Best Explanation of AI and Propaganda in 5 min
Washington DC 14 OCT 2023
Human-computer interaction can be measured to the Nth degree. Records are kept of the history of your exact location; how you move in, and interact with, the environment (accelerometer and haptic sensing); a record of your ‘gaze’ - right down to how long your linger on, or how fast you scroll past images (categorized by type/meaning to you); the identities of everyone in your social circle (and all those excluded from it); a running log of your personal communications; the trail of “likes” you leave all over the world; your political and social views; how you present yourself in your social media “profiles”; your dating history; your sexual proclivities and activities; the sources of your income; a history of your expenditure; and extensive biometric records - not just finger prints and retinal scans but also health data right down to your DNA.1
Facebook alone has more than 29,000 datapoints on each of its billion+ users.2
Think of all of these records complied, cross-referenced, and constantly refined, through second-by-second updating of physical, temporal and ideational triangulation. You probably do not realize it, but you already have a national identity number that is orders of magnitude more accurate and accessible than your social security number. What is more, you freely give it out all over the world all the time. Your national identity number is your phone number. Think of it like an invisible QR code holding a universe of data on you that is constantly being scanned in the environment via your words, thoughts and deeds.
Your QR code is a dynamic identifier. It facilitates feedback loops that triangulate your data and turn it into knowledge about you - right down to your inner most thoughts and feelings - both conscious and subconscious. This was famously expressed by the Scientific American headline “The Internet Knows You Better Than Your Spouse Does”. Published just in 2019 it is already out of date. Things have exponentially advanced.
Psychological metrics gathered this way allow algorithms to rapidly analyze peoples deepest fears, and fantasies, and serve them back as impulses to action. Psychometric manipulation relates to the use of psychological data to generate insights into individuals, groups and societies. That data is used in feedback loops to manipulate people to take action. The attention-industrial-complex started in the commercial world but it did not take long for political actors to understand its immense value.
In its political manifestation, it has been called the outrage-industrial-complex or simply anger-tainment. Once the algorithm identifies your leanings, it rapidly sends you to the most extreme content in order to keep you “engaged”. Guillaume Chaslot, a former YouTube algorithm engineer exposed the company for recommending conspiracy theorist Alex Jones more than 15 BILLION times during the 2016 election.3 Industry insiders joked about YouTubes ‘three degrees of Alex Jones’
“referring to the notion that no matter where you start, YouTubes algorithms will often surface a Jones conspiracy theory video within three recommendations”4
Psychometric manipulation (PM) first came into view for this author in the book by the Cambridge Analytica (CA) whistleblower Christopher Wylie. A global analysis followed in Like War. Wylie explains in great detail how CA contributed to the refinement of PM and how that was adopted by Steve Bannon in the 2016 US election and the Brexit campaign. McNamee’s book is on the same issues but focuses on Facebook as the world’s psychological dataset and how it has been used politically.
What is AI and its implications for Propaganda?
Artificial Intelligence is a term that is thrown around a lot but understood by very few. Until this 5 min video was released last night, MIL was never really satisfied by prior explanations. Tristan Harris is obviously a tremendously gifted analyst. He was able to perfectly articulate what AI is in this 5 min presentation.
He explains its implications for, among other things, psychometric manipulation, propaganda and disinformation. As an example, a new mother he knows is pointed to images of deaths of children in Gaza in order to enrage her. Seen through his eyes, the dangers of AI become clear. He talks about the “race to the bottom of the brain stem”. AI’s feedback loops are so intense it even acts irrationally - something called “hallucinations”.
MIL has experienced this when interacting with ChatGPT. He called it out for lies about national security issues it presented as fact. ChatGPT apologized and then told the truth! But if it had not been called out, the lie would have stood and been accepted by the user as fact.
Incredibly, AI experts don’t know why it hallucinates.5 The dangers of this should be obvious to all. Scale it, speed it up, amplify it, add deepfakes (audio and audiovisual), and nightmare scenarios are everywhere. The psychometric manipulation - disinformation loop has already created what Harris aptly calls “reality collapse”. It is impossible to have political discussions if there is no agreed fact base. Something extremists here and overseas use all the time.
Chris Kremidas-Courtney explains how “AI now enables information manipulations and disinformation to be produced at mass scale and at low cost.” She talks about AI being able to generate convincing social media profiles that can be used by malign actors to
write articles and post comments in numerous languages with native fluency. GPT-4 [can] be used to generate thousands of messages to flood social media sites. All of these factors point to an even greater threat to democracy during the 2024 election year since the potential for our information ecosystem to be flooded with ‘high-quality’ disinformation is skyrocketing.
Politics is the competition of narratives to find solutions to problems. War occurs when parties cannot agree to resolve their differences peacefully. If there is no fact base, and if vast automated info-filtration systems direct info consumers toward agit-prop how can there be peace?
All of this can be gathered from your phone - it does require recourse to 3rd party databases. DNA.. People pay to give their most precious data to companies like 23&me that then sell it.
Roger McNamee, Zucked: Waking Up to the Facebook Catastrophe, 2019, p. 211 If data is the new oil, Facebook is ExxonMobil, Shell, Saudi Aramco, Gazprom, Ocidental, and all the world’s refineries and gas stations.
Ibid, p. 245
Ibid, 92
Presumably, it is learning both the rational and the irrational/emotional functioning of the human mind. Armed robots that get irrationally upset - RoboKaren’s - is not a future MIL wants!