Fake news is a fact these days. You can win elections (see Trump) , you can invade neighbours (see Ukraine), you can crash a stock value or increase a stock value all aided by fake news.
In an interesting article from Scientific American When the Big Lie Meets Big Data we see that the same technics used for winning elections can be used to create a fake reality, a very individual targeted fake reality.
Considering that lately this is no longer done by humans but done by specially trained AIs that use the user profiles created from Big Data collected by all the big Internet trackers (Facebook, Google, Amazon etc.) we can say that Matrix is already at version 0.1 and we call it “Computational Propaganda.”
What Nix described in his presentation involved carefully crafted messages aimed at his target personalities. His messages pulled subtly on various psychological strings to manipulate us, and they obeyed no boundary of truth, but they required humans to create them. The next phase will be the gradual replacement of human “craftsmanship” with machine learning algorithms that can supply targeted voters with a steady stream of content (from whatever source, true or false) designed to elicit desired behavior. Cognizant of the Pandora’s box that data scientists have opened, the scholarly journal Big Data has issued a call for papers for a future issue devoted to “Computational Propaganda.”
AIs that create fake, personal and targeted views of the world to billions of human users is already reality. Welcome to the Matrix.
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