Machine Learning, Deep Fakes, and the Threat of an Artificially Intelligent Hate-Bot
Fake news isn’t new. More than a century ago, newspapers owned by William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer helped stir up enthusiasm for war against Spain by hyping the dubious claim that Spanish agents had used explosives to sink the USS Maine in Havana Harbor. The cry of “Remember the Maine! To hell with Spain!” even became a battle slogan.
But social media and other new technologies make the spread of fake news easier. Now everyone, not just government propagandists and major mass-media magnates, can get in on the action. That includes hostile foreign powers. And it remains an open question as to whether tech-supercharged fake news will make democracy seem incompatible with a free and open media environment.
One might hope that our elected leaders would discourage—or at least ignore—voter opinions that emerge from false information. But politics is no different from any other business: The most successful suppliers are the ones who realize that the customer is always right. As we’ve learned during the COVID pandemic, this applies to matters of life and death. If a self-selected media diet causes US Democratic voters to favor mandatory masking in kindergartens; and Republicans to oppose all vaccine mandates; then politicians on either side who buck their party members’ majority views can be expected to perform poorly in primaries.
We have not yet begun to scratch the surface of how fake news can be weaponized by unscrupulous actors. Imagine that China has secretly decided to invade Taiwan, and wanted to complicate the US response by propelling Americans into another bout of internecine culture wars. Chinese propagandists would be eager to find and disseminate a video similar to that of police abusing George Floyd in 2020. But if they couldn’t find such material, why wouldn’t they manufacture it?
