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AI Generated Propaganda
- bediger4000 3y agoWill it get "their", "there" and "they're" correct?
- gumballindie 3y agoThey desecrated are language.
- squarefoot 3y agoIf it's fake, and the strange head bandage immediately raised some alerts, I find both exciting and worrying that AI can now create credible hands.
- lm28469 3y ago> and the strange head bandage immediately raised some alerts Not much makes sense in the image. Like almost every other AI generated image, as soon as you start digging it falls apart completely - What's the weird arm sling thing ? - Why is there a white corner on his right side, but not the other ? - Why does he have a full size paper sheet glued to his arm ? - The body position doesn't match the bed - The background is a mess, things collide and disappear in weird ways The light looks very artificial too
- liveoneggs 3y ago> What's the weird arm sling thing ? He's the mayor of Bloodfield
- throwuwu 3y agoAmateur prompt work for sure. I could make a convincingly realistic (although not indistinguishable) image and I’m by no means an expert. All the major giveaways cited in the thread can be cleaned up by iterating and retouching with other AI tools. There are people out there using MJ and DALL-E plus other tools 8+ hours a day making mind blowing stuff.
- wnkrshm 3y agoThe real mind games start once people adapt real scenes to the tells of AI generated imagery and have the video to prove it.
- throwuwu 3y agoAI video generation keeps getting better so not even that much effort is required.
- petesergeant 3y agoThe source[0] marks the image as such: "Иллюстрация на обложке: изображение сгенерировано искусственным интеллектом", which I think is probably the best "tell" 0: https://uproar-crowned-964778.appspot.com/2023/04/24/my-dlya-komandirov-kak-spichki-odna-sgorela-vzyal-druguyu/ https://uproar-crowned-964778.appspot.com/2023/04/24/my-dlya... via https://twitter.com/ChrisO_wiki/status/1653118082766852097?s=20 https://twitter.com/ChrisO_wiki/status/1653118082766852097?s...
- ufo 3y agoWhich translates to "Illustration on the cover: the image is generated by artificial intelligence"
- awegio 3y agoSo like almost every news website they added a title picture to every article to drive engagement. The problem here is that they used a picture where a face was visible, they have to use some generic image instead. The whole trend of adding stock pictures to everything only creates distractions. It's bad for the reader, good for the publisher. The pictures are either useless or misleading.
- r721 3y agoFor the record: the weird appspot.com URL is a hack to circumvent internet censorship inside Russia (temporary domain basically), the canonical URL is https://baikal-journal.ru/2023/04/24/my-dlya-komandirov-kak-spichki-odna-sgorela-vzyal-druguyu/ https://baikal-journal.ru/2023/04/24/my-dlya-komandirov-kak-... , this is quite well known regional outlet ("Lyudi Baikala"/"People of Baikal").
- asow92 3y agoPlot twist: how do we know this isn't AI generated, AI generated propaganda?
- JimRyan 3y agoThe source in the last tweet says its AI generated. I'm also not completely sure whether the writer was trying to pass the image off as legit, they don't directly say it. https://uproar-crowned-964778.appspot.com/2023/04/24/my-dlya-komandirov-kak-spichki-odna-sgorela-vzyal-druguyu/ https://uproar-crowned-964778.appspot.com/2023/04/24/my-dlya...
- r721 3y agoAbout the appspot.com URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35791787 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35791787
- sdfghswe 3y agoIt's obviously AI generated, to the point that it's likely propaganda to suggest that your enemy does propaganda.
- krunck 3y agoWell, everybody does propaganda. When they say they don't do propaganda, that's propaganda. Governments engaged in geopolitical conflicts do it 24x7x365.
- ImHereToVote 3y agoOne of the things that an adult has to face growing up, is that at least some of the ideas that you hold in your head, have been cooked up in a think-tank or secret government bureau. EDIT: If you haven't realized this, then change some to a lot.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- daveguy 3y agoIf only there was some big strong leader that could tell it to us straight.
- ImHereToVote 3y agoStrong leader? Please elaborate.
- detrites 3y agoSo then why wouldn't they do a better job, to avoid detection as "propaganda to suggest that your enemies do propaganda"? Seems likely it's propaganda to suggest that your enemies do "propaganda to suggest that your enemies do propaganda"...
- f6v 3y ago
- dundarious 3y agoAmnesty International are using AI-generated images also, though they are at least honest enough to admit it: https://gizmodo.com/ai-midjourney-image-art-amnesty-international-colombia-1850393124 https://gizmodo.com/ai-midjourney-image-art-amnesty-internat... Archive of the posts which have since been deleted: https://archive.md/20230501183435/https://twitter.com/Amnesty_Norge/status/1651879572944691201 https://archive.md/20230501183435/https://twitter.com/Amnest... I don’t support it.
