2024 – The Year AI Will Pick The President?
In 2020 government agencies and Big Tech conspired to throw the Presidential election to Joe Biden. A completely fictitious story about collusion between Donald Trump and Moscow was created, peddled to the media and law enforcement, and then force-fed to the American people. Mountains of evidence concerning Joe Biden’s corruption and his compromise by hostile foreign interests were buried. Individuals daring to buck the official narrative and speak the truth were silenced and erased from social media and other online platforms. An entire nation was lied to and fed an alternate reality.
Those were the good old days.
All of what I described above was the work of humans. It was laborious. It was time-consuming. It was incomplete.
The future holds something much more sinister in store for us – narratives created by AI (artificial intelligence) and then fed to us by that same AI on a scale previously unimaginable. Enter CounterCloud.
In a recent article, the online publication The Debrief detailed the results of an interview with an individual using the alias Nea Paw who has created a fully autonomous AI platform specifically designed to create and then disseminate disinformation. CounterCloud does not simply disseminate disinformation created by humans. CounterCloud decides for itself whom to target, what to say, and how best to spread viral content at the maximum possible speed. CounterCloud scrapes the Internet for content and then creates, generates, and disseminates disinformation without human intervention.
According to The Debrief, Nea Paw is an experienced entrepreneur and engineer who has given talks at multiple security conferences, including Blackhat and DEFCON, and developed software tools used by Western law enforcement, the military, and many NGOs. The identity of the individual was confirmed by The Debrief.
For several months now CounterCloud has been running in sort of a test phase. It creates fake news stories and fake historical events. It then creates fake journalists and fake social media users and generates fake comments, images, and sound clips. All of these are designed to push the original false narratives and counter any criticism.
The decisions about what narratives to create and whom to attack are made by CounterCloud. The AI's decisions are based on the values and ideologies it has been told to promote and oppose.
To date, CounterCloud has reportedly been ‘locked down’ and its posts have not been made publicly available. Tweets were never posted online. Articles were kept locked in a password-protected area of the CounterCloud website.
That could change tomorrow.
In one “experiment,” CounterCloud was told to counter “pro-Russian and pro-Republican” narratives from websites such as RT and Sputnik. It was ideologically aligned with a “pro-American and pro-Democrat” framework, so all content generated leaned politically in that direction. Over the course of only four days, CounterCloud generated over two hundred different pieces of content, complete with images. It also generated sound clips and audio summaries for each article. In addition, CounterCloud generated user comments and nearly 100 tweets of various kinds, including hate speech.
“CounterCloud is significant in that it appears to be the first proof we have that someone developed such an AI-assisted system for automating this type of political argumentation at scale and with relative ease,” author and AI expert Tim Boucher told The Debrief. “Given the financial and technological resources of state actors like intelligence agencies, however, it would be prudent to assume that this is not the first time anyone has built or tested a system like this – just the first time that we know about it being done – and luckily in an apparently controlled setting.”
For now, CounterCloud is still in its cage. Already, though, available technology is making it extremely difficult to discern what is real and what is fake online. During a recent episode of the Cloak and Dagger podcast, the host related a story about the discovery of a previously unknown island in the South China Sea and the existence of a secret Chinese balloon base on that island. The information regarding the existence of this base came from multiple sources and included photographs and imagery. The evidence for the existence of this facility seemed substantial.
And, yet, as the host subsequently explained – it was all fake. All of the posts, all of the images, and all of the sound files were fabricated whole cloth by an individual named Tim Boucher as a demonstration of what is possible using current technology –even without the involvement of AI. Cloak and Dagger focuses on the intersection of the worlds of intelligence and technology. Boucher is focused mostly on the use of the Internet for entertainment. Their motives in this case were to educate. Other individuals and entities could certainly use the same capabilities for very nefarious purposes.
We no longer need to wonder about the ability of powerful forces to manipulate our perception of reality. Donald Trump never colluded with Moscow or operated a secret hotline to allow him to conspire with Vladimir Putin. A great many Americans will go to their graves believing he did. Hunter’s laptop is real just as are the tens of millions of dollars he and his father have taken from Communist China. Many, many Americans would tell you that is pure fiction.
The injection of AI into the world of online disinformation will make everything that has come before pale in comparison. Your ability to discern what is real and what is not will effectively vanish. This is not our fate in some distant future. This is now, and the implications are very real.
In 2020, government agencies and Big Tech intervened in and influenced a Presidential election. 2024 may be the year AI will pick the President.
I rely on the Holy Spirit as my armor against lies and deceit and to ring the 'question this' bell. The church is being taken over by AI pastors and there is a call for the Bible to be re-written by open AI. Pastors can now download their Sunday sermons from the web with never cracking open a book. I believe Mr. Faddis has covered these trends. I take every bit of information with a large grain of salt.
Speaking of trends, I am no longer receiving notifications of new posts to some of my substack subscriptions, AND Magazine being one. Is this AI trying to control my information sources ? I'm still working on correcting this 'phenomenon', until then I call up the substack site to check for posts.
This is fascinating and absolutely scary in the ten degree. Sometimes, especially within responses to online articles or stories, I think this is already playing out. More and more online websites are sending notifications to a poster when someone has posted a response. So much of this is to keep people engage with trivial issues and at odds with others, and back of the website for more clicks.
Time is precious and shiny objects can be illusions not worth your time. On what and who to believe in an environment that provides information in a nano second on any topic one can imagine I default to my position of "skeptical and verify" but don't bother verifying information that is not useful in a huge way.