Bots Are Destroying Political Discourse As We Know It
Presidential-campaign season is officially, officially, upon us now, which means it’s time to confront the weird and insidious ways in which technology is warping politics. One of the biggest threats on the horizon: Artificial personas are coming, and they’re poised to take over political debate. The risk arises from two separate threads coming together: artificial-intelligence-driven text generation and social-media chatbots. These computer-generated “people” will drown out actual human discussions on the internet.
Text-generation software is already good enough to fool most people most of the time. It’s writing news stories, particularly in . It’s talking with customers on merchant websites. It’s writing on topics in the news (though ). And it’s being used to bulk meant to appear like legitimate local news outlets but that publish propaganda instead.
