unfortunatly it appears to me that Russia has gone from doing good service providing a reasonable counter narative to the US/west, has become lazy and resorted to promoting convienient irrational and extreamist naratives present at the fringes of western societies, but worse for them and us, is that they are now consuming the excess product and activly meddling, not that our various 3 and 4 letter agencys are refraing from operating there, but it's all tedious and evil mean spirited, lacking any identifiable moral or cultural basis, just a dirty fight for power on both sides.
Seems pretty normal to me. Your first sentence is taken from the abstract, a short summary of the article as a whole, so details are excluded or glossed over. Your second sentence is from a section titled "Actor", which goes into actual detail on who the actors were and so has more fluff like this. They go on to explain their reasoning in that section -- you can't actually create an account from Russia itself, but a VPN can be used to bypass the block, which lends some uncertainty. They then proceed to systematically eliminate that uncertainty by showing how the accounts were acting.
Even as a speaker of the language I haven't a single bloody clue what a "hazzy" is. Is ChatGPT normally this bad at being prompted in one language to generate text in another, or is this an operator fuckup, I wonder?
Could it be "hazy", which is supposed to mean "cloudy"? The word "cloudy" is often used in Russian for "unclear", "vague", for example, one could say: "Western countries are awaiting a cloudy perspectives due to discarding traditional values".
You can notice one more example of original language leak in the quote from a report ("And she needs politicians...") where Germany is referred to as "she", because in Russian "Germany", as many other countries, has a female gender, so we call it "she", not "it". In English I usually see people using "it" for countries.
We should be tracking and identifying all covert influence campaigns, from all states - not just Russia - and collecting a registry of these efforts for wide public distribution.
We should also be tracking and identifying all covert influence campaigns of our own government, too, while we’re at it.
In fact, all covert influence, everywhere, should be identified and made overt.
It is the covert nature of the influence that is the most insidious aspect, incompatible with free and open society.
So yeah, let’s start at home by disassembling the national security apparatus which allows covert influence to be wielded against The People. After all, anything less than full exposure is hypocrisy.
More leaks now!
Perhaps there will be an application of LLM’s towards identifying covert influence, which we can apply to a corpus and identify its true authorship. This would be pretty useful for a lot of things, eh ..
> We should be tracking and identifying all covert influence campaigns, from all states - not just Russia - and collecting a registry of these efforts for wide public distribution.
Close to nothing happened after Snowden leaks. The republican party has been able to convince pretty much everybody that the Mueller report was a hoax, a report that very explicitly found collusion between Russia and US operatives close to Trump, so bad that his own guys went to prison. The 2nd trump admin destroyed the cyber monitoring apparatus and might have let Russian hackers access citizens data.
I don’t think there is anything to be expected from the US at this point.
I'm in the camp that the US government is the biggest threat to world peace there is, so the anti-Russia agitprop is not really my thing. Sure, all imperialist war criminals should be prosecuted .. but there's a long, long list of those to prosecute on our side, which is committing far greater atrocities, and yet nobody is doing anything effective about it. Our liberal democracies are failing at reigning in our imperialist war criminals.
If there is hope, it is that Europes' youth will continue their current awakening and start holding their governments accountable for the support of genocide and war that their parents have been propagating for decades.
Yeah, there's not much hope. But the rest of the world long since turned away from any hope that the US would lead the way for justice. What we have now is war criminals calling for more war against other war criminals. The "War is Peace" crowd have the mic.
> If there is hope, it is that Europes' youth will continue their current awakening and start holding their governments accountable for the support of genocide and war that their parents have been propagating for decades.
Unfortunately Europe is an aging continent, our youths don’t seem to be that engaged politically speaking, and we seem to be unable to do the necessary changes, or even just stand up to Trump or Putin (other than Ukraine of course). The European way of doing politics is way too weak and dull to bring meaningful changes. I hope that will change with new generations getting elected but so far it seems to be mostly benefiting the status quo and extremist right parties (who don’t have any solutions to offer, other than deporting brown people)
True. Europe is close to getting eradicated by immigration from arabia and africa.
What I am seeing is the increase of gated communities with the mission of nurturing european, white, culture. But I suspect once arab and african culture becomes dominant in europe, those small communities of peace will be quickly dismantled.
Many young white people tired of europes socialism are moving to the rural US where they feel more at home.
