Mr Goldstein goes on to say that if a platform is flooded with untrue information or propaganda, it will make it more difficult for the public to discern what is true. Often, that can be the aim of those bad actors taking part in influence operations.
His report also notes how access to these systems may not remain the domain of a few organisations.
“Right now, a small number of firms or governments possess top-tier language models, which are limited in the tasks they can perform reliably and in the languages they output.
“If more actors invest in state-of-the-art generative models, then this could increase the odds that propagandists gain access to them,” his report says.
Nefarious groups could view AI-written content similar to spam, says Gary Marcus, an AI specialist and founder of Geometric Intelligence, an AI company acquired by Uber in 2016.
“People who spread spam around rely on the most gullible people to click on their links, using that spray and pray approach of reaching as many people as possible. But with AI, that squirt gun can become the biggest Super Soaker of all time.”
In addition, even if platforms such as Twitter and Facebook take down three-quarters of what those perpetrators spread on their networks, “there is still at least 10 times as much content as before that can still aim to mislead people online”, Mr Marcus says.
The surge of fake social media accounts became a thorn in the sides of Twitter and Facebook, and the quick maturation of language model systems today will only crowd those platforms with even more phony profiles.
“Something like ChatGPT can scale that spread of fake accounts on a level we haven’t seen before,” says Vincent Conitzer, a professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon University, “and it can become harder to distinguish each of those accounts from human beings.”
