A lot of artificial intelligence has been deployed toward dubious goals such as propaganda, disinformation, phishing scams and manipulating people.
Mixed Partly true and partly false in roughly equal measure.
Factual: Statements about the present or the past, checked against the record: did they hold up?
What would count as true or false
Judge as of 2023. True: credible documentation from that year, such as security-industry reports, platform threat reports, government or NGO reports (for example Freedom House 2023) or academic studies, shows AI being used widely (not in isolated cases) for propaganda or disinformation, phishing or scams, and manipulative targeting. Mostly true: widespread use is documented for most of the listed categories, but one is thinly documented. Mixed: the uses are documented but only as scattered cases or emerging trends, so 'a lot' is only partly supported. Mostly false: such uses were mainly hypothetical or anticipated in 2023, with only a few real instances. False: there is no documented deployment of AI for these purposes.
Set before the research began.
Evidence (4)
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E1 FREEDOM ON THE NET 2023 Freedom House · 2023
“During the February 2023 Nigerian elections, an AI-manipulated audio clip spread on social media, purportedly implicating an opposition presidential candidate in plans to rig balloting.”
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E2 FREEDOM ON THE NET 2023 Freedom House · 2023
“However, much of the work is still done by humans.”
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E3 Twice as many cyber incidents reported and rise in AI scam attempts Swiss National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC), federal government · 6 May 2024
“Although the number of reports of such incidents is still comparatively low, the NCSC believes that these are the first attempts by cyber criminals to explore how AI might be used for future cyberattacks.”
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E4 Meta Quarterly Adversarial Threat Report Q3 2023 Meta · November 2023
“we’ve seen a case when a political party in Poland reportedly used AI-created audio in the course of an election campaign to make an argument against their opponents.”
Reasoning
E1 documents a 2023 AI-manipulated audio clip in Nigeria's election, and E4 reports a case in which a Polish party reportedly used AI-created audio in an election campaign. However, E2 notes that much of this work was still done by humans. E3 calls AI scam reports "comparatively low" and describes them as criminals' first attempts. The evidence shows scattered cases and emerging trends rather than widespread use in every listed category, and none of the evidence items addresses manipulative targeting, so "a lot" is only partly supported.
Cite this claim
Steven Pinker, “A lot of artificial intelligence has been deployed toward dubious goals such as propaganda, disinformation, phishing scams and manipulating people.” (said 2023). Verdict: mixed. Reliability API, claim c_e4b4bb430c88, method 0.1.0+28da144b, dataset release v1.1.2. https://epistacklabs.com/claims/c_e4b4bb430c88
This claim is in dataset release v1.1.2, with the same verdict.
Reply to this claim
More factual claims by Steven Pinker
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Mostly true
“I argued that any intelligent system is a mechanism which is good at solving some problems but not others, and which is inherently limited by knowledge about the world attainable only by observation…”
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“A major fact about language, known for decades, is that people don’t blurt out what they mean”
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Mostly true
“But in other kinds violence, such as homicides, the progress has definitely continued.”
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Mostly true
“I float a number of hypotheses as to why cooperation and human flourishing in general have increased.”
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Mostly true
“Those were as old as civilisation.”
Slavery and imperialism were as old as civilisation, predating the Enlightenment.
Verdicts are made automatically; how verdicts are made.