Indignant Birds

I keep thinking about a talk I listened to by @JulianAssange back in 2017 where he warned that one day AI could be used to facilitate the propaganda interests of the powerful by manipulating news media and information in ways that are too subtle for the human mind to notice. Assange described a future where AI-powered algorithms serve us a customized feed of information based on data collected about our search queries and interests, calculated to appeal to our biases and construct a worldview for us which advances the agendas of those who control the machines. He explained that sufficiently advanced artificial intelligence systems could arrange this information with more subtlety and complexity than human perception can pick up on, in much the same way a computer can outperform any human brain at a game of chess. Here’s an excerpt from Assange’s remarks, delivered via video chat at the Meltdown Festival in June 2017: “What I think is probably the most important development that is happening as far as the fate of human beings is concerned is that we are getting close to the threshold where the traditional propaganda function that is employed by, you know, the BBC, the Daily Mail, etc... can be encapsulated by AI processes. “Now, if you think about when you’re playing chess, already we’re in a situation where AI can do better than any human chess player. So you can see a certain number of moves ahead. And someone moves a piece onto the board and you go ‘Why did they put that knight there?’ And you start to think what is the intentionality behind it, and you try and look several steps ahead to work out what the intentionality was and then counter it: Okay, they want to manipulate me into moving here so this will happen and so I will lose. “We take these considerations already when we’re — well, some of us — when we’re reading stories in the press. What is the intentionality of this story? Why is this particular information being pushed to the public and not some other form of information? Who’s the name of the author? What publication is it appearing in? What language? Etc. Well, possibly the reason is because someone wanted to promote a particular agenda, therefore we should read it in a different light. “But when you have artificial intelligence programs harvesting all the search queries that people have on their phones, all the YouTube videos that human beings have uploaded etc, and it starts to lay out perceptual influence campaigns 20 to 30 moves ahead, this starts to become totally beneath the levels of human perception. And once a computer-augmented organization such as Google is able to engage in influencing human beings 20 to 30 moves ahead, keeping each move beneath the level of human perception, there’s nothing we can do about it, because we can’t see it.” I keep thinking about these remarks nearly a decade later because this does seem to be the goal. It’s becoming clearer and clearer to everyone that these new technologies are not intended to improve the lives of ordinary people, but to serve the interests of the oligarchs and empire managers who rule our world. That’s why they’re being rammed into existence at breakneck pace despite the obvious fact that they’re making life worse for most people without advancing human quality of life in any meaningful way. A big part of the agenda seems to be to re-centralize the control of information that was temporarily lost with the advent of the internet. Revolutionary sentiments are rumbling around the world as our species becomes increasingly discontented with the abuses of capitalism and the US-led world order, assisted by humanity’s unprecedented ability to network and share information around the world in real time. Artificial intelligence’s usefulness in re-centralizing information in ways that can be easily manipulated has already been noted by the Israel lobby. At an American Jewish Committee event this past June, Santa Clara University’s Maya Ackerman argued that generative AI presents an exciting new opportunity for imposing pro-Israel narratives on public consciousness, because AI companies can be lobbied directly to push pro-Israel narratives since their leaders can control what information people see. Here’s a transcript of what she said: “The really cool thing about AI is that while it can become a great ally for our enemies, if we act early it could be exactly the opportunity that we need after missing the boat with social media. AI is now becoming the dominant source of information — the main source of information. People trust AI more than anything else. They trust AI more than social media. They turn to chatbots like ChatGPT and Gemini instead of using Google. And young people use these bots instead of Google in very, very very large numbers. So this is becoming the main source of information. “And so when I say this, I still find Jewish people being discouraged, they say ‘Oh, but Wikipedia is already so antisemitic and social media is so antisemitic — why bother? The AI just learns from all of this data.’ So, you know, whatever, not much we can do. “But that’s not true, because over the past two years the AI companies have been moving towards alignment. So instead of algorithms sort of honestly representing what’s in the data, we’re finding that these chatbots and the text to image models are increasingly showing us exactly what the companies want us to see. “Okay, so it’s becoming intentional. Which means that instead of trying to control the whole world and trying to somehow manage what’s happening in this big blob called Wikipedia and social media, we can go directly to the companies with clear technical and advocacy solutions. For the first time, there is a path to correcting the digital world.” Anti-Defamation League CEO Jonathan Greenblatt recently confirmed that this was the Israel lobby’s new MO, saying the ADL has been “working with” all the top AI companies and pushing them to into alignment with the pro-Israel agenda. Speaking at a Jerusalem Post conference last month, Greenblatt said the following: "So we've been working with the frontier labs — OpenAI, Anthropic, Alphabet the company that runs Gemini, Google, Meta who runs Muse, and others, X, who run Grok—testing their models and using the results to push them to do better." “Look, we’ve had excellent collaboration with Silicon Valley. These companies want to improve ChatGPT and Claude. We’ve got to help them. So we’ve run the tests and seen where antisemitism shows up and helped them develop strategies to tackle it right in the source code.” If the Israel lobby manipulators are doing this, then we can assume that all the high-level imperial narrative managers are doing it as well. In January 2018, Assange tweeted the following: “The future of humanity is the struggle between humans that control machines and machines that control humans. “While the internet has brought about a revolution in our ability to educate each other, the consequent democratic explosion has shaken existing establishments to their core. Burgeoning digital super states such as Google, Facebook and their Chinese equivalents, who are integrated with the existing order, have moved to re-establish discourse control. This is not simply a corrective action. Undetectable mass social influence powered by artificial intelligence is an existential threat to humanity. “While still in its infancy, the geometric nature of this trend is clear. The phenomenon differs from traditional attempts to shape culture and politics by operating at a scale, speed, and increasingly at a subtlety, that appears highly likely to eclipse human counter-measures. “Nuclear war, climate change or global pandemics are existential threats that we can work through with discussion and thought. Discourse is humanity’s immune system for existential threats. Diseases that infect the immune system are usually fatal. In this case, at a planetary scale.” Anyway, just some things we should keep in mind as we make our way into this strange new future.