Malicious AI swarms can threaten democracy

I would actually love if what comes out of this is that people stop trusting social media entirely and put a lot more weight into face-to-face interactions.

There are only 2 logical solutions, the powers that be will either create heavier blinders within nation states or the public creates truly independent/public systems.

Social mass-media is doomed to fail in its current form. These platforms are already manipulated by capital through advertising, nation states, data-brokers and platform self interest.

People need more federated networks where agents can be verified, at least locally and "feeds" cannot be manipulated.

The powers that be do not believe in democracy how you and I believe in it, they believe in manufactured consent.

Mass media in its current form is just a way to create consent within the masses, not the other way around, the masses don't make the decisions.

> because it makes the rich richer and the poor poorer

This is a terrible take. Whenever there is a massive technical shift it's the incumbents who struggle to adapt. We've already seen companies go from nothing to being worth tens of billions.

As long as the stock market appreciates more than GDP grows, the rich will become richer quicker than the poor no matter what we do.

They push the danger factor so that governments will regulate the industry and prevent startups from competing. It's 100% about regulatory capture.

Social media is a pretty new thing, even home internet is. People used to get info from each other or from a select few broadcast/paper news sources, the latter owned by powerful people of course. AI or not, we're probably going back to that because people realized you can't trust stuff from random places.

>It's dangerous because it gives individuals the power to provide answers when people ask questions out of curiosity they don't know the answer to, which is when they are most able to be influenced.

Can you point to a time in history of written information this wasn't true though?

- Was the Library of Alexandria open to everyone? My quick check says it was not.

- The access to written information already precluded an education of some form.

- Do you think Google has an internal search engine that is better than the one you see? I suspect the have an ad-less version that is better.

- AI models are an easy one obviously. Big Players and others surely have hot versions of their models that would be considered too spicy for consumer access. One of the most memorable parts of ai 2027 for me was the idea that you might want to go high in government to get access to the super intelligence models, and use them to maintain your position.

The point is, that last one isn't the first one.

Thank you, this is an excellent assessment

It's dangerous for psychological reasons. We already saw how the internet was able to organically form into bubbles that escaped into the real world and fully influenced how people identify and conduct themselves. AI now lets people sub divide into further groups based on entirely arbitrary criteria which they feed into AI and AI feeds back their bubble. Think Manson, think cults, suicide pacts, tidepod eating cult, and of course, political parties.

The kids will at some point worship a prompt-engineered God (not the developer, the actual AI agent), and there will be nothing society will be able to do about it. Nobody verbalizes that Gen Z moves entirely like a cult, trend after trend is entirely cult-like behavior. The generation that is going to get raised by AI (Gen Zs kids) are going to be batshit crazy.

It gives the powerful more power to monitor and control the people.

AI is despotism automated.

> Stop blaming technology for the way humans misuse it.

Exactly, that's why I propose every person has access to a nuke.

Elephant in the room here: the scale of technology matters. Being able to lie on a scale that eradicates truth as a concept matters.

We can't just naively say all tools are similar. No no, it doesn't work that way. I'm fine with people having knives. I'm fine with people having a subset of firearms. I am not fine with people having autonomous drones, or nuclear weaponry, or whatever. Everything is a function of scale. We cannot just remove scale from the equation and pretend our formulas still hold up. No, they don't. That's why the printing press created new religions.

Its a bit more of a question of which can we change more easily; tools, or human nature

> Stop blaming technology for the way humans misuse it

> Don't blame the tools. This is the worst kind of ignorance

"Stop blaming [guns // religion // drugs // cars // <insert_innovation_here>] for the way humans misuse it"

There is a reason regulations exist. Too much regulation is detrimental to innovation, but some amount of standards is needed.

This is a naive view of technology and its development. Yes, there is a certain degree to which technologies can be appropriate for a range of ends, but they are also created and distributed in historical situations in which the creators have incentives. There are plenty of cases in history in which purely "neutral" technological decisions and developments had intentional political and economic effects. Check out Langdon Winner's classic paper "Do artifacts have politics?"

The tools do not exist without the humans, and the humans, consciously of otherwise, design tools according to their own views and morals.

To outline just a basic example: many initial applications of generative AI were oriented toward the generation of images and other artistic assets. If artists, rather than technologists, had been the designers, do you think this would have been one of the earlier applications? Do you think that maybe they may have spent more time figuring out the intellectual property questions surrounding these tools?

Yes, the morals ultimately go back to humans, and it's not correct to impute morals onto a tool (though, ironically enough, the personification and encoding of linguistic behaviors in AI may be one reason that LLMs can be considered a first exception to this) but reducing the discussion to "technology is neutral" swings the pendulum too far in the other direction and ultimately tends to absolve technologists and designers of moral responsibility pushing it to the use, which, news flash, is illegitimate. The creators of things have a mora responsibility too. For example, the morality of designing weapons for the destruction of human life is clearly contestable.

We know that humans are the problem but you can’t change that.

Maybe it’s a bad idea to put powerful tools in the hands of people you know will misuse it.

Let‘s make e gedanken experiment.

We create mighty tools with two buttons. Button 1 solve world hunger and cure every disease. Button 2 kill everybody but you.

Would give everyone such a tool?

The tool is the final key for a omnipresent full time monitoring and control.

Everywhere you move. Everything you say, everything you buy.

They've had the monitoring technology for decades. The problem was the fire hose.

There is no problem with the fire hose anymore.

If this doesn't scare the s** out of you, then you're ignorant.

Maybe if we had a well-functioning government I would hold out some degree of hope. But our Democratic institutions are already in shambles from facebook.

All previous technologies basically enhanced the talent and intelligence. Yes AI can do that, but the difference this time is it replaces intelligence on a huge scale

The role of the intelligensia, to borrow an old term, arguably has pushed idealistic progress on society with its monopoly on competence.

That Monopoly on competence generally came with it. The essential counterbalance to centralized authority and power along with idealism and philosophically derived morality and righteousness.

Ai is the end of the monopoly of competence for almost all the hacker news crowd.

North Korea is the future with AI.

I'm often a little bewildered at why we so consistently label "cheaper/easier" as less significant than "new". "Cheaper/easier" is what creates consequences, not "new".

New developments in AI are used here to push the usual "solutions" - more privacy invasion, more centralized control, for the sake of democracy. Disinformation campaigns arent just used to influence elections but thats like the most common theme. The reality is that humans need to be upgraded with "mental antivirus". We're seeing the beginning of something like that with people being able to tell when text theyre reading is LLM-generated. Everyone probably gets psyopped every time they start scrolling a social media feed - We just need to be aware of that

There is an element that when it becomes cheaper/easier it cancels each other out. Spam became cheaper/easier but that just meant people were less trusting of random emails.

It probably is true that some populations are more vulnerable to AI produced propaganda/slop, but ultimately I have 50 more pressing AI concerns.

Some GenAI manufactured consent for the Iran war should do the trick

Is it time to move away from directly elected representative toward topic-specific randomly pick representative? Would this help prevent operation to influenced opinion?

Yes

There's plenty we can do before any attribution is made.

LLMs hallucinate. They're weak and we can induce that behavior.

We don't do it because of peer pressure. Anyone doing it would sound insane.

It's like a depth charge, to make them surface as non-human.

I think it's doable, specially if they constantly monitor specific groups or people.

There are probably many other methods to draw out evidence without necessarily going all the way into attribution (which we definitely should!).