I really feel scared. Very scared.
Web-wide surveillance and censorship, enabled by the unimaginably huge computational energy of synthetic intelligence (AI), is right here.
This isn’t a futuristic dystopia. It’s occurring now.
Authorities companies are working with universities and nonprofits to make use of AI instruments to surveil and censor content material on the Web.
This isn’t political or partisan. This isn’t about any explicit opinion or concept.
What’s occurring is {that a} instrument highly effective sufficient to surveil all the pieces that’s mentioned and achieved on the Web (or giant parts of it) is changing into out there to the federal government to observe all of us, on a regular basis. And, primarily based on that monitoring, the federal government – and any group or firm the federal government companions with – can then use the identical instrument to suppress, silence, and shut down no matter speech it doesn’t like.
However that’s not all. Utilizing the identical instrument, the federal government and its public-private, “non-governmental” companions (assume, for instance: the World Well being Group, or Monsanto) also can shut down any exercise that’s linked to the Web. Banking, shopping for, promoting, instructing, studying, entertaining, connecting to one another – if the government-controlled AI doesn’t like what you (or your children!) say in a tweet or an electronic mail, it could actually shut down all of that for you.
Sure, we’ve seen this on a really native and politicized scale with, for instance, the Canadian truckers.
But when we thought the sort of exercise couldn’t, or wouldn’t, occur on a nationwide (and even scarier – world) scale, we have to get up proper now and understand it’s occurring, and it may not be stoppable.
New Paperwork Present Authorities-Funded AI Supposed for On-line Censorship
The US Home Choose Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Authorities was fashioned in January 2023 “to research issues associated to the gathering, evaluation, dissemination, and use of data on US residents by govt department companies, together with whether or not such efforts are unlawful, unconstitutional, or in any other case unethical.”
Sadly, the work of the committee is seen, even by its personal members, as largely political: Conservative lawmakers are investigating what they understand to be the silencing of conservative voices by liberal-leaning authorities companies.
Nonetheless, in its investigations, this committee has uncovered some astonishing paperwork associated to authorities makes an attempt to censor the speech of Americans.
These paperwork have essential and terrifying all-of-society implications.
Within the Subcommittee’s interim report, dated February 5, 2024, paperwork present that educational and nonprofit teams are pitching a authorities company on a plan to make use of AI “misinformation companies” to censor content material on web platforms.
Particularly, the College of Michigan is explaining to the Nationwide Science Basis (NSF) that the AI-powered instruments funded by the NSF can be utilized to assist social media platforms carry out censorship actions with out having to really make the selections on what must be censored.
Right here’s how the connection is visualized within the Subcommittee’s report:
Learn Extra: Authorities Funds AI Instruments For Entire-Of-Web Surveillance And Censorship