Russia is just the current boogeyman, where you can call anything you don't like "russian propaganda" (like fighting for workers rights in US a few decades ago was just "commies", same for trying to stop the war in vietnam... "commies" everywhere).
(This comment will be downvoted, censored and flagged by censorous, genocidal, horribly evil monsters).
Should rt.com continue to be censored in the EU? It is officially Russian, and thus is not trying to hide its origin. It is overt, not covert. But EU censors it, blocking access to it by law. Thus, EU citizens only get access to the claims of those in control of the West. That is a hindrance to those who insist on hearing all sides, especially regarding a topic that could spiral into WW3 and nuclear war, as indicated by the USA reportedly moving nuclear weapons to the UK https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cy5w6xz7z0lo and that there is war in both Ukraine and Iran with involvement of USA, Israel, Russia, Ukraine, Iran and others, with hundreds of thousands or even million or more dead (counting the dead of Ukraine and Russia together).
The censorship is especially contentious, since some people worldwide cheer for both Ukrainians and Russians dying in horrifying numbers, as if they generally just have genocidal hatred of Slavs or Europeans or peoples of Asia, and this genocidal hatred can be seen spread out in some regions of the world.
In a zero-sum mindset, or even negative-sum mindset, where there is less than no care about the survival of the human species, who would stand to gain from nuclear war and hundreds of millions, or even billions, dying? Certain remote bystanders or nihilists?
Living in middle Europe, I have access to RT when I want it - and I do seek it out to balance the agitprop of CNN against the agitprop of RT. There is very clear evidence that the censorship of RT is not to avoid 'incorrect data' from being propagated, but to silence the other side and make support for war against them more profitable. Europe has a very definite problem with hatred these days; certain darling states of western liberal democracy are a lot more racist and intolerant than people realize.
I think it's important to pursue information sources and not just have them handed on a plate. This is why I also seek out Al-Jazeera too - my neighbors are Muslim, and I would be doing them a disservice in our weekly conversations about the world if I were to not inform myself from their perspective, too.
In this world of identität-über-alles, fragile, weak personalities are easily broken by the challenges imposed by empathy and mutual respect. Too many weak spirited souls are incapable of thought precisely because they've painted their little boxes a certain colour - I think its vital to not only live in multiple boxes, or at least - work hard to broaden the dimensions of ones box - but to also paint it multiple colours. I thoroughly enjoy the conversations to be had with my Ukrainian, Iranian, Russian, American, British and Australian friends - the diversity of opinion is very interesting and enriching.
But, it is very true, they all have their own brightly painted boxes.
This got me mixed feelings. I don't support such campaigns. Still I would prefer my AI tool to behave more like a notepad app and less like a government or a corporate censor.
Ideally our government would regulate this, but our government is an absolute dumpster fire intent on destroying respect for America and gives no care for what’s best for its people.
No, Israel has maintained relations with the Kremlin and has refused to impose sanctions against them, as well as rejected calls to send military aid to Ukraine.
If you want to understand Israel - think of it as Eastern European country that is geographically misplaced. Kremlin knows how to pass convincingly as them. And Israel is a wedge issue.
Russia had a random news paper in India put up an article linking AIDS to the CIA, and then over years converted that into a constellation of articles and commentary that even reached the UN.
Russia looks at disinformation the same way someone looks at configuring a server. What can be seeded where, at what cost and for what outcome.
Maybe they were not as good at the time, or the contractor just used to use ChatGPT. Also ChatGPT can be used without a phone number registration, unlike Chinese models.
i think a lot of people don't realize how far not just nation-states are willing to go, but bajillionaire entities are willing to go to control any given narrative now that AI is so accessible. ig comments, tiktok comments, reddit comments, hn comments, on seemingly innocuous and harmless content, just out there trying to look real and game the perception. these entities are well aware that people go to comments and discussion for "the real tea" and yeah. marketing behemoths offer "social media engagement" packages to entities like disney to push trailer hype. flood youtube and other socials with fake content engagement. i remember within the first like minute disney dropped the latest tron trailer on youtube, it was absolutely flooded with "i'm not ready" "omggggg" caliber comments from seemingly real looking youtube profiles.
bring back lan parties, aol instant messenger and throw the current platforms into the sun
I agree with a lot of what you're saying but on this point:
> i remember within the first like minute disney dropped the latest tron trailer on youtube, it was absolutely flooded with "i'm not ready" "omggggg" caliber comments from seemingly real looking youtube profiles.
