China uses AI to generate propaganda on YouTube, report finds
In a YouTube video, a voice in English announces that China has researched and developed its own ultra-thin 1-nanometer chip – a staggering claim given that the chip isn’t expected in commercial devices for another decade.
"Recent news from China has sent ripples of excitement and astonishment across the globe," gushes the voice-over on the China Charged YouTube channel. "This revolutionary breakthrough is more than a technological marvel; it is a game-changer that will redefine the global tech landscape."
"Prepare to have your mind blown," says another video, this time on the channel Unbelievable Projects. "Welcome to today's video, in which we'll discover why America remains behind China in infrastructure development."
These voices and their “good news” about China are evidence that the Chinese Communist Party and its overseas proxies are using artificial intelligence to flood YouTube with propaganda videos, according to a new report that describes a "coordinated inauthentic influence campaign" on the platform.
The specifics of this article aside, I am so not looking forward to the continued proliferation of AI based bullshit on the internet/public discourse/the media/etc. It’s gonna get so so much worse, we’re just scratching the surface right now. The validity of any photo or video will be destroyed and nothing will be trustworthy anymore. This is great news for fascists who thrive in a world where the truth is unknowable and meaningless.
It's just sort of kind of like a slightly more advanced form of spam, or trolling, or really fucked up propaganda/news. The integrity of the ideas and the evidence itself is more what should be evaluated in an argument anyways, rather than the source, and I don't think like, evidence, generally, like, evidence in general, proof of things in general, is going anywhere anytime soon. I don't think AI is advanced enough to break encrypted p2p communication, so I don't really think there's much of a chance that shit just gets totally wiped off the internet and you start seeing like mass memory hole type shit. It's more likely that you end up seeing mass disinformation campaigns. You know, like what we've had since forever, where you get the population to do it to themselves.
The specifics of US propaganda aside...
> The videos are part of at least 30 channels identified by researchers as being part of the "Shadow Play" network promoting pro-China and anti-U.S. narratives, according to the Australian Strategic Policy Institute.
> according to the Australian Strategic Policy Institute
> Australian
Next week: China develops world's first 0nm chip!
-12nm
“Your joke, but worse!”
I'm shocked.
They've also infiltrated the administration of lemmy.ml and specifically c/worldnews.
Administration? Lemmy was built by a guy that denies tiananmen square massacre.
Before you get downvoted by the tankies, note for historical accuracy (so that I will be downvoted because they like that even less, OTOH lemmygrad doesn't even see me so w/e): The massacres were in side streets, not on the square itself. The party was at first split as to how to deal with the protests, the students were to simplify quite a bit Dengists alarmed by the power shifts within the party away from Dengism following Hu Yaobang's death. Hardline faction was amassing the army outside of Peking, Peking locals went out there and handed them noodles and explanations as to the situation, explaining that the protesters were their sons and daughters, good socialists^1^, not some bourgeois anti-revolutionary mob. Dengist faction lost out in the internal party struggle, hardliners decided that the army shall march, army marched, Peking locals erected barricades etc. in the streets leading to the square, get massacred, army arrives at square, delivers final ultimatum, students retreat, with no further or at least minimal bloodshed.
^1^ According to Marxist-Leninist-Maoist type thought. People understanding actual theory understand that Dengists are even more capitalist than Lenin, but MLs never acknowledge that state capitalism is, indeed, capitalism, and Dengists never acknowledge that they're not even doing state capitalism any more but run of the mill oligarchic capitalism.
Weird, as social leaning instance, they should be opposed to modern China! Should we help them?
Amazing how effective propaganda can be.
Got banned from there today for suggesting that disappearing prisoners isn't the status quo in "the west".
Oddly enough I've been downvote-stalked since and I find it hilarious.
Do people really get their news and information from random YouTube channels?
YouTube is not a reliable source!
My father in law watches this crap all the time. Also every war propaganda video.
.. if not that, Thai boxing or bear hunting. Ya never know what he'll be watching as long as it's one of those. Oh unless it's Friday night, then he's watching SmackDown.
Yep i know a lot of people at least in my country. If not YT, then they get it from FB
I automatically dismiss any argument that uses a YouTube video as evidence. If it's legit, there's going to be text that goes with it.
TBF, the FriendlyJordies are a reliable news source, but that's more of an exception to the rule.
The problem isn't getting your new from YouTube. But rather random YouTube channels. It's like saying "Do people really get their news from random news sites"
Yeah it seems a lot of people do. Especially if it's linked through social media, I would guess a non trivial amount of people won't fact check it or check the source.
