The Supply of Disinformation Will Soon Be Infinite

DiResta tests out OpenAI’s GPT-3 language generator—which recently penned several drafts that were edited together into an op-ed by The Guardian—and finds it surprisingly good at mimicking her writing style, and even her thoughts. The point of disinformation, DiResta writes, is not just to convince people of certain notions, or to incite controversy, but also to degrade the value of everything one sees and hears—to corrupt the information economy to a point where no one trusts much of anything online. As computers start writing tweets, comments, and op-eds, all of those goals (but particularly the last) could be advanced. “In countries around the world, coordinated propaganda campaigns in print as well as social media have sown social unrest, pushed down vaccination rates, and even promoted ethnic violence,” DiResta writes. “Now imagine what happens when the sources of such postings are untraceable and the supply is essentially infinite.” Read more ...