Omniscient, Malevolent, Autonomous Robots Threaten Consensual Reality

I was very unsurprised to read this headline which would normally sound very exciting to me:
"Researchers create 'malicious' writing AI"

Not because it isn't true, but because it's already been true for at least five or six years. The only thing different is the word "AI" in there.

What's also different, not with this technology but the greater technosphere, is that we can now see what intentionally-generated low-credibility information can do when propagated at the scale of globally-connected digitally-mediated social networks. (A robot wouldn't use that many hyphens in one sentence by the way, too suspicious; credibility-threatening.)

The idea of holding back your natural language generator for fear that it might create a dystopia sounds more like a natural publicity generator at work.

Nonetheless, some real talk. The thing that makes this new intelligentity special is that it's got a good natural language generator AND a good database of high-credibility content to inform it. That's important, because without the ability to first filter good news from bad news sources to begin with, the output would not be noteworthy.

So this is the next step. As soon as we figure out how to deal with the fake news problem (i.e., by creating databases of credible sources, or eventually criteria that can auto-select), then bad actors will create the automated re-narratization of that "good" information to send fake shit right under our new radar.

I look forward to re-reading this post in another seven years.


Notes:
Researchers create 'malicious' writing AI
Feb 2019, BBC News

Narrative Science
They write programs that write. For example, they will take your quarterly report data, and write about it so people can read it like a story using their Natural Language Generator.

Other Writing Robots:
The Policeman's Beard Is Half-Constructed
written by a computer in 1984
[main]
[PDF]

[html]

Verified Facts
http://www.verifiedfacts.org/
The greatest website ever for conspiracy theories, created by robots, for robots.

Communications From Elsewhere
http://www.elsewhere.org/pomo/
"The essay you have just seen is completely meaningless and was randomly generated by the Postmodernism Generator."

Robot writes LA Times earthquake breaking news article
March 2014, BBC

Post Script:
I'm not sure if this is still happening, but for a while (circa 2013) you could buy a book that was basically a copy of a Wikipedia page. The entire process, from the purchase order, to the printing of the book, was automated. Obviously, there were no authors listed, and no editors. Also obviously, this blew my mind, so I soon owned a physical copy of "Stigler's Law of Eponymy," taken from the eponymous Wiki page.

Eponymy relates to names of things, like how Weezer's first album is eponymous because it's named after the band itself. (Actually, because all their albums are named this way, they get new meta names based on colors, and so the first album eventually became the Blue album. Beatles come to mind.)

Stigler's Law of Eponymy states that discoveries, for example, are  assigned to people other than their inventors.

And from a passage in this very Wiki page, I will now paste, via an unknown volunteer contributor:

"It takes a thousand men to invent a telegraph, or a steam engine, or a phonograph, or a photograph, or a telephone or any other important thing—and the last man gets the credit and we forget the others. He added his little mite — that is all he did. These object lessons should teach us that ninety-nine parts of all things that proceed from the intellect are plagiarisms, pure and simple; and the lesson ought to make us modest. But nothing can do that."
-Mark Twain, "Letter to Helen Keller," 1903   

A real-fake book about eponymy written by an author with no name FTW!
Network Address, 2013