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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   34590 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 30, 2023

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New ACX post: Mostly Skeptical Thoughts On The Chatbot Propaganda Apocalypse, discuss!

I'll begin: this quote from philosophybear (what's his account here btw?):

The capacity of the wealthy to command vast armies of bots (GPU’s to run machine learning are expensive) will further erode what “democracy” there is on the internet. If fee structures are bought in like I described to keep bots out, that will make the internet less democratic too. My advice is to log off and start forming connections and organizations in real life now.

... made my inner Curtis Yarvin giggle hysterically. Observe the uncanny uniformity of ideological positions on pretty much all social issues in most large newspapers, most top universities, most large corporations. The only deviations are of the "we need fifty Stalins" kind (until they become the norm eventually). Can you imagine a Harvard professor, a New York Times editor, and the Raytheon PR department having a substantial disagreement on whether we need more trans drone pilots? I can't.

And it took people the possibility of bots faking a pale shadow of such consensus to start worrying that maybe democracy is susceptible to being secretly not the rule of the people but the rule of whoever tells the people what to believe, and the unbelievable synopticity of what we are told to believe means that this rule is being actively exercised?

Later Scott sort of touches on this a bit quoting a comment that said:

On the 'disinformation vs. establishment bot' question, check out bots interacting with climate change: 83.1% of bot tweets support activism, 16.9% skepticism according to https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1674927821001490 .

The abstract ends with:

Based on the above findings, we suggest cultivating individuals’ media literacy in terms of distinguishing malicious social bots as a potential solution to deal with social bot skeptics disguised as humans, as well as making use of benign social bots for science popularization.

Based on the above findings, we suggest cultivating individuals’ media literacy in terms of distinguishing malicious social bots as a potential solution to deal with social bot skeptics disguised as humans, as well as making use of benign social bots for science popularization.

Clear proponents of using bots for information and cultural warfare.

As an aside, the psy-op groups within military and intelligence organisations must already be exploiting the advanced chatbots. How much of the Ukraine war propaganda is already using this praxis?

One thing that the Ukraine war has demonstrated is that Russian Bots are a paper tiger, probably.

There's no tiger, just paper and a lot of lies. Look up Hamilton 68, e.g. at Taibbi's Racket, he's got the receipts. It all was a scam, they just took a couple of known Russian accounts and linked a bunch of random accounts to them by some sort of stupid algorithm, without verifying anything, and everybody in the press cited them as the primary experts on Russian influence. Twitter knew it's a scam from the start and thought about maybe telling people, but they decided not to (likely because it fits the agenda so well).

Russian Bots are a bogeyman invented by western media.

I was led to believe that Russia had the capacity to use cyberattacks to cripple large swaths of other nations' infrastructure for minimal cost and effort.

Maybe they still do, but somehow it hasn't been brought to bear in any way that has been noticeable outside the country.

There's a wide gap between being able to disrupt infrastructure and to cripple it. Most cyberattacks a country can pull off belong to the former capacity: log into a server controlling a water treatment plant and switch everything off. Crippling something requires a much more elaborate exploit.

So even if Russia can cyberattack Ukraine, this will not have a greater effect than just dropping missiles onto its power plants. Crippling its military communications would've been really useful when the war broke out, but it seems it was beyond Russia's capabilities.

Russia did some damage to Ukraine in cyberattacks at the start of the war (around 2014 or so), because Ukraine's cyber security, as pretty much every other security, was in shambles then. Look up Sandworm by Andy Greenberg, it has a loot of good info on that. But since then Ukrainians got their act mostly together (as much as any state actor can, there always be holes and human factor) and Russia didn't get any new capacities, so whatever damage they did has long been fixed and the new damage is nowhere near significant. They tried to attack in January 2022 but the most they could do is to deface some government websites, which is embarrassing but hardly crippling. Now Russia is back to shooting ballistic missiles into densely populated highrise buildings.

I dunno, I'd count a ransomware attack that locks operators out of control systems and access to data as 'crippling' for most pursuits, even if the physical infrastructure is unharmed.

When I worked at a power plant all of the computers that actually controlled anything were offline and had their USB ports disabled. They had to be able to update them for maintenance and stuff so I'm sure there was some way in, but if you need physical access then it's going to have to be a more targeted attack and not just uploading a virus that knocks out a whole country or region.

Like with nuclear and biological weapons, that's not the shit-flinging contest you want to initiate unless you can ensure crushing supremacy. Israel can "cyberattack" Iran, because the retaliation is known to be relatively negligible. Russia can cyberattack Ukraine, maybe, but Ukraine has friends on the other side and they've got more and better hackers and superior tools, and they won't be as restrained in using those to strike back at Russia on behalf of Ukrainians as is the case with drone strikes on civilian infrastructure.

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