- camillomiller 3y agoSeems like a very stupid idea that could easily backfire and it was just about riding the AI wave. What a pity.
- breakingrules 3y ago[dead]
- Frummy 3y agoMaybe I'm chronically online but I can see instantly if something was AI generated Even had AI generated linkedin profiles message me I guess for scams or hacking or something
- HlessClaudesman 3y agoYeah, I would like to credit my powers of AI detection also, but here's the thing: how would you know if you had seen an AI generated piece of media that perfectly mimicked what human could do? To illustrate, the Last Samurai (2003) was a special effects heavy movie but the casual user would barely have noticed any SFX, that was 20 years ago. We are rapidly approaching a similar moment with AI image generation capabilities, if not already past it.
- mabbo 3y agoTo those saying "Oh I can tell it's fake, obviously!", consider: will your parents/grandparents? And will you still be able to tell in five years, when this tech has had 20 new iterations, each addressing the very tells that right now let you notice it's fake? I know, I know, photoshop and fake pictures have always been around. But now, everyone can do it in 30 seconds. That changes things.
- morkalork 3y agoWhat was life like 150-200 years ago? Back then you had only the written word to go by for news of the outside world and it was just as easily manipulated. I think we've been living through a brief and unique period of truth-y-ness with a plethora of photographic and video evidence.
- Frummy 3y agoRest in peace to saying "pics or it didn't happen" I guess
- throwuwu 3y agoAgreed, we’ve been hoodwinked by photos and video and this is the wake up call we need for everyone to realize that seeing an image of something is in no way comparable to actually being there. We’re about to enter a much more skeptical world and that’s a good thing.
- jmondi 3y agoA healthy amount of skepticism is good. You can easily take your skepticism too far and turn into a tinfoil hat wearing conspiracy theorist who doesnt believe anything and has a completely cynical view on the world. I know a few of these...
- hammyhavoc 3y agoWhat about the tinfoil hatters that believe everything just because it's on some 2h YT video?
- sebastianconcpt 3y agoAI is the "going nuclear" of the propaganda wars. And it started before we even understood that we were in a risk of one.
- motohagiography 3y agoWe're only about 6 months into AI tools being openly available and this is what they are producing - and there is still a basic bar for using them. What's interesting about the soldier image is it has the same emotional impact at first glance as if it were real, before your critical faculties engage to sort it, which means its effect has already occurred. If your feeds are full of indignation and outrage, it doesn't matter whether it's real or not, you're going to have a physical and uncritical association with the sensations it creates. It's straight Pavlovian response. Your perceptions literally come through a feed. Maybe we recognize how thoroughly propagandized we are already, and these examples are a merciful uncanny valley that can let us step back and really question the shit we are letting pile up in our psyches. Even as a self check, do a word association exercise and then ask how closely your associations reflect objective or even an ideal reality. I do these occasionally to test the quality of my beliefs, the results are reliably poor. Apprehending anything close to reality at all requires constant vigilance and asking how you know the things you know, and we're just at t=6mos, what does t=36 look like?
- skeltoac 3y agoOff topic. Scrolled a little bit past the thread and almost got caught up in Twitter’s hate bait algorithm. Sexual imagery and I didn’t ask for. This is why I need to remember never to follow links to Twitter, no matter what, ever. One of the hazards of browsing HN: old darlings like Twitter will be tolerated even after they become NSFW by default.
- detrites 3y agoSwap out the "twitter.com" in the URL for a nitter instance of your choice to see it sans recommendations, ads etc: https://github.com/zedeus/nitter/wiki/Instances https://github.com/zedeus/nitter/wiki/Instances
- sebastiennight 3y agoThere is an open-source browser extension called Privacy Redirect which will turn all Twitter links you click into Nitter links [0]. This also turns Reddit links into Libreddit/Teddit links, YouTube links into Invidious links, etc. Basically you get to browse an Internet without intrusive pre-roll ads or outrage algorithms. I think based on your comment that this might be of interest to you. [0]: https://github.com/SimonBrazell/privacy-redirect/ https://github.com/SimonBrazell/privacy-redirect/
- SushiHippie 3y agoI'd recommend to have a look at https://github.com/libredirect/ https://github.com/libredirect/ as it gets actively developed and has more sites and features.