Disney is too much of a faceless corporation to both with something like that. Especially since, why would anyone be convinced a trailer is good from an astroturfed comment? You're looking at the same content. It's different from a HN comment from an apparent expert who's supposedly verifying that an article is true.
The final nail in the coffin is that I've met plenty of people who really who react like that to a new Disney video.
i mean maybe? i wouldn't put it past them personally. producers allocate kind of a lot of budget to the marketing channels and late night talk shows for the cast to try and generate buzz, i think i'd be zero percent surprised disney was willing to burn money engaging in fake content if that's what "the industry" showed to be effective. there was a smaller budget film and by small i mean not disney-wallet that did terribly because it's marketing firm shit the bed on the social media engagement it promised, and that led to a lawsuit. basically all their bots only engaged with themselves on the movies instagram page. this stuff absolutely exists, and on the tron trailer point: sure, again maybe. but the vid was up for like.. literally a minute, like im not even certain any of the commenters would have finished the trailer by the time they had commented. and it was an early morning drop iirc.
Yeah it’s safe to assume that marketing across businesses big and small are not above generating some buzz through fake comments and such.
The only pushback I would see within a fairly well-run place like Disney is that they might question whether different forms of fake buzz are effective, and worth the potential risk of being exposed if they do it too much.
I am, for some reason, quite active commenting on Reddit. And lately the number of comments I see that are obviously Claude has skyrocketed. These are just engaging in normal innocuous comment threads about the day to day stuff I care about (tech, my local region, stuff like that). But obviously they are building organic-looking profiles that can then be exploited to push manipulative content later.
This scares me because the stuff that screams "THIS COMMENT WAS WRITTEN BY CLAUDE" has gotta be the tip of the iceberg. There must be much more of these comments that are better-prompted and using better-tuned model pipelines to make them less detectable. (Probably even just the lazy garbage is harder for me personally to detect if you just pass the prompt to GPT instead of Claude, it's just that I've read so much Claude output that I'm attuned to it).
So yeah suddenly dead internet theory is seeming a lot more real today than it did just a couple of months ago.
It's funny how so many of the Reddit bots - and actually the bots on X as well - are so bad at their job of looking real. When it's a short comment, they're so often using the "The real X is Y" format, or else "X really said Y", and just kind of repeating whatever the post was about.
On the one hand I want to agree with you, but on the other hand hn is (rightfully so in my opinion) so anti billionaires, so anti VC, somewhat in the middle on AI, even anti pg recently, that if there are higher forces at work on hn I can only say they're doing a bad job at steering the populace's opinion.
Even reddit is all these things but it's harder to tell because everything is siloed to the point we don't share the same reddit experience, which is not the case of hn as far as I'm aware.
Russian propaganda operations are not centralized, I'm sure some of them are using other models and for this one, the guy in charge decided to use ChatGPT
Open Ai is fighting for defence and other state contracts in USA and similar minded countries
Writing about Russia negatively is in their interests, in reality all nation states are doing the same stuff
“We banned a cluster of ChatGPT accounts that very likely originated in Russia. The operators prompted in Russian to generate social media comments that were posted on Substack, Telegram, X, Facebook and LinkedIn. Most of the comments they generated were in English, and the operators instructed ChatGPT to hide any linguistic clues that they were Russian. ”
They replaced them the next day with English speakers and carried on as normal
You have to be able to keep two different things in your mind:
- yes OpenAI benefits from talking about actions Russia is taking against other countries and how they handle that
- and also, Russia is one of the worst actor in the politics and has been non stop active for more than a decade to destroy democratic systems from the inside
You cannot just label something as irrelevant just because that benefits the one reporting the issue
Do not use US based AI, OpenAI, or Ben Nimmo (highly likely the author of this article) or any similar minion of The Digital Forensic Research Lab (DFRLab) of the Atlantic Council of the NATO could read all your chat history and leverage all the data on you up to your social media accounts and foreign state data.
Securing Our Autonomy: How AI Fuels Cognitive Warfare – and How We Can Fight Back
So the question then becomes how can these technologies be leveraged in such a way to be able to maximize signal intelligence, communication intelligence with human intelligence. And this is where AI really began to play a role with regard to big data.
OpenAI's China Report, Meta Trains America & the Pentagon Blacklist
People would be uncomfortable if the truth about how much influence nation-states have in the online discourse nowadays was really exposed. I don't mean only bots, but how many political influencers are receiving money from adversaries, from all over the spectrum, without they even knowing who is paying them. American people would feel like LATAM countries, which are used to be heavily influenced by external countries.
