
I used AI to show Trumpers are more easily fooled by AI fake news - kristintynski
https://lawsuit.org/robotrump-an-ai-trump-experiment/
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downerending
This is the second study I've seen on HN today that used a pool of subjects
from Mechanical Turk.

By coincidence, I tried MT itself (as a worker) for the first time a few days
ago, just to see what it was. It's mildly interesting, but one thing that
immediately jumps out is that the pool of people actually working these tasks
is probably very different from the general population.

Good enough for click-bait I suppose, but hope no one is trying to do serious
science this way.

~~~
kristintynski
It has its role in quick and dirty preliminary analysis and experiments.
Studies have shown it is actually pretty damn good.
[http://web.mit.edu/bentley/www/papers/chi-case-
surveys.pdf](http://web.mit.edu/bentley/www/papers/chi-case-surveys.pdf)

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gitgud
The _Show HN:_ section should be a place above politics...

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kstenerud
I wonder if the results would be the same with AI generated content from a
well known liberal figure?

Emotion plays a huge role in how easily people are fooled.

~~~
Nuzzerino
My thoughts exactly. This reads like a political hit piece tailored for an HN
audience.

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not2b
The difficulty with this is that the fake Trump posts are generated by mashing
together words and phrases that the real Trump uses. So they aren't fake at
all, it is all Trump. Not surprising that people can't tell them apart.

Almost 30 years ago I posted a Markov chain text generator to
comp.sources.games. Can't locate the original, but found Rich Salz's cleaned-
up version at

[http://mailing-list-
archive.cryptoanarchy.wiki/archive/1995/...](http://mailing-list-
archive.cryptoanarchy.wiki/archive/1995/11/89e2939b0d041c79d02b21ca6a5d5d593559f0371be2b6cd1f476b107bf5ad7e/)

You just put in text and you get text out that has the same statistics for
three-word sequences. More modern approaches avoid the Memento effect of not
remembering anything other than the previous two words, but it's the same
idea: you take Trump text in and just rearrange it.

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gus_massa
> _Given that RoboTrump could crank out literally millions to billions of
> words per day, you can imagine how this technology could be used to
> manipulate opinion._

I don't see it. If someone autogenerate a million fake comments in a million
post pretending to be Trump, would this change the elections results?

If someone floods the net with fake Trump quotes, why would people believe
them. (Moreover, it will offer some cover for deniability of errors in real
quotes.)

~~~
not2b
The deniability may be the best feature. If Trump says something that hurts
him, he can say that it was "fake Trump", even if one of his own staff posts
it.

