Nov
1
NPR Discovers Democrat Scheme to Manipulate AIs
In an article just published at Hot Air, David Strom (associated with Claremont Institute and the Center of the American Experiment) reported on a disturbing revelation, especially so close to mid-term elections. As he put it,
“[Democrats] have deep connections in Big Tech and own the PR landscape, so it shouldn’t surprise us that their geniuses have figured out how to poison AI to feed sophisticated misinformation to voters.”
Surprisingly, it is the generally-Lefist NPR that discovered and initially reported on what the Democrats are up to. Good for them. As per NPR,
“Ahead of the midterms, some voters are turning to ChatGPT to help them decide who to vote for. When asked for information about candidates in some highly competitive races, NPR found that OpenAI’s AI chatbot cited a set of websites that are thinly veiled political ads made to look like reporting from local news outlets….
ChatGPT’s citation of these websites highlights how AI-generated answers can become yet another avenue for stealthy political advertising as more voters consult chatbots before they head to the polls.”
Strom comments:
“This is a far more sophisticated version of a tactic Democrats have used in the past: creating fake newspapers delivered to people’s homes, presented as ‘news’ but really PR packages for candidates or parties.
But those were fairly transparent; seeding fake news into AI is not, because AI presents information as if it comes from neutral ‘news’ sources, when in fact it is just laundered propaganda not identified as such.
In much the same way that Google will launder Wikipedia answers as authoritative in its AI summaries, making the left-leaning ‘editors’ at the site extremely powerful in creating a Truman Show reality, the fake ‘news’ sites provide another layer of credibility to campaign propaganda….
What’s truly remarkable is how quickly these sites poisoned the information landscape, showing how sophisticated the operation is. The sites showed up in mid-September and almost instantly became authoritative sources in AIs that people use to choose which candidate to vote for.”
Strom goes on to quote the NPR article in his discussion of what is being done to bias AI responses (and how), why Democrat operatives appear to be the culprits, and how NPR discovered the operation. Well worth at least a skim.
