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Posted by DeepLogin 15 hours ago

Israel creates fake think tank in likely attempt to dupe AI chatbots(responsiblestatecraft.org)
571 points | 345 commentspage 2
steveBK123 1 hour ago|
This is just LLM SEO then

I think equally interesting is whatever Dario's wife was able to do in order to wipe her foot print from any search/chat results.

I've worked for a number of small company billionaires who all have suspiciously small information footprints online despite being somewhat public figures for 30 years. Most of them do such a good job it is not even clear what state they live, if they are currently married, and if so what their current (or previous) wife(s)'s name is/was.

kahf56 7 hours ago||
So this is the future of marketing, SEO, advertisement. Open AI also taking it seriously: https://ads.openai.com/
bawolff 7 hours ago||
What does it means to be a "fake" think tank? 80% of think tanks are already propaganda vehicles. A low end think tank is basically a pretentious blog.
Barrin92 7 hours ago|
>What does it means to be a "fake" think tank?

presumably that you don't have employees that do any of the proverbial thinking, which is the case here.

Every think tank has its biases and funding sources but something like RAND is an actual entity at which people do research, this "Hanover Public Policy Institute" has nothing to do with Hanover, policy and isn't an institute, but a deliberately misleadingly presenting arm of the Israeli government proxied through a German advertising company

js8 4 hours ago||
I don't understand why people who don't like fake news and manipulation won't embrace the social graph as a public good.

If enough people were willing to publicly certify that their fellow contacts are human, anybody could then assign trust to each social graph node based on the trust they have in the path to them. It would completely decentralize the algorithms and remove the fake accounts as less trustworthy.

I think people tried this with PGP but it never really caught on.

zombot 4 hours ago||
It doesn't scale as a consumer good. Letting go of consumerist habits is just as hard as breaking any other habit.

Also, it could just as easily be faked, like so much else. Even if someone offered such an assurance, I wouldn't trust random strangers on the internet. At best it would become an arms race between "this is not a real person" and those who sell fake assurances. And it would be one more weapon to damage anyone's reputation you don't like. "not a real person!"

js8 2 hours ago||
I am not really sure how it could be faked. The fake assurance, in order to work, must be connected to you.

By default you could choose not to trust. If you don't trust random strangers it's OK. So I don't see how it would damage someone's reputation worse than today.

It would potentially only add trust. Arguably, today we have bots because we have no other option than to trust without justification. With the public social graph, the trust above the baseline would be justifiable.

zombot 1 hour ago||
Then go and implement it. Either you make the world a better place or you learn how collision with reality impacts ideas.
mulmen 4 hours ago||
The social graph is the source of the fake news and manipulation. Before social media the social graph was email and it was all the same slop and misinformation. Before that it was literally physical mail. Look up chain letters. Truly nothing is new.

If I certify my racist thanksgiving ruining uncle is a real person that doesn’t actually help you avoid misinformation.

I honestly don’t care if the information I consume comes from a person or a robot. I only care if it is accurate or not. Those dimensions are orthogonal.

js8 3 hours ago||
I don't think you understand what I mean by public social graph. What I mean is that anybody could publish or withdraw statements of two forms:

- "I, owner of account A, certify that owner of account B is human."

- "I, owner of account C, have a reason to trust/distrust the certification of account A about account B."

The collection of these statements would be the public social graph.

The social graph would then be used to establish provenance of facts, which are statements of the form:

- "I, owner of account B, certify account A being witness to event X."

Now whether to believe this or not depends on whether A certified B to be a human, and how much you transitively believe that statement.

So there is a kind of reversal - your statement about your uncle being human helps him to certify what you say, and vice versa.

nmeofthestate 3 hours ago||
It's remarkable how much it hasn't worked: Google "the Hanover institute" and you get an AI summary that references various Palestinian activist websites, with no actual link to 'the Hanover institute'. Google "the Hanover institute website" and you'll drag a URL out of Google AI, but it isn't clickable!
shevy-java 1 hour ago||
> The Hanover Institute’s reports — all of which are about Israel and Palestine — appear to be part of an Israeli effort to influence chatbots.

