[News] Are you chatting with a pro-Israeli AI-powered superbot?

[Anti-Imperialist News]

aljazeera.com
<https://www.aljazeera.com/features/longform/2024/5/22/are-you-chatting-with-an-ai-powered-superbot>
Are you chatting with a pro-Israeli AI-powered superbot?
Marium Ali, Hanna Duggal, Justin Salhani
May 22, 2024
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By the end of 2023, nearly half of all internet traffic was bots, found a
study by United States cybersecurity company Imperva
<https://www.imperva.com/resources/resource-library/reports/2024-bad-bot-report-report-ty?lang=EN&asset_id=6912&gated=1>
.

Bad bots reached their highest levels recorded by Imperva, making up 34
percent of internet traffic, while good bots made up the remaining 15
percent.

This was partly due to the increasing popularity of artificial intelligence
(AI) for generating text and images.

[image: INTERACTIVE_MONTHLY BOT TRAFFIC at 2x-1715850584]

According to Baydoun, the pro-Israeli bots they found mainly aim to sow
doubt and confusion about a pro-Palestinian narrative rather than to make
social media users trust them instead.

Bot armies - thousands to millions of malicious bots - are used in
large-scale disinformation campaigns to sway public opinion.

As bots become more advanced, it is harder to tell the difference between
bot and human content.

“The ability of AI to create these larger bot networks … has a massively
deleterious effect on truthful communication, but also freedom of
expression because they have the ability to drown out human voices,” said
Jillian York, director for International Freedom of Expression at
international non-profit digital rights group Electronic Frontier Foundation
<https://www.eff.org/>.

[image: INTERACTIVE_QUOTE-1716283163]
Bot evolution

Early bots were very simple, operating in accordance with predefined rules
rather than employing the sophisticated AI techniques used today.

Beginning in the early to mid-2000s, as social networks like MySpace and
Facebook rose, social media bots became popular because they could automate
tasks like quickly adding “friends”, creating user accounts and automating
posts.

Those early bots had limited language processing capabilities - only
understanding and responding to a narrow range of predefined commands or
keywords.

“Online bots before, especially in the mid-2010s … were mostly
regurgitating the same text over and over and over. The text … would very
obviously be written by a bot,” Semaan said.

[image: INTERACTIVE_BOTS TIMELINE1-1716283195]

By the 2010s, rapid advances in natural language processing (NLP), a branch
of AI that enables computers to understand and generate human language,
meant bots could do more.

In the 2016 US presidential election between Donald Trump and Hillary
Clinton, a study by University of Pennsylvania researchers found that
one-third of pro-Trump tweets and nearly one-fifth of pro-Clinton tweets
came from bots during the first two debates.

Then, a more advanced type of NLP known as large language models (LLM)
using billions or trillions of parameters to generate human-like text,
emerged.

[image: INTERACTIVE_BOTS TIMELINE2 at 2x-1715850533]
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