Propaganda has existed long before social media and were instrumental in creating the worst atrocities of the 20th century, in this regard I fail to see what’s so importantly different about using AI to do it. In particular, I do not expect advanced language models to be especially effective at it, at least for long. Instead, I expect GPT-spamming will—if scaling laws hold and GPT-n actually turns out to be technically impressive—lead to a rapid decline of social media usage and anonymous communication in general (which would paradoxically be a good thing imo). You can’t dump a million tons of gold on the market and expect the price to hold, even if it’s really, really authentic gold.
I find the point about drones enabling genocide at unprecedented scale is the much more important one. Unfortunately, I think the story fails to capture this point since China is just about the worst setting for the story, a country that A) is already a big global player even without considering drones/AI and B) already has the capacity to tightly control its populace and carry out atrocities through human operators.
I think a story that better demonstrates the game-changing effect of drones is one where a previously unremarkable group/organization suddenly acquires unexpectedly large influence over the world through violent means, and doing so while bypassing the traditional requirement of having to use social maneuvering to control a large number of human actors to do your bidding. The recent real-world conflict of Nagorno-Karabakh comes closer as an example.
Propaganda has existed long before social media and were instrumental in creating the worst atrocities of the 20th century, in this regard I fail to see what’s so importantly different about using AI to do it. In particular, I do not expect advanced language models to be especially effective at it, at least for long. Instead, I expect GPT-spamming will—if scaling laws hold and GPT-n actually turns out to be technically impressive—lead to a rapid decline of social media usage and anonymous communication in general (which would paradoxically be a good thing imo). You can’t dump a million tons of gold on the market and expect the price to hold, even if it’s really, really authentic gold.
I find the point about drones enabling genocide at unprecedented scale is the much more important one. Unfortunately, I think the story fails to capture this point since China is just about the worst setting for the story, a country that A) is already a big global player even without considering drones/AI and B) already has the capacity to tightly control its populace and carry out atrocities through human operators.
I think a story that better demonstrates the game-changing effect of drones is one where a previously unremarkable group/organization suddenly acquires unexpectedly large influence over the world through violent means, and doing so while bypassing the traditional requirement of having to use social maneuvering to control a large number of human actors to do your bidding. The recent real-world conflict of Nagorno-Karabakh comes closer as an example.