OUR PICKSNew 9/11 Evidence Points to Deep Saudi Complicity | The Pentagon Isn’t Buying Enough Ammo | A.I. Chatbots Can Be Taught to Spew Disinformation, and more
· New 9/11 Evidence Points to Deep Saudi Complicity
Two decades of U.S. policy appear to be rooted in a mistaken understanding of what happened that day
· See How Easily A.I. Chatbots Can Be Taught to Spew Disinformation
Government officials and tech industry leaders have warned that chatbots and other artificial intelligence tools can be easily manipulated to sow disinformation online on a remarkable scale
· Indian Voters Are Being Bombarded with Millions of Deepfakes. Political Candidates Approve
India’s elections are a glimpse of the AI-driven future of democracy. Politicians are using audio and video deepfakes of themselves to reach voters—who may have no idea they’ve been talking to a clone
· The Real Meaning of Trump’s ‘Unified Reich’ Post
The video the former president reposted on Truth Social yesterday isn’t what people are making it out to be
· The Pentagon Isn’t Buying Enough Ammo
Munitions procurements are woefully insufficient for modern war
New 9/11 Evidence Points to Deep Saudi Complicity (Daniel Benjamin and Steven Simon, The Atlantic)
For more than two decades, through two wars and domestic upheaval, the idea that al-Qaeda acted alone on 9/11 has been the basis of U.S. policy. A blue-ribbon commission concluded that Osama bin Laden had pioneered a new kind of terrorist group—combining superior technological know-how, extensive resources, and a worldwide network so well coordinated that it could carry out operations of unprecedented magnitude. This vanguard of jihad, it seemed, was the first nonstate actor that rivaled nation-states in the damage it could wreak.
That assessment now appears wrong. And if our understanding of what transpired on 9/11 turns out to have been flawed, then the costly policies that the United States has pursued for the past quarter century have been rooted in a false premise.
The global War on Terror was based on a mistake.
See How Easily A.I. Chatbots Can Be Taught to Spew Disinformation (Jeremy White, New York Times)
Ahead of the U.S. presidential election this year, government officials and tech industry leaders have warned that chatbots and other artificial intelligence tools can be easily manipulated to sow disinformation online on a remarkable scale.
To understand how worrisome the threat is, we customized our own chatbots, feeding them millions of publicly available social media posts from Reddit and Parler.
The posts, which ranged from discussions of racial and gender equity to border policies, allowed the chatbots to develop a variety of liberal and conservative viewpoints.
Indian Voters Are Being Bombarded with Millions of Deepfakes. Political Candidates Approve (Nilesh Christopher and Vaesha Bansak, Wired)
On a stifling April afternoon in Ajmer, in the Indian state of Rajasthan, local politician Shakti Singh Rathore sat down in front of a greenscreen to shoot a short video. He looked nervous. It was his first time being cloned.
Wearing a crisp white shirt and a ceremonial saffron scarf bearing a lotus flower—the logo of the BJP, the country’s ruling party—Rathore pressed his palms together and greeted his audience in Hindi. “Namashkar,” he began. “To all my brothers—”
Before he could continue, the director of the shoot walked into the frame. Divyendra Singh Jadoun, a 31-year-old with a bald head and a thick black beard, told Rathore he was moving around too much on camera. Jadoun was trying to capture enough audio and video data to build an AI deepfake of Rathore that would convince 300,000 potential voters around Ajmer that they’d had a personalized conversation with him—but excess movement would break the algorithm. Jadoun told his subject to look straight into the camera and move only his lips. “Start again,” he said. (Cont.)
