Taiwan<\/a>, India and Indonesia.<\/p>\n\u201cA disruptive threat is emerging: swarms of collaborative, malicious AI agents,\u201d the authors said. \u201cThese systems are capable of coordinating autonomously, infiltrating communities and fabricating consensus efficiently. By adaptively mimicking human social dynamics, they threaten democracy.\u201d<\/p>\n
One leading expert in propaganda technology, Inga Trauthig, said the adoption of such advanced technology is likely to be slowed by politicians\u2019 reluctance to cede campaign control to AIs. Another cause for skepticism is concern that using such illicit techniques would not be worth the risk, given voters are still more influenced by offline material.<\/p>\n
The experts behind the warning include New York University\u2019s Gary Marcus, a prominent sceptic about the claimed potential of current AI models who calls himself a \u201cgenerative AI realist\u201d, and Audrey Tang, Taiwan\u2019s first digital minister, who has warned: \u201cThose in the pay of authoritarian forces are undermining electoral processes, weaponizing AI and employing our societal strengths against us.\u201d<\/p>\n
Others include David Garcia, professor for social and behavioural data science at the University of Konstanz, Sander van der Linden, a misinformation expert and director of Cambridge University\u2019s social decision-making lab, and Christopher Summerfield, AI researcher and professor of cognitive neuroscience at Oxford University.<\/p>\n
Together they say political leaders could deploy almost limitless numbers of AIs to masquerade as humans online and precisely infiltrate communities, learn their foibles over time and use increasingly convincing and carefully tailored falsehoods, to change population-wide opinions.<\/p>\n
The threat is being supercharged by advances in AIs\u2019 ability to pick up on the tone and content of discourse. They are increasingly able to mimic human dynamics, for example, by using appropriate slang and posting irregularly to avoid detection. Progress in the development of \u201cagentic\u201d AI also means the ability to autonomously plan and coordinate action.<\/p>\n
As well as operating across social media, they may use messaging channels and even write blogs or use email, depending on which channel the AI thinks best helps achieve an aim, said one of the authors, Daniel Thilo Schroeder, a research scientist at the Sintef research institute in Oslo.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s just frightening how easy these things are to vibe code and just have small bot armies that can actually navigate online social media platforms and email and use these tools,\u201d said Schroeder, who has been simulating swarms in laboratory conditions.<\/p>\n
Another of the authors, Jonas Kunst, professor of communication at the BI Norwegian Business School, said: \u201cIf these bots start to evolve into a collective and exchange information to solve a problem \u2013 in this case a malicious goal, namely analysing a community and finding a weak spot \u2013 then coordination will increase their accuracy and efficiency.<\/p>\n
\u201cThat is a really serious threat that we predict is going to materialise.\u201d<\/p>\n
In Taiwan, where voters are regularly targeted by Chinese propaganda, often unknowingly, AI bots have been increasing engagement with citizens on Threads and Facebook in the last two to three months, said Puma Shen, a Taiwanese Democratic Progressive Party MP and campaigner against Chinese disinformation.<\/p>\n
During discussions on political topics the AIs tend to provide \u201ctonnes of information that you cannot verify\u201d, creating \u201cinformation overload\u201d, Shen said. He said AIs might cite fake articles about how America will abandon Taiwan. Another recent trend is for the AI bots to stress to younger Taiwanese people that the China-Taiwan dispute is very complicated \u201cso do not take sides if you have no knowledge\u201d.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s not telling you that China\u2019s great, but it\u2019s [encouraging them] to be neutral,\u201d Shen told the Guardian. \u201cThis is very dangerous, because then you think people like me are radical.\u201d<\/p>\n
Amid signs the progress of AI technology is not as rapid as Silicon Valley companies like OpenAI and Anthropic have claimed, the Guardian asked independent AI experts to assess the swarm warnings.<\/p>\n
\u201cIn the election-heavy year of 2024 the capabilities were there for AI-driven microtargeting but we didn\u2019t see as much of that as scholars predicted,\u201d said Trauthig, an adviser to the International Panel on the Information Environment. \u201cMost political propagandists I interview are still using older technologies and are not at this cutting edge.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cIt isn\u2019t fanciful,\u201d said Michael Wooldridge, professor of the foundations of AI at Oxford University. \u201cI think it is entirely plausible that bad actors will try to mobilise virtual armies of LLM-powered agents to disrupt elections and manipulate public opinion, for example targeting large numbers of individuals on social media and other electronic media. It\u2019s technologically perfectly feasible \u2026 the technology has got progressively better and much more accessible.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Political leaders could soon launch swarms of human-imitating AI agents to reshape public opinion in a way that…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":351826,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[554,733,4308,86,56,54,55],"class_list":{"0":"post-384800","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-artificial-intelligence","8":"tag-ai","9":"tag-artificial-intelligence","10":"tag-artificialintelligence","11":"tag-technology","12":"tag-uk","13":"tag-united-kingdom","14":"tag-unitedkingdom"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/384800","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=384800"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/384800\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/351826"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=384800"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=384800"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=384800"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}