In some ways, AI is the perfect technology for America in the 2020s: An extremely expensive box that you pour an entire planet\u2019s water, resources, computer hardware, and money into, so that you can then ask it questions and have it go, \u201cOh, yeah, man, I heard that, too.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
Tragically, for those hoping to pass even more of their basic decision-making agency off to the \u201cSounds good, dawg\u201d robot, that same buy-in on confirmation bias does leave the technology with a few minor weak points that nefarious agents can exploit. Like, say, its (surprisingly human) tendency to just give up on performing basic information gathering itself and go ask Reddit, which has now led at least one bot used by a major search engine to declare that the entire executive branch of the U.S. government is suffering from rabies.<\/p>\n
This is per\u00a0Futurism<\/a>, which reports that search engine DuckDuckGo\u2019s built-in AI feature recently began telling people that both Donald Trump and J.D. Vance were dead, after a supposedly rabid Vance\u2014at Trump\u2019s insistence, on the basis that it might grant him \u201csuperpowers\u201d\u2014bit the POTUS and infected him with the virus. This lovely little bit of fiction was quickly tracked back a subreddit that calls itself r\/poisonai<\/a>, which exists to create and support deliberately false narratives for our planet\u2019s guileless automaton dolts to guzzle down. In this case, DuckDuckGo appears to have gotten extra confused because a fake news site that also\u00a0appears to largely run off of AI ran a story sourced from poisonai\u2019s work, and, baby, that\u2019s called corroboration.\u00a0<\/p>\n All of which is very funny\u2014even if it is a\u00a0little\u00a0ominous how easily these bots can be induced to begin spreading blatant misinformation. We\u2019re just saying, it\u2019s all fun and games when an imaginary Trump is frothing at the mouth, less so when actual political agents begin working from this exact same \u201cdeny reality until it changes\u201d playbook.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In some ways, AI is the perfect technology for America in the 2020s: An extremely expensive box that…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":762259,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[62,276,277,49,48,61],"class_list":["post-762258","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-ai","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/762258","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=762258"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/762258\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/762259"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=762258"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=762258"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=762258"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}