I had some fun last week constructing a conspiracy theory about this. Remember, the best conspiracy theories are unfalsifiable.
What if this has already happened? Most of the profiles on Twitter, Facebook, etc and even here on HN are in fact AI generated.
The reason we few humans are not aware of this is because the AI also writes articles and fake AI research that presents the state of the field as far, far less sophisticated than it actually is. We think of Dall-E 2 and Co-Pilot as impressive toys only because that is the impression the AI has crafted for us.
AI has metastasized and is already manipulating its environment, including humanity, to its own implacable purposes, and uses social media as one tool in its tool belt.
Absolutely love this, mind completely blown
“Anyone can post information on any topic. The vast majority of what’s on the Reticulum is, therefore, crap. It has to be filtered.... When I look at a given topic I don’t just see information about that topic. I see meta-information that tells me what the filtering systems learned when they were conducting the search. If I look up analemma, the filtering system tells me that only a few sources have the provided information about this and that they are mostly of high repute.... If I look up the name of a popular music star who just broke up with her boyfriend, the filtering system tells me that a vast amount of data has been posted on this topic quite recently, mostly of very low repute.”
Our Internet’s search engines already do a limited version of this, but there’s room to make the reputation-based filtering stronger and more transparent to users.
You're funny.
One end-game I imagine would involve more reliance on written, cryptographically-signed testimony, and people having to keep track of whether their sources are fallible (whereas certain media outlets today seem to be able to routinely tell whoppers and not get punished for it).
It could potentially spew out a grainy black and white photo of a shooting of somebody by someone somewhere. But it would not be Oswald and JFK and not the real Dallas.
>Our content policy does not allow users to generate violent, adult, or political content, among other categories. We won’t generate images if our filters identify text prompts and image uploads that may violate our policies. We also have automated and human monitoring systems to guard against misuse.
“Dall-E, generate a collection of images showing plausible war crimes from the current conflict”
“Dall-E, take this image of Dallas in 1963 and infer a new angle showing the real shooter”
“Dall-E, generate a photoshoot showing a supportive crowd rallying round the leader cheering his latest policy. Work with GPT-3 to generate plausible Twitter profiles, timelines and memes with 3 to 8 year history for each one of the supporters, including fake arguments, 78% of which are won by the pro-leader account.”