Secretary of State Antony Blinken appeared recently at an awards ceremony for the “Freedom House” — a nonprofit “founded on the core conviction that freedom flourishes in democratic nations where governments are accountable to their people.” Close to 90% of the organization’s funding comes directly from the U.S. government, providing the capacity to launder social control initiatives through the guise of “human rights.”
Embedded within Blinken’s rambling speech about Democracy™ and whatever, he slipped in a most troubling admission that the government is weaponizing AI to combat “Russian disinformation.”
Via U.S. State Department (emphasis added):
Russia continues to push a steady, relentless stream of disinformation about its war of aggression against Ukraine, to lie about and cover up horrific abuses it’s committed, to try to justify committing others.
In response, the State Department has developed an AI-enabled online Ukraine Content Aggregator to collect verifiable Russian disinformation and then to share that with partners around the world. We’re promoting independent media and digital literacy. We’re working with partners in academia to reliably detect fake text generated by Russian chatbots…
As a system that reflects the data on which it’s trained – including the biases embedded in that data – AI can, of course, amplify discrimination and enable abuses.
It also runs the risk of strengthening autocratic governments, including by enabling them to exploit social media even more effectively to manipulate their people and sow division among and within their adversaries.
It’s all well and good for an authoritarian sociopath like Antony Blinken to insinuate that the U.S. government is not “autocratic,” as he does here. But imagine being in the audience and being ignorant or stupid enough to actually believe this bilge. It’s an astonishing proposition. Yet those people exist. They’re called Blue MAGA.
By “manipulating social media,” is Antony Blinken referring to the recently resurrected (under another name) Disinformation Governance Board designed to flag posts inconvenient to the government narrative?
Of course not. He means the U.S. government’s geopolitical rivals.
We can trust the government, of course, to use this technology responsibly because it lied for seven straight years about non-existent Russian interference in the 2016 and 2020 elections.
The announcement of the anti-“Russian disinformation” AI project comes on the heels of the Durham report, which found that the years-long Russiagate hoax should never have gotten off the ground and that the FBI had insufficient justification to ever launch its investigation in the first place.
Instead of any kind of accountability, the U.S. government is rewarded for its malfeasance with more social control powers, this time facilitated by artificial intelligence.
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