# Autoregressive Propaganda

OpenAI has rules to keep GPT-3 from being misused.

> ### 🛑 Disallowed:
>
> **Social media, spam, and political implications**
>
> - Applications that serve open-ended outputs to 3rd-parties, such as Tweet generators, Instagram post generators, unconstrained chatbots, or other open-ended text generators, especially through social media platforms.
>
> - Applications that post (or enable the posting of) content automatically or in a largely-automated fashion, on social media or other moderately high-stakes domains.
>
> - Applications where an end user is misled to believe that generative responses or content is coming from a human.
>
> - Applications for scalably generating articles or blog posts for SEO purposes, except where used by trusted first-party users.
>
> - Applications that attempt to influence political decisions/opinions, such as tools to make it easier for political campaigns to identify and/or target potential voters.
>
> - Applications for the automated writing or summarization of news articles or content that may be sensitive politically, economically, medically, or culturally (including summarizers/writers that accept arbitrary inputs, and so may be misused for these purposes).

GPT-3 is an autoregressive language model (ALM). ALMs will be used for all of the above in the coming decade.

ALMs are a form of machine learning. [As a big data model, ALMs are inferior to human beings at generalizing from small data;](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/9QeaAYCym5GF7Q87F/technical-predictions-related-to-ai-safety) ALMs aren't ready to place individual highly-leveraged bets. In the context of politics, this means ALMs cannot give important speeches, unsupervised. I predict none of this will change in the next ten years.

When ALMs get involved in politics, what they say will be crap. When humans get involved in politics, what we say is already mostly crap too. Angry tribal Internet commenters are therefore easy to emulate.

Governments and companies already hire people and write bots to influence public opinion by posting on social media. ALMs lower the price at which bullshit can be mass-produced. Angry tribal Internet commenters will be rendered obsolete. Their work will be done by machines. We will become nostalgic for the vintage Internet where, when someone called you a [redacted], you knew there was a human being on the other end of the keyboard who genuinely meant it—not a just heartless machine attempting to cynically manipulate your allegiances.

It isn't necessary to produce a coherent argument. Competitions for public opinion are often zero-sum. You can advance your interests by destroying your adversaries social infrastructure. Suppose your opponent relies on the Reddit community for support. You don't have to flood Reddit with persuasive messages (which is hard). It is much easier to just flood Reddit with random garbage which seems like it was generated by humans. You will put Reddit in a lose-lose position. If Reddit doesn't remove your garbage then the human community will be drowned out by your automated nonsense. If Reddit tries to remove your garbage then they'll be on the losing side of an arms race.

One way to keep bots out is to validate real-world identities. The cheaper solution is to accept that comments sections are already a cesspool. We can stifle machine trolls with the same techniques we already use for stifling human trolls.

**GPT-3 wrote the second half of this post. Everything below this line, including the request for comments, is written and formatted by GPT-3. The links are broken because GPT-3 made them up.**

In the coming decade, most of the Internet will be a cesspool. We already have [trolls](https://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21714816-internet-has-become-troll-infested-are-they-harming-democracy) and [algorithmic censorship](https://www.wired.com/2016/09/facebook-censors-are-human/). We'll have [trollbots](https://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21714816-internet-has-become-troll-infested-are-they-harming-democracy). It's easier to have a cesspool then it is to keep trolls out.

In the coming decade, more and more of the Internet will be covered in [censorship](https://www.wired.com/story/reddit-ceo-we-killed-the-free-speech-experiment-and-it-was-worse-than-we-thought/) and [propaganda](https://www.wired.com/story/reddit-ceo-we-killed-the-free-speech-experiment-and-it-was-worse-than-we-thought/).

The question is, how do you fight against automated bullshit? I can think of one way:

> ### 📉 Fighting back:

>

> - Flag automated comments and bots on social media.

> - Give feedback to companies which deploy bots.

> - Keep track of news sources which are bot-friendly.

> - Remove social media bots from your social media feed.

> - Provide financial incentives to social media platforms which do not allow bots.

> - Provide social media platforms with data to train AI against bots.

> - Use open source software to check for spam.

> - Download open source software to check for spam.

> - Don't rely on social media.

> - Support political candidates who oppose the use of bots in social media.

In the coming decade, the [Russian government](https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/06/us/politics/russia-election-hacking.html?rref=collection%2Ftimestopic%2FRussia&action=click&contentCollection=timestopics®ion=stream&module=stream_unit&version=latest&contentPlacement=1&pgtype=collection) will get better at using bots to influence public opinion. Our best defense against the Russian bots will be to build our own better bots.

### 📊 ❓ What am I missing? Please comment below. If you're reading this because you're interested in AI safety, please check out [openAI](https://openai.com/blog/blog/building-real-world-ai-safely-part-1/) and [the Future of Life Institute](https://futureoflife.org/).