Sorpresi? TikTok, il "cavallo di troia cinese" gestito da funzionari del Dipartimento di Stato USA

TikTok: Chinese “Trojan Horse” Is Run by State Department Officials

Alan Macleod, Mintpressnews, 13 april 2023

Amid a national hysteria claiming the popular video-sharing app is a Chinese Trojan Horse, a MintPress News investigation has found dozens of ex-U.S. State Department officials working in key positions at TikTok. Many more individuals with backgrounds in the FBI, CIA and other departments of the national security state also hold influential posts at the social media giant, affecting the content that over one billion users see.

While American politicians demand the app be banned on national security grounds, try to force through an internet surveillance act that would turn the country into an Orwellian state, make clueless statements about how TikTok is dangerous because it connects to your Wi-Fi, it is possible that TikTok is already much closer to Washington than it is to Beijing.

State Department-affiliated media

For quite some time, TikTok has been recruiting former State Department officials to run its operations. The company’s head of data public policy for Europe, for example, is Jade Nester. Before being recruited for that influential role, Nester was a senior official in Washington, serving for four years as the State Department’s director of Internet public policy.

Mariola Janik, meanwhile, left a long and fruitful career in the government to work for TikTok. Starting out at the Bureau of Western Hemisphere Affairs, Janik became a career diplomat in the State Department before moving to the Department of Homeland Security. In September, however, she left the government to immediately take up the position of TikTok’s trust and safety program manager, a job that will inevitably include removing content and reshaping algorithms.

While there is no suggestion that Janik is anything other than a model employee, the fact that a U.S. government agent walked into such an influential position at the social media giant should be cause for concern. If, for instance, a high Chinese official was hired to influence what the U.S. public saw in their social media feeds, it would likely be the centerpiece of the TikTok furor currently gripping Washington.

Janik is not the only former security official working on TikTok’s trust and safety team, however. Between 2008 and 2021, Christian Cardona enjoyed a distinguished career at the State Department, serving in Poland, Turkey and Oman, and was in the thick of U.S. interventionism in the Middle East. Between 2012 and 2013, he was an assistant to the U.S. ambassador in Kabul. He later left that role to become the political and military affairs manager for Iran.

In the summer of 2021, he went straight from his top State Department job to become product policy manager for trust and safety at TikTok, a position that, on paper, he appears completely unqualified for. Earlier this year, Cardona left the company.

Another influential individual at TikTok is recruiting coordinator Katrina Villacisneros. Yet before she was choosing whom the company hires, Villacisneros worked at the State Department’s Office of Human Rights and Humanitarian Affairs. And until 2021, she was part of Army Cyber Command, the U.S. military unit that oversees cyberattacks and information warfare online.

Other TikTok employees with long histories in the U.S. national security state include: Brad Earman, global lead of criminal and civil investigations, who spent 21 years as a special agent in the Air Force Office of Special Investigation and also worked as a program manager for antiterrorism at the State Department; and Ryan Walsh, escalations management lead for trust and safety at TikTok, who, until 2020, was the government’s senior advisor for digital strategy. A central part of Walsh’s State Department job, his own résumé notes, was “advanc[ing] supportive narratives” for the U.S. and NATO online.

Walsh, therefore, is illustrative of a broader wave of individuals who have moved from governments attempting to manipulate the global town square to private companies where they are entrusted to keep the public safe from exactly the sort of state-backed influence operations their former colleagues are orchestrating. In short, then, this system, whereby recently retired government officials decide what the world sees (and does not see) online, is one step removed from state censorship on a global level.

For all the talk of digital influence operations emanating from Russia or other U.S. adversaries, the United States is surely the worst offender when it comes to manipulating public opinion online. It is known, for instance, that the Department of Defense employs an army of at least 60,000 people whose job is to influence the public sphere, most of whom serve as “keyboard warriors” and trolls aiming to promote U.S. government or military interests. And earlier this year, the Twitter Files exposed how social media giants collaborated with the Pentagon to help run online influence operations and fake news campaigns aimed at regime change in the Middle East.

Don’t mess with Project Texas

The influx of State Department officials into TikTok’s upper ranks is a consequence of “Project Texas,” an initiative the company began in 2020 in the hopes of avoiding being banned altogether in the United States. During his time in office, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo led the charge to shut the platform down, frequently labeling it a “spying app” and a “propaganda tool for the Chinese Communist Party.”

It was widely reported that the U.S. government had forced the sale of TikTok to Walmart and then Microsoft. But in late 2020, as Project Texas began, those deals mysteriously fell through, and the rhetoric about the dangers of TikTok from officials evaporated.

Project Texas is a $1.5 billion security operation to move the company’s data to Austin. In doing so, it announced that it was partnering with tech giant Oracle, a corporation that, as MintPress has reported on, is the CIA in all but name.

Disinformazione, sofisticazione ed errori dell'Intelligenza artificiale

Misinformation, mistakes and the Pope in a puffer: what rapidly evolving AI can – and can’t – do.

