The Rise of Generative AI and the Coming Era of Social Media Manipulation

https://www.rand.org/pubs/perspectives/PEA2679-1.html

by willprice89 • 3 years ago

18 7 3 years ago

Nice, plain English account of threats posed by (mostly) LLMs, although not much new we haven't already discussed here on HN.

winternett• 3 years ago

Social Media provides little to no value for the average user anymore...

1. It siphons personal data to be able to sell it backhandedly to other parties.

2. It miniplates user post visibility and timelines towards popular people and entities, preventing independent creators from growing.

3. It charges for visibility by requiring the purchase of ad boosting from creators that aren't even profiting off of their work at all.

4. Promoted (paid) content is often not clearly marked as such, a lot of harmful content is often disseminated far & wide on platforms through covertly paid marketing.

5. Users are unaware that these platforms crawl posts and use personal content later on o power LLMs, which take full credits for ideas created by human beings on social platforms, without any sort of compensation.

6. Many accounts have vast numbers of fake followers, views, and likes... Upholding a false impression of success and growth on platforms. Even many celebrities (already considered popular) often resort to shady tactics to look more popular and successful on social platforms.

7. Many platforms distort time perception, and even manipulate timelines already, some even completely prune trending topics in order to manipulate public perception in investing, shopping, entertainment and in far more serious aspects like politics, especially when they have a monopoly on attention, such as during pandemic related lockdowns.

Modern Social Media is a now disguised form of free labor exploitation and distortion of perception imposed on all of us heavily now that large companies have developed to run vast platforms. Social Media has also fueled many scams like NFTs, Crypto, Shoddy products and services, and now the idea that stolen and parsed text and user content is somehow "Artificial Intelligence".

Social Media has been manipulating us for ages now... It would not surprise me if 97% of users or more have not even earned a dime off of it since it emerged in the 90s, but the problem is that almost everyone on Social Media acts as if they're successful, and that social media is somehow a legitimate industry, all well above reality and their means.

Nevermark• 3 years ago

“Scrapbook” company provides neat service, for tiny posts, with resource costs of less than $1 or a (doubtful) maximum of $10, per user, per year.

Healthy new way to share with friends and family.

Genuinely a valuable service.

—

BUT Scrapbook leaves some conflicts of interest open by:

1. Knowing user’s real identities

2. Reading users posts

3. Accessing their friendships

4. Recording user behavior

5. (The worst) Giving itself permission to game user’s exposure to other’s posts

By itself, not a conflict of interest. But a real conflict given the above:

6. Gives itself permission to insert posts of its own or for hire

——

Conflicts of interest don’t logically imply actual corruption.

But scale up Scrapbook to a billion or two users and the potential for farming users grows to $100’s of billions to $ Trillions of potential future money.

Now add shareholders demanding compounding returns.

Result: Maximum use of all conflicts of interest is ensured, regardless of negative externalities.

—

Aquire of third party information integrated with user omniscience to create detailed psychological, financial, social dossier’s.

Psychology and experiments are mined to create ever improving strategies to guide users to non-scrapbooking behavior.

Anything that makes Scrapbook addictive. No matter how coercive, deceptive or destructive.

Anything that creates impulse purchases. No matter how manufactured purchase result impulses in quality improvements to users lives.

Crowdsource addictive material, both high quality & corrosive, by sharing profit stream. So everyone becomes a coercion collaborator, no matter how healthy their content is.

NOW, use some of the $100’s of billions to stay at the front of AI, to maximize the monetization of said conflicts of interest.

Hilarity ensues

—

TLDR, said simply:

Society’s legal and cultural systems have not yet adapted to the extreme self-funding self-protecting metastasizing threats and negative sum games, that simple conflicts of interest, scaled to billions of people, and leveraged with automation & AI, create.

CharlesW• 3 years ago

Note that the actual title ends with "Social Media Manipulation 3.0", so the author does realize that social media didn't start with generative AI.

willprice89• 3 years ago

Yeah I guess I should have left that in the original submission. I just thought it was a bit confusing out of context (I initially thought it was the third major revision of this particular report)

nine_zeros• 3 years ago

Maybe people of the future will treat social media the way we treat coupons by mail - it exists but nobody gives it a second look.

costco• 3 years ago

Everyone has been saying this massive threat has been coming for years, where is it already? GPT-3.5 API costs basically nothing right now and there are increasingly good enough local alternatives if you get banned. And before ChatGPT, GPT-3 was available to anyone with a convincing enough story and GPT-2 could be finetuned to produce decent output.

I've seen https://twitter.com/xroel_ledner/with_replies and https://twitter.com/xDanial__Miller/with_replies on Twitter which I think are almost certainly ChatGPT but they have a very inauthentic feel to them. I made something similar for Reddit for fun (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36191723) but my bot accounts got most of their upvotes from reposting old stuff, not witty ChatGPT comments. I feel like good propaganda is contextual, preferably incorporates the memes of whoever its targeting, and doesn't just sound like a list of talking points. I haven't seen that yet though it is probably possible at this point. Maybe human propagandists are cheap enough for it to be not worth it?

The Rise of Generative AI and the Coming Era of Social Media Manipulation

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