A new report says cybercriminals linked to China, Russia and Iran are using generative AI tools like deepfakes to spread disinformation and target elections around the world.
With generative AI (I would say that language models are a subset of this, they generate text) you can trick a reasonably naive person for a long period (and a reasonably skeptical person for a short period):
a) into believing that something really happened
b) into believing that many people support an idea
This is potentially highly damaging to electoral representative democracy.
There exists a form of representative democracy (representative direct democracy) that’s invulnerable - it’s called sortitition and allocates offices by lottery - but no country currently uses it and no country seems prepared to use it.
So in short term, the solution is to be skeptical of the information we receive. For many people, that’s quite a lot to ask.
With generative AI (I would say that language models are a subset of this, they generate text) you can trick a reasonably naive person for a long period (and a reasonably skeptical person for a short period):
a) into believing that something really happened
b) into believing that many people support an idea
This is potentially highly damaging to electoral representative democracy.
There exists a form of representative democracy (representative direct democracy) that’s invulnerable - it’s called sortitition and allocates offices by lottery - but no country currently uses it and no country seems prepared to use it.
So in short term, the solution is to be skeptical of the information we receive. For many people, that’s quite a lot to ask.