And it is exactly this combination that should have everyone concerned. In other words, just as social media reduced barriers to the spread of misinformation, AI has now reduced barriers to the production of misinformation. AI can now write high-quality text and produce high-quality images. In the last six months, however, we have reached a new milestone. Even if it had become easier than ever to spread fake news stories, someone still had to write those stories or Photoshop the pictures in them. And even when content did not go viral, it could still be seen by many in one’s online networks.Īnd yet the content that would hypothetically go viral still needed to be produced by someone. There were economic benefits from producing such viral content. Social media changed this calculation forever, creating an environment in which anyone could share information that - at least in theory - had the potential to go viral and reach millions of people at no cost. However, spreading misinformation traditionally required real resources, such as access to a printing press centuries ago or, in the modern era, access to print media, radio or television. Misinformation has long been part of the political world in both democratic and non-democratic political systems. In the aftermath of the 2016 elections, misinformation became both an object of concern and inextricably linked to social media, because social media drove down the cost of spreading misinformation. While many would-be threats have been ascribed to the rise of Large Language Model Chatbots (of which ChatGPT is the preeminent example, albeit one of many), in terms of politics, the primary concern is that ChatGPT - and other forms of content-generating AI - are going to turbo-charge the spread of political misinformation ahead of the 2024 U.S. Enter ChatGPT, which took less than six months to go from a marvel of technological sophistication to quite possibly the next great threat to democracy.
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