I get mine from Lemmy
Yep.
Neither is Wikipedia
or Lemmy
and yet...
“Oh bother! America steals all the hunny!”
at this point I'm convinced China was just copying all of the "China gonna collapse in 3 days" videos
I wonder if the AI has caught on to a lot of the abusable mechanics of YT like an upload schedule, opening livestreams or premieres in multiple windows, the upvote/downvote exploit, etc. There is a solid possibility that an AI has better strats than we do.
The AI is just being used to create the content itself. The upload process is still just a script. The AI can only adjust parameters set by the person, and the person creating the setup likely isn't adding in any of the other factors
An actual AI influencer who could control all that would be interesting. What kind of strategies it would make to get the most engagements
Very Hard to train since I assume you would need real human feedback for each run of course
I think you could just let it push a bunch of buttons and fill in fields at random or with sample data and then score each generation based on user engagement and views, it wouldn't need that much human feedback during the development phase but the downside would be slightly less control over the content it pushes.
doubt it, it's not that advanced lol
Yeah I was really letting my imagination run wild, there.
This made me think of what you can do with AI to poke fun at china, and sadly it seems that microsoft is a bit hard on anti china prompts. But like, life finds a way.....
They do it here too. Anything positive coming out of china is full of this shit and bootlickers quick behind them.
Anything positive coming from anywhere is likely to be at least strongly exaggerated.
true shit
Certainly are a lot more downvotes on any comments that insult China, Israel, Russia, etc.
Alarming as this may sound, they’re beating a dead horse. Most of the people who would believe this shit uncritically also think Fox “News” is the gospel truth. They’re already lost.
Yeah ive blocked every channel reccomendation ive gotten that so much as smells like shoe polish.
Why is this a sign that they're using "Artificial Intelligence"? Sounds like they're just as likely using text-to-speech for planned propaganda. It's not like they don't have an ay of people to work on it.
Because contemporary tts use ml, a form of ai.
tl;dr: AI is creating the voices, not the script.
AI hate gets people emotional and leads to more clicks. Couple that with anything to do with China and you end up with a couple bucks of ad money.
Sometimes I wonder if there are different "levels" of propaganda nation states put out. Like you have this obviously fake crap get a bunch of surface-knowlege people. Then you have more subtle things put out - like social media accounts pretending that something false is a ground truth. You'll then get people who can catch the fake videos and then believe the fake accounts no problem because it's obviously can't be propaganda - because you know what propaganda looks like. cough gell-mann amnesia cough
Or maybe nation states are really that incompetent and the only level of propaganda they can put out is like the article's videos. Honestly people give way too much credit to how much these folks know/plan out. There's no secret cabal playing 5d chess. They're normal people (ie. dumbfucks) pushing a message.
Who knows.
There's also the crap "China will collapse in XX days" propaganda on YouTube as well
It's fucking everywhere
This is very poor form, at least employ agents like the american 3 letters.
All other USAGM-funded outlets have the same perspective as RFA. I stopped reading RFE/RL anymore because it was tiring.
RFA is literally a propaganda source.
Yes but it's pro-Western and thus good
Can someone translate "The Boy Who Cried Wolf" into Chinese please.
Here is what the AI generated image from the bingilator looks like of that.... (you know one good turn requires another)
This article is itself propaganda that aims to provoke hatred with the most ridiculous justifications possible.
...and? Nobody cares when Intel or AMD talk about their latest research. The writer doesn't even try to present the design as unviable or fake, they just arbitrarily decide that it's evil to talk about it.
Gadzooks not the American infrastructure! How dare they criticize that! I guess we should ban all the fuckcars communities because they're always comparing American infrastructure to other countries unfavorably. And that's undermining american democracy or something. What is this person smoking?
The 1nm claim is about as believable as hearing that China built a space elevator. It does not need debunking, it debunks itself.
Probably because aimed at an American audience, in Europe we know that our infrastructure is shit but also don't compare ourselves to China but rather to the likes of Japan or Switzerland (who unlike the rest of us actually get trains right). Mostly because Chinese infrastructure is a lot of bling and relatively sparse but high-impact projects, compared to where they were 50 years ago it's impressive but looking at the whole country it's quite uneven development. Ukraine has better rural infrastructure than China, and unlike China Ukraine is piss-poor. Comparisons to the US come into play when it comes to what not to do.