- sebastiennight 3y agoThanks. I've tried it out of curiosity after reading your comment, and found Libredirect extremely confusing and frustrating : - it rewrites URLs in content that I write, so when I posted a HN story about a youtube video, it changed the URL to some random Invidious instance - its icon is not shown in the extension list in Firefox, so I never know whether it's on or not - it seems to not work on Youtube anymore after I disabled it temporarily, despite the toggle being back on - to change the config, I can't just click the icon (like I would in, say uBlock Origin or even Privacy Redirect), no, I need to go to Extensions > Libredirect > Click the three dots > Settings I feel like the promise and the actuality of this plugin are worlds apart, sadly.
- dukeofdoom 3y agoAI will bring out the "devil" in our collective consciousness. Midjourney is filled with dark images. People that gravitate to the dark side found an easy way to evoke it and put it out into the world. Political news will follow.
- throwuwu 3y agoFUD, there’s just as much uplifting and positive stuff coming out of MJ and other AI tools. You’re just focusing on the negative.
- sn41 3y agoWere you around when Internet 2.0 was supposed to bring democracy all over the world? It has brought a slew of right wing populists. We need to stop viewing technology as neutral, and "oh it will all turn out nice, like the railways did". These are tools which manipulate the human psyche, and not the same as stagecoaches to be disposed of.
- bigfishrunning 3y ago"Populism refers to a range of political stances that emphasize the idea of "the people" and often juxtapose this group against "the elite". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Populism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Populism I can't think of anything more democratic then appealing to the majority of the people...
- JumpCrisscross 3y ago> can't think of anything more democratic then appealing to the majority of the people Populism, pejoratively, means rampant majoritarianism, a known failure mode of democracies. Unfortunately it’s a term, like liberal, that’s been expanded to the point of meaningless.
- tptacek 3y agoPopulism is implicitly an argument that, on some issue or portfolio of issues, there is a coherent will of the decisive majority of all people, such that the opposing view on the issue(s) is democratically illegitimate (because it's an elite interest, or a concentrated interest in a collective action problem). Populism is thus an implicit rejection of pluralism, the idea that groups of people are complicated and contain multiple overlapping and often incoherent sets of issue preferences, and that the goal of politics is to accommodate that. Populism can be tactically useful in a democracy, especially if the ground truth on some issue is that its politics really have been captured by elite interests, and that all of the variance in opinion on that issue comes down to "elite vs. popular". But those issues are pretty rare, and as a formula for the broader project of governing, populism is a disaster.
- skizm 3y agoGOP has already started using AI to generate propaganda: https://www.vice.com/en/article/bvjz9a/republican-ai-ad-gop-beat-biden https://www.vice.com/en/article/bvjz9a/republican-ai-ad-gop-...
- bigfishrunning 3y agoThey're not trying to pass it off as real though, the YouTube description is “An AI-generated look into the country's possible future if Joe Biden is re-elected in 2024.” Basically, it says "this was cheaper then conventional film making techniques."
- ilaksh 3y agoVery interesting. But still the most concerning thing about propaganda is more basic than that. It is that people don't know or are in denial about it's use against them and more generally in all wars. Wars are strategic actions by nations. But humans generally will not engage in mass killing for strategic reasons. They need moral reasons. So propaganda is necessary for warfare in order to frame war in a moral manner. The enemy or enemy leaders are depicted as evil or inhuman. Or their most despicable acts are emphasized to create a sense of 'morally-justified' hatred or the idea that they must be stopped or punished at all costs. Such as killing millions of people if necessary or destroying a country. Actually, if it serves their interests and especially if all of their neighbors are not protesting, humans will go along with pretty much anything. But you do need to at least give them a cover story. Technology should theoretically be able to help reduce the influence of propaganda through things like new types of decentralized news distribution.
- helen___keller 3y ago> Technology should theoretically be able to help reduce the influence of propaganda through things like new types of decentralized news distribution. Why and how? Maybe I don’t know what “decentralized news distribution” means, but whether or not it’s decentralized seems irrelevant to me. People pick sources to follow and share news with others; if those sources are producing propaganda, then people are amplifying propaganda.
- LawTalkingGuy 3y agoIf only a few people at an event publish photos and video there's a lot of dead space/time to insert stories, but if nearly everyone publishes their video feed the majority of the event will be locked down. And not just multiple angles of something, but distributed images through the entire crowd while it's happening. Let's say they show a fight, does the rest of the crowd move appropriately to make room for it? If they show a politicians speaking does the crowd surrounding the closer videos cheer in time with the distant crowd, or are they perhaps spliced together? Forensics will get harder and only more data will give us a chance. Ultimately, analyzing the data is easier than faking it consistently and scale is our advantage.