This already seems to be a wrong analysis in that it makes little sense to "influence" a chatbot. It makes more sense to influence humans, so perhaps the wording is just incorrect, but very clearly the aim is not to "influence" a chatbot per se. That just makes no sense at all.

The wording fake think tank is also strange, because it assumes that all other think tanks are "real". But this assessment can not be made, because not everyone has all information on all think tanks. It is a too simplistic assumption in how the world operates. I understand that if you have incomplete information, you need to infer, but this then leads to information that may be incorrect or incomplete. In turn if your analysis is based on incorrect information, it may lead to wrong conclusions.

manyaoman 4 hours ago||
This fraud is convincing enough to trick the LLMs, but pretty obvious to humans who will eventually come up with countermeasures. Moving forward, watch for some well-established think tanks starting to specialize in slopaganda laundering.
diebillionaires 4 hours ago||
whether it’s new or not doesn’t matter. it’s more propaganda and it should be exposed. really glad they wrote this article.
HDBaseT 9 hours ago||
Dupe? or manipulate ai chatbots to have favorable views of Israel?
dylan604 7 hours ago|
You just asked the same thing twice
N_Lens 9 hours ago|
I find intensive marketing/PR efforts are often inversely correlated with the claims being made - whether it's products or geopolitics. Israel certainly engages in very intense marketing on certain fronts, but truth cannot be obscured forever. In Physics the law of conservation includes not only matter and energy, but also information (Information cannot be destroyed from the Universe).
somenameforme 8 hours ago||
I've also found this to be true, but also only in relatively modern times. For instance during the Cold War there was an obscene amount of propaganda, but it was mostly true. For instance the wide array of cheap affordable goods in American shelves was constantly flaunted, but not in the least bit misleading.

I don't understand the modern effort to engage in 'information warfare' as a thing in and of itself. Each time it collapses and people sees what was 'really' happening, it just makes them that much less likely to believe you next time. And you also create a significant number of perpetually jaded people who will basically never believe you again, even when you're telling the truth. Countless politicians have proudly paraded around their pristine, seemingly untouched, copies of Meditations, but perhaps they should go for more foundational works, like The Boy Who Cried Wolf.

xg15 5 hours ago|||
> And you also create a significant number of perpetually jaded people who will basically never believe you again, even when you're telling the truth.

Yes, but they will also not believe my enemies. Making people not believe anything anymore is a classic strategy of propaganda.

somenameforme 3 hours ago||
Maybe that is the rationale. It's the only thing that'd make sense, but for problem that it doesn't. When somebody, or some entity, lies to you - that entity becomes the liar. People may not want to believe 'the enemy', but that's going to be because of their own ideological reasons, and not because they now refuse to believe anybody. On the contrary non-ideologues may even be ever more swayed towards your enemy as a result of this.

Personally I think the issue is that after WW2 we were left with a large scale and ever growing intelligence apparatus, but with ever fewer appropriate tasks for them. That led directly to the era of recklessly overthrowing nations, often to our own detriment, and gradually transitioned to the modern era of aimless 'information warfare' which I think will ultimately be shown to be very much to our detriment, once again.

N_Lens 7 hours ago|||
The difference between American and Russian propaganda is that Russians know it's propaganda.
wiseowise 4 hours ago||
This was a great, old anecdote. Until they’ve started the biggest European war of the century.
edmundsauto 7 hours ago||
One goal of modern propaganda is to make it irrelevant when the truth inevitably comes out.

Look at the US situation. It’s clear that Trump is a rapist - the truth has come out. It’s clear he’s corrupt. For all the “release the full Epstein files” discussion, it really wouldn’t change anything.

The truth will come out but will the people who can make it matter be listening?

hunterpayne 7 hours ago||
Oh the irony.
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