The United States of America is currently witnessing the most brazen attempt at election interference ever in the form of the Soviet show trial of former President Donald Trump in Judge Juan Merchan's courtroom and its sadly predictable outcome. As we survey the political landscape for other potential sources of election chicanery, we know that the Democrats' Magic Mail-In Ballot Machine is almost certainly getting an upgrade.
Worry not, fellow patriots, Washington Post Opinion columnist Josh Tyrangiel wants you to know that the real election interference monster under the bed in 2024 is going to be a bunch of Russians with access to ChatGPT.
OK, I threw a bit of snark in there.
Tyrangiel covers AI for WaPo, so he mostly knows what he's talking about when it comes to the nuts and bolts of it, but I'm here to slightly push back on his conclusions about its impact on the election.
There's a lot to pick apart here, but I'll offer just one paragraph that tells us everything that we need to know.
For more than a year, FBI Director Christopher A. Wray has warned about a wave of election interference that could make 2016 look cute. No respectable foreign adversary needs an army of human trolls in 2024. AI can belch out literally billions of pieces of realistic-looking and sounding misinformation about when, where and how to vote. It can just as easily customize political propaganda for any individual target. In 2016, Brad Parscale, Donald Trump’s digital campaign director, spent endless hours customizing tiny thumbnail campaign ads for groups of 20 to 50 people on Facebook. It was miserable work but an incredibly effective way to make people feel seen by a campaign. In 2024, Brad Parscale is software, available to any chaos agent for pennies. There are more legal restrictions on ads, but AI can create fake social profiles and aim squarely for your individual feed. Deepfakes of candidates have been here for months, and the AI companies keep releasing tools that make all of this material faster and more convincing.
The article that Tyrangiel links to in order to establish the 2016 baseline for interference is one by Glenn Kessler from just last year that was still flogging the "But Russia!" dead horse. You're all discerning readers, so you don't need proof that WaPo's "fact checker" is a propagandist hack, but I'll offer Kessler's most recent tweet as an example for anyone who may be new here:
New #FactChecker -->Trump’s (misleading) closing argument to the court of public opinion https://t.co/edtNF3aeVZ
— Glenn Kessler (@GlennKesslerWP) May 28, 2024
We don't need a grain of salt for these guys, we need a brand new salt lick.
As Tyrangiel notes earlier in the article, most AI CEOs acknowledge the "glass-half-full, glass-might-explode" potential of what they're doing. That's always where I've been regarding not only artificial intelligence, but technology in general. I'm both fascinated by it and feel that I may be participating in humanity's doom.
I also don't discount the idea that Russia and China will be monkeying around with disinformation using AI a lot this year. Where I differ from the lefties is in believing the impact it will have.
At present, AI's greatest potential to sway voters is on social media. I'm not saying this as an AI expert, I'm saying it as an expert on both American politics and social media.
Dems worry about social media influence because their base is comprised of gullible simps who believe in things like "free" government money, evil Israel, and good Hamas. Even though Trump deftly used social media to bypass the biased MSM hacks in 2016, that's not why people voted for him.
I tend to reject the notion that, in this most important of presidential election years, anyone on either side is scrolling through Twitter/X or Facebook to figure out how they want to vote. That includes the lefties.
It seems particularly preposterous to think that the undecided voters out there are going let it all come down to impressions they get from social media. In fact, the people most likely to be swayed are probably not that internet savvy.
So, give it your best shot, Putin and Xi — most Americans have made up their minds. There's a greater likelihood that those who haven't will be swayed by direct mail.
Of course, when we revisit this in four years, AI might be running for president.
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