Twitter bots in 2019 can perform some basic functions, like tweeting content, retweeting, following other users, quoting other users, liking tweets and even sending direct messages. But even though bots on Twitter and other social media seem to be getting smarter than previous iterations, these A.I. are still relatively unsophisticated in terms of how well they can manipulate social discourse.
Elon Musk tweeted that “advanced AI” will be used to “manipulate social media” — if, he guessed, it hasn’t done so already. He added that “anonymous bot swarms” are “evolving rapidly.”
Anonymous bot swarms deserve a closer examination. If they’re evolving rapidly, something’s up.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) September 26, 2019
In the first tweet, Musk said that anonymous bot swarms deserved closer attention. Bots are autonomous programs that often attempt to game social media, by retweeting a specific tweet to promote it across the platform, or to spread disinformation across the platform by making it look like thousands of people are tweeting about the same bit of (fake) news. In his next tweet Musk clarified on his first warning by saying that if advanced AI (which he describes as artificial intelligence beyond the possibilities of regular bots) hasn’t already been applied to easily manipulate social media, it won’t be long before that happens.
His tweet was made just hours after The New York Times published an article showcasing a study showing that at least 70 countries have experienced digital disinformation campaigns over the past two years.
“In recent years, governments have used ‘cyber troops’ to shape public opinion, including networks of bots to amplify a message, groups of “trolls” to harass political dissidents or journalists, and scores of fake social media accounts to misrepresent how many people engaged with an issue,” Davey Alba and Adam Satariano wrote for the Times. “The tactics are no longer limited to large countries. Smaller states can now easily set up internet influence operations as well.”
In the documentary “Do You Trust Your Computer?”, Musk warned of the dangers of a single organization someday developing superintelligence.
“The least scary future I can think of is one where we have at least democratized AI because if one company or small group of people manages to develop godlike digital superintelligence, they could take over the world,” Musk said.
“At least when there’s an evil dictator, that human is going to die. But for an AI, there would be no death. It would live forever. And then you’d have an immortal dictator from which we can never escape.”
I think that the problem of your security on the web will get only worse as the time goes and bots may be only one side of it. Many users are being victims of spam performed by bots and usual security methods like Captcha can’t solve this issue.
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