In a YouTube video, a voice in English announces that China has researched and developed its own ultra-thin 1-nanometer chip – a staggering claim given that the chip isn’t expected in commercial devices for another decade.
“Recent news from China has sent ripples of excitement and astonishment across the globe,” gushes the voice-over on the China Charged YouTube channel. “This revolutionary breakthrough is more than a technological marvel; it is a game-changer that will redefine the global tech landscape.”
“Prepare to have your mind blown,” says another video, this time on the channel Unbelievable Projects. “Welcome to today’s video, in which we’ll discover why America remains behind China in infrastructure development.”
These voices and their “good news” about China are evidence that the Chinese Communist Party and its overseas proxies are using artificial intelligence to flood YouTube with propaganda videos, according to a new report that describes a “coordinated inauthentic influence campaign” on the platform.
I’d be surprised if it’s just China
It’s not. Youtube is full of AI-generated content. Mostly conspiracy bullshit targeted at republicans and other right wingers. But it’s only now when China does it, it makes it to the headlines.
everyone has massive propaganda departments if they can afford it
it’s so so extremely useful for driving political support
the US even has dedicated “Psychological Operations” divisions in the Army
The specifics of this article aside, I am so not looking forward to the continued proliferation of AI based bullshit on the internet/public discourse/the media/etc. It’s gonna get so so much worse, we’re just scratching the surface right now. The validity of any photo or video will be destroyed and nothing will be trustworthy anymore. This is great news for fascists who thrive in a world where the truth is unknowable and meaningless.
It’s just sort of kind of like a slightly more advanced form of spam, or trolling, or really fucked up propaganda/news. The integrity of the ideas and the evidence itself is more what should be evaluated in an argument anyways, rather than the source, and I don’t think like, evidence, generally, like, evidence in general, proof of things in general, is going anywhere anytime soon. I don’t think AI is advanced enough to break encrypted p2p communication, so I don’t really think there’s much of a chance that shit just gets totally wiped off the internet and you start seeing like mass memory hole type shit. It’s more likely that you end up seeing mass disinformation campaigns. You know, like what we’ve had since forever, where you get the population to do it to themselves.
The specifics of US propaganda aside…
> The videos are part of at least 30 channels identified by researchers as being part of the “Shadow Play” network promoting pro-China and anti-U.S. narratives, according to the Australian Strategic Policy Institute.
> according to the Australian Strategic Policy Institute
> Australian
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Administration? Lemmy was built by a guy that denies tiananmen square massacre.
Before you get downvoted by the tankies, note for historical accuracy (so that I will be downvoted because they like that even less, OTOH lemmygrad doesn’t even see me so w/e): The massacres were in side streets, not on the square itself. The party was at first split as to how to deal with the protests, the students were to simplify quite a bit Dengists alarmed by the power shifts within the party away from Dengism following Hu Yaobang’s death. Hardline faction was amassing the army outside of Peking, Peking locals went out there and handed them noodles and explanations as to the situation, explaining that the protesters were their sons and daughters, good socialists1, not some bourgeois anti-revolutionary mob. Dengist faction lost out in the internal party struggle, hardliners decided that the army shall march, army marched, Peking locals erected barricades etc. in the streets leading to the square, get massacred, army arrives at square, delivers final ultimatum, students retreat, with no further or at least minimal bloodshed.
1 According to Marxist-Leninist-Maoist type thought. People understanding actual theory understand that Dengists are even more capitalist than Lenin, but MLs never acknowledge that state capitalism is, indeed, capitalism, and Dengists never acknowledge that they’re not even doing state capitalism any more but run of the mill oligarchic capitalism.
Can someone please explain to me the drama of Lemmy.ml and why everyone seems to be leaving it?
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Better yet, look at the modlog.
Lemmy.ml is run by ML. Marxist-LENINIST. They will not allow almost any critique of any government that falls under that umbrella ever. But will gladly hypocritically criticize any western power for the same thing.
If it was wrong for the US Britain and the west to do it. It’s wrong for China, North Korea today or the Soviet Union in their time to have done it as well. Not a free pass for them to do it. When it comes to anything criticizing their political ideologies you may as well be on something like lemmy.conservative in many ways.
Proper link - couldn’t find the referenced thread
Hi there! Looks like you linked to a Lemmy community using a URL instead of its name, which doesn’t work well for people on different instances. Try fixing it like this: !worldnews@lemmy.ml
honestly they just expect more evidence
I think they’re not moderated by Americans so their standard for what’s “acceptable” is less “what’s politically-aligned” but “what’s backed by the available evidence”
Weird, as social leaning instance, they should be opposed to modern China! Should we help them?
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Got banned from there today for suggesting that disappearing prisoners isn’t the status quo in “the west”.
Oddly enough I’ve been downvote-stalked since and I find it hilarious.
Next week: China develops world’s first 0nm chip!
-12nm
“Your joke, but worse!”
Culturally there is no real concept of plagiarism or cheating in China. Any shortcut is acceptable, because if you aren’t using it someone else is.
