both the problem and solutions for all of these problems have been obvious from the beginning. "Missing Middle" for housing, a VAT tax to pay for UBI, blockchain ledgers for AI, DAOs for political organization and advocacy itself. These are all terms that show up on any search engine, and is just sitting right there. But the attention to it isn't likely to shift without a few things getting out of the way, first. (There's a reason why we call it creative-destruction.)
This is my "big picture" that I have for crypto - I'm mostly just waiting around for people to realize what's actually going on. Will anyone care before it's too late? We'll see. I'll leave this message on TEIA for posterity's sake, and people in the future can decide for themselves.