- rhyme-boss 3y agoAnd then we all look at the comments, possibly forgetting that they could also be AI-generated.
- cseleborg 3y agoI guess the principle "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence" will be more relevant than ever from now on.
- evo_9 3y agoPolitical ads serve no meaningful purpose at this point; it would be better to ban all of them, most do more harm than good by presenting missleading information, or using fear, hyperbole, etc to provote an emotional reaction. When I receive any political adverstisements in the mail I don't look at them, they go straight into the recycling bin - even for issues, politicians I would vote for.
- JumpCrisscross 3y ago> Political ads serve no meaningful purpose at this point; it would be better to ban all of them...When I receive any political adverstisements in the mail I don't look at them You're proposing to ban speech that, by your own admission, you do not read.
- lancesells 3y agoThis is off topic, but holy hell the tweets underneath this. This is like taken from the front page of Fox News.
- vintermann 3y agoI have a theory that propagandists' jobs are safer than they would seem. Thing is, when you're arguing online with some political consultant who four years ago was convinced Joe Biden was senile (because they supported Amy Klobuchar), who is now just as convinced he's sharp as a razor and ready for another term, are they really trying to convince you with their arguments? No, I don't think so. I think the whole point is what they're doing to themselves. Look at me, how loyal I am. I won't stop at anything to win. I don't care if my past words indict me, that was then, this is now and everything is at stake! Winners never quit! Never mind what you think, don't you feel my determination? So it's not about the quality of the words that come out of their mouth. GPT4 can surely produce much better words, but that's not what's supposed to convince. It's the example, the example of fanatical organizational-personal loyalty, that's supposed to convince. GPT4 would need to lie and convince people it's a real person - or rather, many real people - in order for that sort of thing to work. But political consultants are already doing that at scale. It's probably not any better at lying, and even if it is, what they have is good enough. Substitute Biden and Klobuchar for any other politicians, obviously. It's not a left/right thing.
- AnimalMuppet 3y agoBut who are they signaling to when they do this? Not the person they're arguing with. Not me, either, if I'm reading the conversation. To me, they're signaling "I refuse to actually consider anything the other person says. All I will do is argue and repeat my talking points. I might as well be a robot." They're signaling to the people who pay them, and to the people who might hire them in the future, not to their readers. To their readers, they're kind of anti-signaling. I mean, are many people genuinely persuaded by whoever can yell the longest? (Because that's what they're doing. They always reply with something, and that something is never an indication that the other side might have even a shred of a point. But is anyone actually persuaded by some "brick wall" posting the last word at the end of some long back-and-forth?)
- clankyclanker 3y agoI think you've got it: the point isn't persuasion, the point is exhaustion and disengagement. If you can keep shouting until the other side goes home, your opinions become more prevalent. You can then make your opinions so prevalent that other folks assume there's no point to engaging (voting? commenting?) because of how outnumbered contrary opinions are. At that point, your opinion has become reality. It relies on psychological tricks to subvert the one-voice-one-vote rule (c.f., State Street).
- goldenshale 3y agoNobody should be trusting anything they see online anyways. Trump and his whole cohort were real people spewing real lies all the time, so is it really that different if its a midjourney photo with some GPT text? We've been in an age of needing to check your facts from multiple reliable sources for some time, and I think this might actually accelerate some important developments that will help us by not just combating AI but also lying leaders. Information needs to be cryptographically signed by the device/creator/journalist/organization and reputation needs to be tracked. Tucker Carlson's texts have exposed the fact that he was lying throughout the Trump presidency. The number one news anchor on the most watched channel in the US was lying to the public and then privately texting with friends and colleagues about it. He should be shunned from public media for good now. The internet has been full of crap for years, so my prediction is AI generated content has a burst of utility early on for bad actors, but it will quickly be normalized and cast aside like most of the garbage we wade through today.
- fabiofzero 3y agoWell the link is on Twitter. Dying social media platforms are for old people, so they may indeed fall for it.
- hammyhavoc 3y agoCurrent stats for demographics? Or is that an ass-pull remark?
- samstave 3y agoWe need ai regulation so quickly, and one thing that would be interesting for ai articles to be required to have a validation check marking it as AI, and ai platforms should be required to prove their content came from that ai Maybe a watermark?
- hammyhavoc 3y agoWhen people can run AI locally, what good is regulation going to do? Laws don't stop crimes, it's just they'll get punished, if caught. It's the internet. They likely won't even be in the same continent, let alone country. Propaganda from malicious actors abroad isn't going to be prevented by regulation, they're going to have entire departments dedicated to it, so is Uncle Sam.