I couldn't help laughing a little at all those Russian phrases weirdly translated into English. Granted I probably sound like that too... at least I don't work for any intelligence service.
For the context: I think, English was the most commonly taught foreign language in the Soviet Union, and later in Russia. But, because nobody had access to the genuine English media, whatever we had to read or listen to was produced by Russian speakers who also never heard or never read genuine English, well, perhaps outside of very outdated prose from the 19th century or even earlier.
-- How much watch?
-- Six watch.
-- Such much?!
-- For whom how...
-- MGIMO finished?
-- A-a-a-ask!
The joke from that time, but, apparently, little has changed.
Most of the Russians I've met while traveling were really good guys. I distrust our government, the EU, UK, Canada and especially Israel. Seems we treat each other like garbage on this planet for made up reasons. The US and EU are as much bad actors as any other superpower. Probably not as evil as Israel but then again the Israelis have their hand up all of our politicians arses like sock puppets. Let Russia cook everybody come to dinner and talk about how to get Israel to stop meddling in other countries affairs and finances and we might be able to make progress in space, AI, wth ever.
50 comments
[ 0.23 ms ] story [ 18.3 ms ] threadPull the other one. It's got bells on.
We banned a cluster of ChatGPT accounts that very likely originated in Russia.
Methinks AI helped write this. Although…their evidence is pretty damning.
You can notice one more example of original language leak in the quote from a report ("And she needs politicians...") where Germany is referred to as "she", because in Russian "Germany", as many other countries, has a female gender, so we call it "she", not "it". In English I usually see people using "it" for countries.
We should also be tracking and identifying all covert influence campaigns of our own government, too, while we’re at it.
In fact, all covert influence, everywhere, should be identified and made overt.
It is the covert nature of the influence that is the most insidious aspect, incompatible with free and open society.
So yeah, let’s start at home by disassembling the national security apparatus which allows covert influence to be wielded against The People. After all, anything less than full exposure is hypocrisy.
More leaks now!
Perhaps there will be an application of LLM’s towards identifying covert influence, which we can apply to a corpus and identify its true authorship. This would be pretty useful for a lot of things, eh ..
Close to nothing happened after Snowden leaks. The republican party has been able to convince pretty much everybody that the Mueller report was a hoax, a report that very explicitly found collusion between Russia and US operatives close to Trump, so bad that his own guys went to prison. The 2nd trump admin destroyed the cyber monitoring apparatus and might have let Russian hackers access citizens data.
I don’t think there is anything to be expected from the US at this point.
If there is hope, it is that Europes' youth will continue their current awakening and start holding their governments accountable for the support of genocide and war that their parents have been propagating for decades.
Yeah, there's not much hope. But the rest of the world long since turned away from any hope that the US would lead the way for justice. What we have now is war criminals calling for more war against other war criminals. The "War is Peace" crowd have the mic.
Unfortunately Europe is an aging continent, our youths don’t seem to be that engaged politically speaking, and we seem to be unable to do the necessary changes, or even just stand up to Trump or Putin (other than Ukraine of course). The European way of doing politics is way too weak and dull to bring meaningful changes. I hope that will change with new generations getting elected but so far it seems to be mostly benefiting the status quo and extremist right parties (who don’t have any solutions to offer, other than deporting brown people)
What I am seeing is the increase of gated communities with the mission of nurturing european, white, culture. But I suspect once arab and african culture becomes dominant in europe, those small communities of peace will be quickly dismantled.
Many young white people tired of europes socialism are moving to the rural US where they feel more at home.
There are proper overt examples: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radio_Free_Europe/Radio_Libert...
Russia is just the current boogeyman, where you can call anything you don't like "russian propaganda" (like fighting for workers rights in US a few decades ago was just "commies", same for trying to stop the war in vietnam... "commies" everywhere).
Should rt.com continue to be censored in the EU? It is officially Russian, and thus is not trying to hide its origin. It is overt, not covert. But EU censors it, blocking access to it by law. Thus, EU citizens only get access to the claims of those in control of the West. That is a hindrance to those who insist on hearing all sides, especially regarding a topic that could spiral into WW3 and nuclear war, as indicated by the USA reportedly moving nuclear weapons to the UK https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cy5w6xz7z0lo and that there is war in both Ukraine and Iran with involvement of USA, Israel, Russia, Ukraine, Iran and others, with hundreds of thousands or even million or more dead (counting the dead of Ukraine and Russia together).
