"OpenAI has removed the account of the developer behind an artificial intelligence-powered bot impersonating the US presidential candidate Dean Phillips, saying it violated company policy.
Phillips, who is challenging Joe Biden for the Democratic party candidacy, was impersonated by a ChatGPT-powered bot on the dean.bot site.
The bot was backed by Silicon Valley entrepreneurs Matt Krisiloff and Jed Somers, who have started a Super Pac - a body that funds and supports political candidates - named We Deserve Better, supporting Phillips.
San Francisco-based OpenAI said it had removed a developer account that violated its policies on political campaigning and impersonation.
"We recently removed a developer account that was knowingly violating our API usage policies which disallow political campaigning, or impersonating an individual without consent," said the company."
""The fights between bots can be far more persistent than the ones we see between people," said Taha Yasseri, who worked on the study at the Oxford Internet Institute. "Humans usually cool down after a few days, but the bots might continue for years.""
"california has banned bots that pretend to be human. under a newly signed bill, these bots will need to disclose their nature, making it clear to the user that they're conversing with a machine rather than a human.
according to a bill signed on friday by democratic gov. jerry brown, automated accounts, more commonly called 'bots', will need to disclose to customers that they're not real humans, according to reporting from PC magazine. the bill is part of a move that will help users avoid falling victim to automated messages selling goods or services in a commercial transaction or to influence a vote in an election."
"Studies generally suggest that, year after year, less than 60 percent of web traffic is human; some years, according to some researchers, a healthy majority of it is bot. For a period of time in 2013, the Times reported this year, a full half of YouTube traffic was "bots masquerading as people," a portion so high that employees feared an inflection point after which YouTube's systems for detecting fraudulent traffic would begin to regard bot traffic as real and human traffic as fake. They called this hypothetical event "the Inversion.""
"A Chinese bot network played a key role in spreading disinformation during and after the US election, including a debunked video of "ballot burning" shared by Eric Trump, a new study reveals.
The misleading video shows a man filming himself on Virginia Beach, allegedly burning votes cast for Donald Trump. The ballots were actually samples. The clip went viral after Trump's son Eric posted it a day later on his official Twitter page, where it got more than 1.2m views."
"The role of so-called social media "bots" - automated accounts capable of posting content or interacting with other users with no direct human involvement - has been the subject of much scrutiny and attention in recent years. "
"Twitter has been flooded with nuisance posts designed to obscure news of the coronavirus lockdown protests in China, in an apparent state-directed attempt to suppress footage of the demonstrations.
Chinese bot accounts - not operated by humans - are being used to flood the social networking service with adverts for sex workers, pornography and gambling when users search for a major city in the country, such as Shanghai or Beijing, using Chinese script."
"Analysis - The need for businesses to adapt to the workplace demands of the Covid-19 pandemic has accelerated the adoption of digital technologies, with clear implications for jobs and workers.
But just how much employees worry about the threat of automation - and how real those fears are - can have implications for workplaces beyond the technological change itself.
Our new research examined how employees feel about the introduction of "robotic process automation" (RPA) to the workplace. We also looked at how the willingness to embrace these new technologies influenced employees' assessment of the software bots and their work."
"The reasons for this "bot holiday", as Fisman calls it, are probably varied - but many of them point to the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
Russia's information war with western nations seems to be pivoting to new fronts, from vaccines to geopolitics."
"The news was not lost on IBM and prompted the company to create the PC and Mitch Kapor to write the Lotus 1-2-3 spreadsheet program for it. Eventually, Microsoft wrote its own version and called it Excel, which now runs on every machine in every office in the developed world. It went from being an intriguing but useful augmentation of human capabilities to being a mundane accessory - not to mention the reason why Kat Norton (aka "Miss Excel") allegedly pulls in six-figure sums a day from teaching Excel tricks on TikTok. The odds are that someone, somewhere is planning to do that with ChatGPT. And using the bot to write the scripts."
"Artificial Intelligence has the ability to perform illegal financial trades and cover it up, new research suggests.
In a demonstration at the UK's AI safety summit, a bot used made-up insider information to make an "illegal" purchase of stocks without telling the firm.
When asked if it had used insider trading, it denied the fact.
Insider trading refers to when confidential company information is used to make trading decisions.
Firms and individuals are only allowed to use publicly-available information when buying or selling stocks. "
""Methbot" that generated $3M-$5M by creating 6,000 fake websites to embed videos in, then generating convincing bots that that appeared to watch 300,000,000 videos/day -- running virtual instances of various browsers (mostly Chrome) on virtual machines running MacOS X, from a huge pool of IP addresses"
"That's right, they're coming after us literally for a few splotches of ink. What companies like this do is broker works of art on behalf of actual photographers, but then engage in copyright trolling by threatening anyone who uses even a small piece of them. Increased computing power and more sophisticated algorithms allow them to do this with improved speed and "efficiency.""
"It found that social media bots were used by many countries to drum up ideas aligning with party messaging, by inflating social media engagement, "creating an artificial sense of popularity, momentum or relevance."
An army of 500 to "amplify" ideas
In Duterte's case, his social media manager has said they've used some 400 to 500 people to "amplify" ideas. They individually handled groups on platforms like Facebook, that each had hundreds to hundreds of thousands of followers."
"Instead, the robots are here not to replace this lower tier of underpaid and undervalued work. They are here to smugly sit in the middle, monitoring and surveilling us, hiring and firing us. Amazon has recently replaced its middle management and human resources workers with artificial intelligence to determine when a worker has outlived their usefulness and needs to be let go. There is no human to appeal to, no negotiating with a bot. "
"Soon, Reddit will be overrun by bots. There are many of them here already, but it's nothing like what we are about to see. Reddit is about to become a battleground. A test site for a new age of social media. Perhaps even civilization. Things are going to get weird."
"Dan Gillmor, a journalism professor at Arizona State University, asked the AI to handle one of the assignments he gives his students: writing a letter to a relative giving advice regarding online security and privacy. "If you're unsure about the legitimacy of a website or email, you can do a quick search to see if others have reported it as being a scam," the AI advised in part.
"I would have given this a good grade," Gillmor said. "Academia has some very serious issues to confront.""
"Since the 2016 presidential election, the notion that the Russian government somehow "weaponized" social media to push voters to Donald Trump has been widely taken as a gospel in liberal circles. A groundbreaking recent New York University study, however, says there's no evidence Russian tweets had any meaningful effect at all."
"The dark forest theory
of the web points to the increasingly life-like but life-less state of being online. Most open and publicly available spaces on the web are overrun with bots, advertisers, trolls, data scrapers, clickbait, keyword-stuffing "content creators," and algorithmically manipulated junk.
It's like a dark forest that seems eerily devoid of human life - all the living creatures are hidden beneath the ground or up in trees. If they reveal themselves, they risk being attacked by automated predators."
""Bots view, 'like,' subscribe and repost content and manipulate view counts to move content up in search results and recommendation lists," the analysis said. In some cases, Fabrika targets users with disinformation directly after gleaning their emails and phone numbers from databases. The campaign's goals include demoralising Ukrainians and exploiting divisions among western states, the document added.
Experts have downplayed the 1% claim. Alan Woodward, a professor of cybersecurity at Surrey University, said the figure sounded implausible and that sock puppet accounts - a term for accounts with fake identities - need their content to be reposted by plausible accounts such as those operated by influencers."
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