The plan, mentioned in a new 76-page wish list by the Department of Defense’s Joint Special Operations Command, or JSOC, outlines advanced technologies desired for country’s most elite, clandestine military efforts. “Special Operations Forces (SOF) are interested in technologies that can generate convincing online personas for use on social media platforms, social networking sites, and other online content,” the entry reads.
The document specifies that JSOC wants the ability to create online user profiles that “appear to be a unique individual that is recognizable as human but does not exist in the real world,” with each featuring “multiple expressions” and “Government Identification quality photos.”
In addition to still images of faked people, the document notes that “the solution should include facial & background imagery, facial & background video, and audio layers,” and JSOC hopes to be able to generate “selfie video” from these fabricated humans. These videos will feature more than fake people: Each deepfake selfie will come with a matching faked background, “to create a virtual environment undetectable by social media algorithms.”
Any government does anything shady Oh! I i would not have thought that any government is using my patriotism for their malicious things!
I don’t get it. They’re not already?
Jesus, even before I read the article it read like the U.S wants to emulate disinformation campaigns others are using. The irony of three letter agencies condemning AI campaigns while the Pentagon is going “We want that”, is insane but its to be expected I guess.
I assume this is the same reason why they want to ban TikTok but not Facebook - it’s not so much that they object to the data harvesting, they just object to non-American data harvesting that they can’t readily influence.
…Do you think the US government has never done disinformation campaigns before?
No. I’m not clueless or surprised. Just disappointed that we’re stooping to using AI bots to sow discord like Russia is doing.
Office of Strategic Influence says sup
no, but they pretend otherwise, so them publicly salivating for it is a new level of embarrassing.
.world will double in users again
So they can save money by firing their army of nafo meat puppets?
I mean they did had IRL meeting probably because even they didn’t believed they are real people lol.
Can we have a side internet, for us normal people?
No.
I think the saving grace of the Internet is in the small holes that arent populated enough for these big actors to care about. If you’re influencing a nation, you probably aren’t going to inject your AI slop into a tiny proboards or like the forum on Gaia Online.
except gaia is one of the largest forums on earth.
they have more subscribers than Apple TV+
That exists it’s called tildeverse and gemini
Have you got a more specific search term for Gemini? Unfortunately the word has been taken by Google
Here ya go!
Thanks!
Unfortunately, if everybody goes there the bots will follow.
What’s the pros and cons of those?
Both go back to 90s tech so you lose a lot of functionality. Gemini is mainly text based with links to files. So think pre web text pages at University’s but it’s cool to read people’s pages without all the distractions of images and video. I have read some cool stories on there. Got an awesome cookie recipe as well from a person in Denmark.
So they want to automate the use of troll-farms?
Dude I can’t even pass a catchpa these day. I still don’t know if a e-bike is a scooter, a bike, or a moped.
Are you jealous of the other bots who can?
Captcha and I can never agree on what is and isn’t a bus.
Click on all busses:
This would work for a short while as long as the user knows their hardware.
They keep showing me strange street features from distant countries and ask me shit like “mark all the crosswalks”. And i look at it and think “no idea, what this is, no crosswalk i have ever seen looked like this, so i guess it it is something different”.
And then i have to do the next captcha. Sometimes i am caught in captcha hell, where i have to solve captchas until i give up and close the browser.
There is a short story in here about someone who can’t pass a captcha, loses their identity, and has to move on to becoming a fisherman in Norway.
Fisherman in Norway is probably an upgrade for some people lol
What sites are still using image captchas and not “Click here if you are not a robot”?
I just realized I don’t surf the web randomly anymore, mainly because of crap like that.
When i click them, they oftentimes show me a captcha afterwards, as they apparently don’t believe me. I once solved captcha after captcha for like two minutes and then ragequit, finally accepting, that i am a robot.
Weird how they’re doing the thing they accuse others of doing. Almost like it’s a confession.
Projection is a major problem
Bro I’ve about a dozen I can sell you right now
The listing notes that special operations troops “will use this capability to gather information from public online forums,” with no further explanation of how these artificial internet users will be used.
Any chance that’s the real reason and not just a flimsy excuse? What kind of information would you even need a fake identity to gather from a public forum?
CSAM?
Dead internet, it will be drowned in bots.
Already is
As if any institution, org or group that has an agenda to push doesn’t have battalions of bots guiding the discussion of forums to whichever way they want and not just fake followers and likes. As if people would need permission or would ask for it even if they had to. You just cant have any real sense of the public opinion on the internet, if there ever was such a time.
So we really are going for a dead internet. Nobody is going to want to interact with bots all day online. But maybe that’s the point, harder to organize organically on the streets without a presence online.
Wow. Hadn’t thought about it that way.
Telling on themselves a bit given the implication is that they’re so far behind every other country who’re definitely already doing the same
definitely
Definitely, given the overwhelming mountain of evidence you’re sitting on 👍 Meanwhile, the US isn’t the largest intelligence/security state in the world by leaps and bounds. It’s just a little-bitty backward country whose military-industrial complex invented the internet.
