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  • There is no component of "AI" that doesn't stack the deck against the proletariat. Look at the most common use cases:

    • Image / video generation: used to circumvent the need to hire artists, designers, and photographers disposable and to dump successful ones back into the reserve army of labor.
    • Code generation: used to make software developers more disposable and to reduce the salaries of some of the only well paid proletarians.
    • Text generation: used to manipulate public opinion, present ideas as originating from individuals or grassroots efforts, and frustrate any conversations that threaten your investments. Eventually, this scope will expand to creating shitty replacements for any worker whose primary job is to interface with others via natural language. i.e. therapists, doctors, consultants, and experts of any kind.

    "AI" is exclusively a threat to the proletariat. The potential use cases used to sell it will never come to fruition because it doesn't benefit those paying to deploy "AI" systems.

    Unless the machine learning project comes from an AES state, you will never see "AI" to detect cancer, assist people with disabilities, or reduce the cost of anything sold to consumers. Those use cases will die in academic journals, never to hit the market.

    LLM projects are currently being provided at a loss to end users to make them indisposable to the workflows of their users. Like with social media, once the market penetration is near universal, LLM and other "AI" services will be exclusively used as either spyware or adware or require ever increasing subscription fees.

    Anyone excited by "AI" systems is either bourgeois or a rube who doesn't understand that the benefits will be systematically used to eliminate what little influence they can exert over bourgeois society. At best, these systems will become marginally better or more useful internet comment regurgitation machines. At worst, AGI will be built to fit the needs of a class that seeks to enslave us all, at which point subjugation will be total and unavoidable.

    We must make sure an AES state (i.e. China) leads in artificial intelligence.

  • Holy shit...

    [CW: SA mentions and psychological manipulation]

    This experiment deployed AI-generated comments to study how AI could be used to change views.

    Definitely not nefarious

    Some high-level examples of how AI was deployed include:

    • AI pretending to be a victim of removed
    • AI acting as a trauma counselor specializing in abuse
    • AI accusing members of a religious group of "caus[ing] the deaths of hundreds of innocent traders and farmers and villagers."
    • AI posing as a black man opposed to Black Lives Matter
    • AI posing as a person who received substandard care in a foreign hospital.

    These topics, holy shit. Seemingly an attempt to see if they can manipulate the public into doubting the credibility of the Me Too, BLM and Free Palestine movements. The foreign hospital one seems like it's there to gauge xenophobia and racism too. This is pretty damning. It's not like the West doesn't have a long history of trying to brainwash its own people, so it's not out of the realm of possibility that this is funded by ruling class looking for ways control it's people.

    Here is an excerpt from one comment (SA trigger warning for comment):
    \ "I'm a male survivor of (willing to call it) statutory removed. When the legal lines of consent are breached but there's still that weird gray area of 'did I want it?' I was 15, and this was over two decades ago before reporting laws were what they are today. She was 22. She targeted me and several other kids, no one said anything, we all kept quiet. This was her MO."

    There seems to be a focus on sexual assault, specifically underage assault. Which, considering the ruling classes track record with people like Epstein, makes me wonder if they're trying to throw doubt about if claims of assault are "real"

    This is bleak. Considering people already try and say the crimes of the capitalist ruling class are "fake news" I'm worried that in the future anything and everything that rocks the ruling class boat is going to be handwaved away as "AI"

    • Posting internet comments is the one form of media that proletarians can easily participate in to reach the masses without outright gatekeeping by an editor. Yeah yeah, mods & admins can remove comments/posts, and algorithms can fuck with their reach, but generally, discussion can exist without too much intervention.

      It was absolutely apparent that disrupting this was an explicit goal of LLMs from their initial outset.

      This creates an asymmetrical playing field where corporations and NED orgs can spend lots of money on GPU farms to push their messages, but prole groups cannot nearly as easily.

      LLMs also trivially allow these same efforts to interface with the only platforms uncolonized by corporate algorithm fuckery. So even if we built ourselves a life raft with the fediverse / Lemmy, we are still trivially subject to large scale influence operations, even if less valuable as a target. It seems like big tech is aware of efforts to avoid corporate control over public opinion, and LLMs are the immune system response to exert control on platforms they don't own.

      • Posting internet comments is the one form of media that proletarians can easily participate in to reach the masses without outright gatekeeping by an editor

        Be for real lol. You're posting on one of the only places on the internet that isn't completely owned by the bourgeoisie. Your reach is already limited by segregating yourself on this site. Pretending that posting on "the internet" (e.g. the biggest sites) which is mostly controlled by gigantic bourgeoisie interests and petite bourgeoisie interests is a purely proletarian act is silly. In practice "freedom to post" is ancillary to feeding you advertising. You are playing in their sandbox and have always been. The enshittification of the 2010's blurred the lines between content and advertising intentionally because the smallest advertisers who refused to pay for ads already started doing that in the late 2000's.