Everyone plagiarises until they become powerful enough to influence others to stop or face sanctions.
Fake it till you make it. Once you make it, call out others plagiarism.
Competition comes with copying some of components. All Android OEMs, including Samsung copy each other.
blame the game, not the player
Sometimes I wonder if there are different “levels” of propaganda nation states put out. Like you have this obviously fake crap get a bunch of surface-knowlege people. Then you have more subtle things put out - like social media accounts pretending that something false is a ground truth. You’ll then get people who can catch the fake videos and then believe the fake accounts no problem because it’s obviously can’t be propaganda - because you know what propaganda looks like. cough gell-mann amnesia cough
Or maybe nation states are really that incompetent and the only level of propaganda they can put out is like the article’s videos. Honestly people give way too much credit to how much these folks know/plan out. There’s no secret cabal playing 5d chess. They’re normal people (ie. dumbfucks) pushing a message.
Who knows.
Propaganda is a quantity over quality game. You’re not trying to convince the die-hard supporters of the other side, that’s not realistic. You’re trying to give informational cover to your own side.
It’s like suppressive fire. Is the machine gunner specifically trying to kill the enemy? No, he’s sending bullets whizzing overhead to change their behavior. Then his buddies can circle around their cover and very specifically aim at and kill them.
edit: You are right that it’s no 5d chess though. It’s more like the excuses you’d get out of a young kid. Just flak, intended to get in the way. Fired in quantity.
There’s also Russian style propaganda which isn’t really about sending any specific message but more about sowing chaos. It’s about blasting people with so much contradictory information that they become overwhelmed and exhausted and just give up trying to pay attention to anything. To say it a different way it’s about lowering the signal to noise ratio to the point where most people lose the signal.
China tends to favor targeted disinformation, they tightly control what people hear and have specific messages they push. Russia just tries to scream incoherent gibberish where nobody can hold a conversation anymore.
There’s also Russian style propaganda which isn’t really about sending any specific message but more about sowing chaos. It’s about blasting people with so much contradictory information that they become overwhelmed and exhausted and just give up trying to pay attention to anything.
“Flood the zone with shit”
— Steve Bannon
That makes sense, but the targets of my first paragraph wouldn’t be the die-hards. It would be people who think they can identify fake news - but their hubris is what makes tricking them even easier. It would actually be much easier making fake accounts than making the fake YT videos.
If I was to use your analogy - it’d be like if the gunner’s level of effort to land hits or to whiff were the same. [S]he’d obviously just hit them.
There’s also the crap “China will collapse in XX days” propaganda on YouTube as well
It’s fucking everywhere
“Oh bother! America steals all the hunny!”
at this point I’m convinced China was just copying all of the “China gonna collapse in 3 days” videos
Alarming as this may sound, they’re beating a dead horse. Most of the people who would believe this shit uncritically also think Fox “News” is the gospel truth. They’re already lost.
Yeah ive blocked every channel reccomendation ive gotten that so much as smells like shoe polish.
I wonder if the AI has caught on to a lot of the abusable mechanics of YT like an upload schedule, opening livestreams or premieres in multiple windows, the upvote/downvote exploit, etc. There is a solid possibility that an AI has better strats than we do.
The AI is just being used to create the content itself. The upload process is still just a script. The AI can only adjust parameters set by the person, and the person creating the setup likely isn’t adding in any of the other factors
An actual AI influencer who could control all that would be interesting. What kind of strategies it would make to get the most engagements
Very Hard to train since I assume you would need real human feedback for each run of course
I think you could just let it push a bunch of buttons and fill in fields at random or with sample data and then score each generation based on user engagement and views, it wouldn’t need that much human feedback during the development phase but the downside would be slightly less control over the content it pushes.
doubt it, it’s not that advanced lol
Yeah I was really letting my imagination run wild, there.
Give them a break they don’t have a 24 hour cable news channel for propaganda
Why is this a sign that they’re using “Artificial Intelligence”? Sounds like they’re just as likely using text-to-speech for planned propaganda. It’s not like they don’t have an ay of people to work on it.
Because contemporary tts use ml, a form of ai.
tl;dr: AI is creating the voices, not the script.
AI hate gets people emotional and leads to more clicks. Couple that with anything to do with China and you end up with a couple bucks of ad money.
This made me think of what you can do with AI to poke fun at china, and sadly it seems that microsoft is a bit hard on anti china prompts. But like, life finds a way…
What’s next? They landed on the dark side of the sun? North Korea already did that.
RFA is literally a propaganda source.
Yes but it’s pro-Western and thus good
This is very poor form, at least employ agents like the american 3 letters.
RFA is a private, nonprofit corporation, funded by the U.S. Congress through the U.S. Agency for Global Media (USAGM), an independent federal government agency that oversees all U.S. civilian international media. In addition to providing oversight, the USAGM works with RFA to ensure the professional independence and integrity of its journalism.
All other USAGM-funded outlets have the same perspective as RFA. I stopped reading RFE/RL anymore because it was tiring.