We are pathetically behind in the cyber warfare sphere, though. Like at this point it’s embarrassing, we don’t even have the semblance of security education or standards for digital hardening. it’s just fucking awful, and we are being obliterated by chinese/russian/anyone else troll farms and hackers because of it. massive data breaches are a weekly occurrence.
Its just… we’ve got the NSA, sure, and they are good at what they do. But what they do is not what we need. Right now, you can scatter some USB drives outside any gvmt office here and some poor dumb HR rep or whatever will invariably plug it in to their work desktop, and they’ll totally fail to understand why it was bad for them to do that.
We are pathetically behind in the cyber warfare sphere, though.
Not relative to other countries.
we are being obliterated by chinese/russian/anyone else troll farms
We are not; we are told we are. It’s propaganda coming from our own security state, pointed at us. Why? To manufacture our consent to censorship. They are telling us that other countries are doing to us what they are doing to other countries, and have been since even before the internet existed.
Listen to this complete inversion of reality from Biden: How would it be if the United States were viewed by the rest of the world as interfering with the elections directly of other countries, and everybody knew it?
- IT Pro: Cambridge Analytica models were exaggerated and ineffective, [UK Information Commissioner’s Office] claims
- Wall Street Journal: Mueller Doesn’t Find Trump Campaign Conspired With Russia
- Jacobin: Democrats and Mainstream Media Were the Real Kremlin Assets
- Washington Post: FEC fines DNC, Clinton for violating rules in funding Steele dossier
- Washington Post: Russian trolls on Twitter had little influence on 2016 voters
- Jacobin: It Turns Out Hillary Clinton, Not Russian Bots, Lost the 2016 Election
- Matt Taibbi: Move Over, Jayson Blair: Meet Hamilton 68, the New King of Media Fraud The Twitter Files reveal that one of the most common news sources of the Trump era was a scam, making ordinary American political conversations look like Russian spywork
- Jacobin: Why the Twitter Files Are in Fact a Big Deal On the Left, there’s been a temptation to dismiss the revelations about Twitter’s internal censorship system that have emerged from the so-called Twitter Files project. But that would be a mistake: the news is important and the details are alarming.
- MSNBC Repeats Hamilton 68 Lies 279 Times in 11 Minutes
- Jeff Gerth at Columbia Journalism Review on Russiagate: Editor’s Note | Part one | Part two | Part three | Part four
- Matt Taibbi: WMD, Part II: CIA “Cooked The Intelligence” To Hide That Russia Favored Clinton, Not Trump In 2016
- Chris Hedges: Why Russiagate Won’t Go Away
Yeah… this is an example of what I’m talking about. It’s the romanticized version of the wild west online right now, and whenever you talk about the need for increased security, you’re subjected to a
propaganda lecture(edit for clarity:) lecture about propaganda and the political implications of fucking twitter or something. Everyone is so primed to respond along the party line to the idea of troll farms that the conversation about how they’re used outside of influencing our elections never even occurs to people. Most don’t even realize it’s an issue that could be discussed.So lets be clear here, while you’re absolutely correct about what you’re saying, that’s not related to what I was saying.
The near constant spear phishing, network intrusion, ransomware, impersonation, false landings, etc. attacks that every government, medical, social and technical system in the country is being constantly subjected to is the issue I am qualified to speak about. It’s an area where the US isn’t even attempting to fight back, and as beautiful as headline-darling things like stuxnet were, the developers that worked on it haven’t figured out how to mitigate ex: the rampant identity theft throttling the country. My favorite new one has been the theft of identity and thence blackmail of recently paroled prisoners, since a bad actor can easily get them returned to prison by just, say, using their credit card at a walmart out-of-state, or applying for public benefits in a different city. This happens all the time and nobody, at all, is talking about it. It’s so common I was brought in to write a set of tools that auto-generate the letter informing out-of-state LEO agencies that the person was the victim of identity theft and should not be found in violation of their parole terms, since that was so common it was all their entire staff were spending their time doing.
That’s just the one example that has occured to me, if you want more I can go on for very literal hours (just ask my students (who are no doubt quite stick of the topic…)). There’s no systems, or even the political or social will to investigate developing systems, that could even begin to address the most basic issues in this realm. That is the problem I was screaming helplessly into the void about.
Yeah, I work in this industry, in the US. I’m familiar with the specific attacks you mentioned. I’ve been paid to lose sleep over these things. I’ve worked extra hours dealing with DDOS attacks and suspected intrusions and zero-day fire drills. I know.
But this isn’t unique to the US. It’s basically the same everywhere. And the US isn’t uniquely “behind.” Everyone’s behind. If the US is unique at all, it’s that we happen to own & run more internet services than anyone else.
I’m familiar with the specific attacks you mentioned
(I made “false landings” up.)
No, it’s not unique to the US. But we’re by far the most dependent on technology out of any country and knowing this we talk a big game and do nothing to back said game up. The frequency with which [any agency you care to name] fails information security audits is pretty much just one long interrupted string of failures, and having worked with many western non-US governmental groups, the difference in security culture is pretty shameful.
More likely, they’ve been doing this for many years and it is basically obsolete, so they are spilling the beans now.
Or not and we really are doomed.
My first thought was if they’re asking for this officially, they’ve piloted some version of it unofficially.