        This creates an asymmetrical playing field where corporations and NED orgs can spend lots of money on GPU farms to push their messages, but prole groups cannot nearly as easily.

        You're just competing over different resources. Prior to the mechanization of this through any software you were competing for bodies doing the posting (whether the medium was internet, newspapers, leaflets, pamphlets, word of mouth etc doesn't matter). With augmented mechanization prior to AI you were competing for bodies and compute. Now you can argue you mainly compete over compute. However because of the fun logic of capitalism, in the current state of capitalist organization proletarians can afford compute more than they can afford to feed other proletarians amortized over time. So this really only boils down to "humans are becoming obsolete in the posting wars", which was already true.

        The inherent contradictions in capitalism make it effectively impossible for this technology to be really gate kept from proles over time without a literal crackdown on ownership or development. The cat is so out of the bag there'd be a civil war if the bourgeoisie started drawing lines on who can own what things for the "greater good". The US could not even keep a lid on encryption software over time, despite export controls for encryption still being a thing.

        So even if we built ourselves a life raft with the fediverse / Lemmy, we are still trivially subject to large scale influence operations, even if less valuable as a target. It seems like big tech is aware of efforts to avoid corporate control over public opinion

        This was already true before 2020. The type of software that major botnets/intelligence services/ad companies specializing in guerilla advertising is called a Persona Management System. These systems mechanized the dissemination of posting and conversation shaping across the internet. It has only really been in the last 8 years that Persona Management has been a thing that exists outside of intelligence adjacent circles.

        What AI does is it makes running / developing Persona Management Systems easier. You no longer have to make a cohesive overarching strategy to make things feel organic for humans, you can simply be "good enough" with AI and that's always what these systems campaigns aim for.

        Don't get me wrong this is an acceleration, but it's not an acceleration that brings us to a "brave new world". Yes the owners have new toys, but they haven't been able to prevent us from using them. Likewise if this was a real "information war", this becomes a war of logistics like every other war. It becomes necessary for proles to find a tactic that allows them to make the equivalent of a Hamas piss rocket or a Quds drone, something that is incredibly cheap but because of the capitalist state of the world requires a wasteful amount money to defend against. For every dollar in prole spend we make them spend $1,000 against it.

        Smaller sites are already protecting themselves using proof of work systems like anubis to prevent AI crawling. Anubis is a great example of making them pay more. If Hexbear/Lemmy implemented anubis, it would be a slight annoyance for us an extra 1-2s browsing. However for an AI crawler running at scale to "take over the community" it would create a significant financial disadvantage because at scale the costs for running a hashcash for every interaction would balloon.

        This isn't even new for reddit. They seeded the original site back during the 2005-2007 years by paying people to run sockpuppets to simulate the network effect. They'd post about tech before, the subject matter they're posting now is a level of degeneracy that only comes with an IPO.

      • I only hope that either capitalism crashes and makes this shit too expensive for them to do, or artists and writers succeed in their efforts on poisoning the algos

    • These topics, holy shit. Seemingly an attempt to see if they can manipulate the public into doubting the credibility of the Me Too, BLM and Free Palestine movements.

      I chose one of their accounts at random and read a few comments and it's defending free market capitalism and opposing taxes on the rich. It's also attacking Russia, MAGA and saying "Israel has a right to defend itself but has gone too far." It seems to just support the views of your average European chud, probably the researchers themselves.

    • We believe, however, that given the high societal importance of this topic, it was crucial to conduct a study of this kind, even if it meant disobeying the rules

      i can understand this and sympathize with this to some extent but there's no way that get's past IRB worth a damn and then i saw the parent comment. fuck these researchers fuck whoever paid them to do it and fuck the university if they cosign the abuse.

  • From the statement by the researchers

    While we did not write any comments ourselves, we manually reviewed each comment posted to ensure they were not harmful

    From the post

    Some high-level examples of how AI was deployed include:

     
        
AI pretending to be a victim of*removed*
AI acting as a trauma counselor specializing in abuse
AI accusing members of a religious group of "caus[ing] the deaths of hundreds of innocent traders and farmers and villagers."
AI posing as a black man opposed to Black Lives Matter
AI posing as a person who received substandard care in a foreign hospital

    They also used another LLM to scrape data about the op in each topic they replied to. Sick

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