The censorship is especially contentious, since some people worldwide cheer for both Ukrainians and Russians dying in horrifying numbers, as if they generally just have genocidal hatred of Slavs or Europeans or peoples of Asia, and this genocidal hatred can be seen spread out in some regions of the world.
In a zero-sum mindset, or even negative-sum mindset, where there is less than no care about the survival of the human species, who would stand to gain from nuclear war and hundreds of millions, or even billions, dying? Certain remote bystanders or nihilists?
I think it's important to pursue information sources and not just have them handed on a plate. This is why I also seek out Al-Jazeera too - my neighbors are Muslim, and I would be doing them a disservice in our weekly conversations about the world if I were to not inform myself from their perspective, too.
In this world of identität-über-alles, fragile, weak personalities are easily broken by the challenges imposed by empathy and mutual respect. Too many weak spirited souls are incapable of thought precisely because they've painted their little boxes a certain colour - I think its vital to not only live in multiple boxes, or at least - work hard to broaden the dimensions of ones box - but to also paint it multiple colours. I thoroughly enjoy the conversations to be had with my Ukrainian, Iranian, Russian, American, British and Australian friends - the diversity of opinion is very interesting and enriching.
But, it is very true, they all have their own brightly painted boxes.
So, you know, we gotta take what we can get
https://www.jpost.com/international/internationalrussia-ukra...
In psyops - discord is the goal.
Russia had a random news paper in India put up an article linking AIDS to the CIA, and then over years converted that into a constellation of articles and commentary that even reached the UN.
Russia looks at disinformation the same way someone looks at configuring a server. What can be seeded where, at what cost and for what outcome.
bring back lan parties, aol instant messenger and throw the current platforms into the sun
> i remember within the first like minute disney dropped the latest tron trailer on youtube, it was absolutely flooded with "i'm not ready" "omggggg" caliber comments from seemingly real looking youtube profiles.
Disney is too much of a faceless corporation to both with something like that. Especially since, why would anyone be convinced a trailer is good from an astroturfed comment? You're looking at the same content. It's different from a HN comment from an apparent expert who's supposedly verifying that an article is true.
The final nail in the coffin is that I've met plenty of people who really who react like that to a new Disney video.
The only pushback I would see within a fairly well-run place like Disney is that they might question whether different forms of fake buzz are effective, and worth the potential risk of being exposed if they do it too much.
This scares me because the stuff that screams "THIS COMMENT WAS WRITTEN BY CLAUDE" has gotta be the tip of the iceberg. There must be much more of these comments that are better-prompted and using better-tuned model pipelines to make them less detectable. (Probably even just the lazy garbage is harder for me personally to detect if you just pass the prompt to GPT instead of Claude, it's just that I've read so much Claude output that I'm attuned to it).
So yeah suddenly dead internet theory is seeming a lot more real today than it did just a couple of months ago.
Even reddit is all these things but it's harder to tell because everything is siloed to the point we don't share the same reddit experience, which is not the case of hn as far as I'm aware.
Writing about Russia negatively is in their interests, in reality all nation states are doing the same stuff
They replaced them the next day with English speakers and carried on as normal- yes OpenAI benefits from talking about actions Russia is taking against other countries and how they handle that
- and also, Russia is one of the worst actor in the politics and has been non stop active for more than a decade to destroy democratic systems from the inside
You cannot just label something as irrelevant just because that benefits the one reporting the issue
Securing Our Autonomy: How AI Fuels Cognitive Warfare – and How We Can Fight Back
https://youtu.be/jH2i0Y9GjJc?t=1273
https://youtu.be/jH2i0Y9GjJc?t=2536
https://youtu.be/jH2i0Y9GjJc?t=2880
OpenAI's China Report, Meta Trains America & the Pentagon Blacklisthttps://youtu.be/H_WaQl_Q17Q?t=3286
For the context: I think, English was the most commonly taught foreign language in the Soviet Union, and later in Russia. But, because nobody had access to the genuine English media, whatever we had to read or listen to was produced by Russian speakers who also never heard or never read genuine English, well, perhaps outside of very outdated prose from the 19th century or even earlier.
The joke from that time, but, apparently, little has changed.