tech
Synthetic everything is warping America
It's poisoning the signals people rely on to understand reality.
TL;DR
- Median Strategies, a new polling firm, confessed to faking survey results in two key political races as a 'social experiment'.
- AI-enabled synthetic and fabricated content is increasingly causing problems with understanding politics, business, and culture.
- AI is also being used for political manipulation, such as AI-generated robocalls imitating voices and AI deepfakes in campaign ads.
- Businesses are facing risks from fake people and content, including North Korean operatives infiltrating U.S. companies and a $25 million fraud involving deepfake executives.
- The internet is heavily populated by bots, and practices like 'Sloptimization' involve seeding the web with biased product rankings.
- Even weather forecasts are being faked, with AI farms creating bogus forecasts online.
- As AI advances, authenticity and trust are becoming more valuable and harder to maintain.