- LawTalkingGuy 3y agoThat's like licensing all photocopiers to make sure the state knows who can produce propaganda. Not only is it an obvious rights violation, but it will never work. If watermarking is the solution it needs to be applied to the legitimate content.
- samstave 3y agoYeah, I am not qualified to develop the solution, but I am qualified enough to agree that this is going to be a difficult, slippery slope. What I thought was going to be a massive cyber-war with russia/ukraine/nato/US/China, did not turn out so. But once we have the first major cyber attack on [sinfrastructure] with an AI based crawling weapons, such as an AI developed STUXNET/DUQU - then we will have crossed the threshold into the next information era.
- jbattle 3y agoI have little fear about AI generating propaganda. It's cheap to write a crappy article and fake a photo or two - or choose a real photo but twist the story around the photo. What I worry about is "artificial / generated consent". You read some upsetting story, and your skeptical brain holds it at arms length. Then you read commentary in a forum you trust and you see message after message of thoughtfully worded support for some position. I think reading gobs of "informed real people" commentary is far more persuasive - and subtly so - than reading an article from someone you KNOW is pushing a specific perspective. I like to believe I'm an independent thinker, but a big part of my process is to seek out many different points of view and judging which feel well supported and well reasoned. Consensus DOES play a role in my judgement forming. If consensus is easily faked, yikes.
- iotku 3y ago>I like to believe I'm an independent thinker, but a big part of my process is to seek out many different points of view and judging which feel well supported and well reasoned. Ultimately that's the best most people can do short of intensive 'independent' research on most topics which outside of your personal expertise generally isn't entirely possible (even if you have good research skills, there's time limitations.) >Consensus DOES play a role in my judgement forming. If consensus is easily faked, yikes. Even prior to widespread AI tools this has been a strong method in information warfare, that's why it's detrimental to not show dislikes/downvotes in rating systems, it can make a far greater consensus appear to exist where there is far more disagreement among a topic. As far as I'm concerned, the removal of those metrics are to enforce that specific purpose.
- eunos 3y agoThe photo looks like too much HDR and the bandage on the head looks like wrapped tissue.
- Imnimo 3y agoIs the accompanying story untrue, or is this just a case of someone using an AI tool to create a generic stock image for an otherwise-truthful article, and then the provenance of the image being lost?
- r721 3y agoI didn't read the story but the outlet is quite well known ("Lyudi Baikala"/"People of Baikal"), they mentioned the illustration is AI-generated in the end of the article. As I see it the confusion started from Twitter user ChrisO_wiki which retells independent Russian media stories in the form of Twitter threads, and he used the image without mentioning that it was AI-generated.
- Imnimo 3y agoHmm, if that's all this is, I'm not sure I would count this as "AI Generated Propaganda". It's not really someone using AI tools to try to fool people, it's just a case of poor communication.
- orbital-decay 3y ago> they mentioned the illustration is AI-generated in the end of the article This is a really dark pattern, which is clearly being used for deception and plausible deniability (the article is reposted with the embedded picture - everyone sees the picture and assumes it's a photo without checking - it's not us, we warned you it's generated, with a tiny line decoupled from the picture nobody ever paid attention to). Such use of generated images is extremely myopic and will backfire, or already backfired, sowing doubt in everything they and their side writes, regardless of their credibility. The case will be heavily abused by the opposite propaganda as well.
- r721 3y ago>The case will be heavily abused by the opposite propaganda as well. This is what already happened actually, the outlet is quite small, I just looked at their thread in Russian, and it received 7 likes: https://twitter.com/BaikalPeople/status/1653348890807074818 https://twitter.com/BaikalPeople/status/1653348890807074818 People with agenda started to quote tweet ChrisO_wiki's English translation thread with captions like "look at this blatant pro-Ukrainian propaganda", and it got 1.5M views.
- jl2718 3y agoNo amount of propaganda can defeat what’s been implanted by teachers in school. It takes almost zero technology to require a child to believe a lie as a condition of their freedom. Don’t bother with AI; just put it on a test. Belief of anything beyond that point is controlled by cognitive dissonance.
- jruohonen 3y agoThere are all kinds of propaganda; white, grey, and black. The use of deepfakes probably belongs to the black category. But what I've always found more intriguing is the white propaganda; it provides interesting historical insights into major events in world politics. Thus, can someone with access to DALL-E 2 or similar feed it the public archives of propaganda posters [1], generate a few samples, and deliver these for a discussion here at Hacker News? It would be interesting to see what kind white propaganda an AI and its users would generate! [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/PropagandaPosters/ https://www.reddit.com/r/PropagandaPosters/