You appear to be ignoring a few thousand years of recorded history around what happens when a demagogue gets a megaphone. Human-powered astroturf campaigns were all it took to get randoms convinced lizard people are an existential threat and then -act- on that belief.
I think I'm just going to build and open source some really next gen astroturf software that learns continuously as it debates people online in order to get better at changing people's minds. I'll make sure to include documentation in Russian, Chinese and Corporate American English.
What would a good name be? TurfChain?
I'm serious. People don't believe this risk is real. They keep hiding it behind some nameless, faceless 'bad actor', so let's just make it real.
I don't need to use it. I'll just release it as a research project.
Does it really? You thinking LLM-powered propaganda distribution services can't out-scale existing troll farms? Or do a better job of evading spam filters?
Any evidence or sources for that? I just don't know how that would be knowable to any of us.
Yuval Noah Harari gave a great talk the other day on the potential threat to democracy from the current state of the technology - https://youtu.be/LWiM-LuRe6w
It's definitely not something I would attempt to productize and profit off of. I'm virtually certain someone will, and I'm sure that capability is being worked on as we speak, since we already know this type of thing occurs at scale.
My motivation would be simply shine a light on it. Make it real for people, so we have things to talk about other than just the hypotheticals. It's the kind of tooling that if you're seriously motivated to employ it, you'd probably prefer it remain secret or undetected at least until after it had done it's work for you. I worry that the 2024 US election will be the real litmus test for these things. All things considered it'd be a shame if we go through another Cambridge Analytica moment that in hindsight we really ought to have seen coming.
Some people have their doubts, and I understand that. These issues are so complex that no one individual can hope to have an accurate mental model of the world that is going to serve them reliabily again and again. We're all going to continue to be surprised as events unfold, and the degree to which we are surprised indicates the degree to which our mental models were lacking and got updated. That to me is why I'm erring on the side or pessimism and caution.