 

Experts have sounded a warning on artificial intelligence as it becomes increasingly sophisticated and harder to detect

 

Donna Lu, The Guardian

Fri 31 Mar 2023 15.00 BST Last modified on Sat 1 Apr 2023 01.05 BST

 

Generative AI – including large language models such as GPT-4, and image generators such as DALL-E, Midjourney, and Stable Diffusion – is advancing in a “storm of hype and fright”, as some commentators have observed.

Recent advances in artificial intelligence have yielded warnings that the rapidly developing technology may result in “ever more powerful digital minds that no one – not even their creators – can understand, predict, or reliably control”.

That’s according to an open letter signed by more than 1,000 AI experts, researchers and backers, which calls for an immediate pause on the creation of “giant” AIs for six months so that safety protocols can be developed to mitigate their dangers.

But what is the technology currently capable of doing?

 

It can generate photorealistic images

Midjourney creates images from text descriptions. It has improved significantly in recent iterations, with version five capable of producing photorealistic images.

These include the faked images of Trump being arrested, which were created by Eliot Higgins, founder of the Bellingcat investigative journalism network.

Midjourney was also used to generate the viral image of Pope Francis in a Balenciaga puffer jacket, which has been described by web culture writer Ryan Broderick as “the first real mass-level AI misinformation case”. (The creator of the image has said he came up with the idea after taking magic mushrooms.)

 

Image generators have raised serious ethical concerns around artistic ownership and copyright, with evidence that some AI programs have being trained on millions of online images without permission or payment, leading to class action lawsuits.

Tools have been developed to protect artistic works from being used by AI, such as Glaze, which uses a cloaking technique that prevents an image generator from accurately being able to replicate the style in an artwork.

It can convincingly replicate people’s voices

AI-generated voices can be trained to sound like specific people, with enough accuracy that it fooled a voice identification system used by the Australian government, a Guardian Australia investigation revealed.

 

It can convincingly replicate people’s voices

In Latin America, voice actors have reported losing work because they have been replaced by AI dubbing software. “An increasingly popular option for voice actors is to take up poorly paid recording gigs at AI voiceover companies, training the very technology that aims to supplant them,” a Rest of World report found.

It can write

GPT-4, the most powerful model released by OpenAI, can code in every computer programming language and write essays and books. Large language models have led to a boom in AI-written ebooks for sale on Amazon. Some media outlets, such as CNET, have reportedly used AI to write articles.

 

Video AI is getting a lot better

There are now text-to-video generators available, which, as their name suggests, can turn a text description into a moving image.

 

It can turn 2D images into 3D

AI is also getting better at turning 2D still images into 3D visualizations.

 

It makes factual errors and hallucinates

AI, particularly large language models that are used for chatbots such as ChatGPT, is notorious for making factual mistakes that are easily missed because they seem reasonably convincing.

For every example of a functional use for AI chatbots, there is seemingly a counter-example of its failure.

Prof Ethan Mollick at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, for example, tested GPT-4 and was able to provide a fair peer review of a research paper as if it were an economic sociologist.

However, Robin Bauwens, an assistant professor at Tilburg University in the Netherlands, had an academic paper rejected by a reviewer, who had likely used AI as the reviewer suggested he familiarise himself with academic papers that had been made up.

The question of why AI generates fake academic papers relates to how large language models work: they are probabilistic, in that they map the probability over sequences of words. As Dr David Smerdon of the University of Queensland puts it: “Given the start of a sentence, it will try to guess the most likely words to come next.”

In February, Bing launched a pre-recorded demo of its AI. As the software engineer Dmitri Brereton has pointed out, the AI was asked to generate a five-day itinerary for Mexico City. Of five descriptions of suggested nightlife options, four were inaccurate, Brereton found. In summarising the figures from a financial report, Brereton found, it also managed to fudge the numbers badly.

 

It can create (cursed) instructions and recipes

ChatGPT has been used to write crochet patterns, resulting in hilariously cursed results.

GPT-4, the latest iteration of the AI behind the chatbot, can also provide recipe suggestions based on a photograph of the contents of your fridge. I tried this with several images from the Fridge Detective subreddit, but not once did it return any recipe suggestions containing ingredients that were actually in the fridge pictures.

 

It can act as an assistant to do administrative tasks

“Advances in AI will enable the creation of a personal agent,” Bill Gates wrote this week. “Think of it as a digital personal assistant: It will see your latest emails, know about the meetings you attend, read what you read, and read the things you don’t want to bother with.”

“This will both improve your work on the tasks you want to do and free you from the ones you don’t want to do.”

For years, Google Assistant’s AI has been able to make reservations at restaurants via phone calls.

OpenAI has now enabled plugins for GPT-4, enabling it to look up data on the web and to order groceries.

Link originale: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/apr/01/misinformation-mistakes-and-the-pope-in-a-puffer-what-rapidly-evolving-ai-can-and-cant-do