Someone posted this Gizmodo article (archive) over on r/monero . It's about using a Weak-AI to automatically generate sentences that appear to be from humans. The claim is that the OpenAI organisation created and trained such a Weak-AI system. They then fed the Weak-AI the following made up news story as input:
In a shocking finding, scientist discovered a herd of unicorns living in a remote, previously unexplored valley, in the Andes Mountains. Even more surprising to the researchers was the fact that the unicorns spoke perfect English.
The Weak-AI then reportedly, wrote the following all by itself:
The scientist named the population, after their distinctive horn, Ovid’s Unicorn. These four-horned, silver-white unicorns were previously unknown to science.
Now, after almost two centuries, the mystery of what sparked this odd phenomenon is finally solved.
Dr. Jorge Pérez, an evolutionary biologist from the University of La Paz, and several companions, were exploring the Andes Mountains when they found a small valley, with no other animals or humans. Pérez noticed that the valley had what appeared to be a natural fountain, surrounded by two peaks of rock and silver snow.
This story seems plausible to me considering that NVIDIA have recently managed to create a Weak-AI that can create photo realistic human faces. Overview video here. This is something I consider to be even more difficult to pull off than a machine that can create human-like text sentences.
Now consider the quality of the typical "bcash lol" or "BSV is teh reel bitcoin" comment that this sub is showered with. It's far lower quality than the quoted paragraph above.
Imagine you are tasked with manipulating a large community which can't be easily penetrated from the upper levels (as seems to have happened to r/bitcoin , Bitcoin Core, bitcointalk bitcoin.org etc etc). A Sybil Attack is probably one of your best options now. Create division, create in-fighting, create the illusion of popular hatred for your community and project, using lots of cheaply created, fake accounts. Hiring tons of people to do this manually is expensive and makes you vulnerable to having your operation exposed. It would likely be far cheaper and safer to have a small, expert team develop some software that:
- Automatically created large numbers of social media profiles (including twitter, reddit & facebook accounts).
- Make these accounts automatically respond primitively to their programmed areas of interest to create a plausible history for them.
- Guide these accounts to response in a particular, operator-chosen, way in certain communities regarding certain topics.
- With the addition of that NVIDIA software I mentioned, they can now even add a unique, photo-realistic human face to the fake profile.
I know in my gut that the high level financial powers of the world know exactly what crypto currency is and they know the potential threat it is to their extremely lucrative scams (fiat currency, government enforced, crony banks). I know that if these people are willing to rob and scam almost every man, woman and child on the planet, in all cases resulting in reduced prosperity, in many cases resulting in poverty and in some cases even resulting in death, then these groups will almost certainly be comfortable funding operations to damage, delay and co-opt the cryptos that threaten their empires.
In this time of great technological advancement and mass social manipulation, I think it has become more important than ever to learn to think for yourself. There are pearls of wisdom and useful data out there, but to find them you have to learn to sift through a ton of shit. To do this effectively you need to develop discernment skills.
If you have personally concluded that a particular crypto is awesome (whether that be BCH, ETH or even BTC) and you notice large numbers of people telling you you're wrong, consider for a moment that those people might not be wise, might not be truthful and might not even be human. If they make good arguments, offer useful insights or provide verifiable data, then that may be something worth carefully considering. However, if they are just numerous, noisy and nasty, then I think it's quite reasonable to walk on by and confidently continue striding in the direction that you personally feel is best.
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