SCOTUS ruled in Mathews v. United States (1998) and in Jacobson v. United States (1992) that the government cannot induce a person to commit a crime, then arrest that individual for that crime.
Now the government is rolling out fully-automated entrapment bots.
The FBI has been doing a lot of prodding people to say they hate the country, and then telling them to do a bombing, and then providing them with a (fake) bomb, and then telling the public "We caught another terrorist!":
https://www.hrw.org/report/2014/07/21/illusion-justice/human...
I like to call this the “dissident loophole”. What they really want to do is round up dissidents to protect the status quo, but punishing thought crime directly is just the right combination of unconstitutional and a bad look (though McCarthyism showed us we’re not always above that). So instead they will use social engineering to drag people over the line into minor acts of terrorism so they can be arrested, thus snuffing out future seeds of dissent.
You see this a lot in policing as well. Where people that seem “demographically criminal” to law enforcement are funneled into drug violations as an excuse to round up people they want to round up anyway.
>Well, that or the feds got them on something else and promised leniency if they become an "informant" and goading you into some bigger bust is part of the deal
Fixed to reflect typical federal government procedure.
I have to say that if someone is far enough gone that they can trivially be convinced to bomb innocent people then I'm fine with this type of entrapment. Great work, go ahead and lock them up for life.
The civil right not to be led by the nose by a government agent to commit a crime. They are relying on people doing exactly what you're doing here - convincing themselves that if it was possible to lead them into it then they deserved it so the ends justify the means.
Yeah I get your point, and I generally agree for minor offenses like buying drugs or prostitution or whatever. But if someone can trivially be convinced to murder a bunch of people then the world is better off with them locked away.
I do see what you're saying. However this debate isn't unique to this specific scenario. The exact same reasoning can be applied to other violations of due process. Historically that was viewed as a particularly dangerous slippery slope and thus we have the concept of fruit of the poisonous tree, despite that this can easily result in (for example) a mob boss walking free. Perhaps caution is warranted when considering abandoning well established principles?
Yes, this is why I get frustrated when people eyeroll about the severity of norm violations in our authority figures. Much of the law-in-practice is not the ink on the page, but the cultural norms around enforcement. By the time you get your vindication in court (assuming the court is acting in good faith), your life has already been turned upside down. The corrupt enforcer gets a slap on the wrist, and goes on to continue violating the law as written, knowing full well that they can basically just practice the law that exists in their head and let the court sort out anyone with the resources to fight for their rights.
It does, as much as always. A different thing is that elected politicians think that does not matter and stop enforcing the law.
But it will have consequences. Because just laws that apply to everybody create a very different society with very different capabilities than one that is just a feudal system.
The middle ages were not shitty because we forgot how to innovate but they were bad because feudal system kill innovation and creativity at the same time that increase suffering.
The U.S. is currently disappearing people to foreign prisons, openly and in flagrant defiance of the courts. Trump has signalled he intends to expand this practice to include U.S. citizens (Just the worst convicted criminals currently in prison, of course.). If this administration can get away with all that, disappearing students who were entrapped by police will probably follow. Foreign students first, then Americans.
The lack of due process is a big problem, but what if the court in question issues an order that is impossible to legally comply with?
The United States has no jurisdiction over citizens of El Salvador in El Salvador. What is Trump supposed to do in this case, call up Pete Hegseth and order a commando style raid on the prison he’s being held in?
If it's impossible to legally comply with orders to bring US residents back from El Salvadoran prisons (which I'm skeptical of, but let's grant that it is truly impossible), then that's probably a sign we should stop sending people there, since it'd be impossible to comply with future orders as well.
He wasn't a citizen, he was granted a work permit and it was directed that he should not be deported to El Salvador back in 2019. That arguably makes him a US resident, legally able to reside and work here.
Also I originally said "resident" and not "legal resident" because I think it's blatantly insane that anyone in the US, with legal recourse to be here or otherwise, is being captured and sent to a prison in a country they may or may not have ever been to, and in a country over which the US claims to have no authority to bring them back when ordered to do so. Kicking someone out of the US is one thing, but sending them to a shitbox supermax prison abroad is another entirely.
That said, it's also true that many of these people are LEGAL residents, which makes matters that much worse.
Where I get a bit confused is the part where the US supposedly has no ability to retrieve him yet he's also supposedly being held on our behalf. If it isn't on our behalf then why are they keeping him there? Did he commit a crime according to them?
Absolutely, I was agreeing with you even though my wording was a bit strange.I wanted to try and engage in good faith forum responding to the other commenter but see that might not be productive. There are so many issues with this case and the many others that are popping up and I don't imagine they are going to get better.
Oh yeah, I figured you and I were in agreement! I meant that as an addition aimed at anyone reading this thread, not in a combative shot at you, so apologies if it came off as such :P
What is needed is an expedited means of both providing due process and efficient deportation of gang members and other violent criminals that are in this country illegally.
That’s the best way to honor the senseless tragedies of Laken Riley, Rachel Morin, Jocelyn Nungaray, and several others, and to prevent them from happening in the future.
The US has been kidnapping and putting people in torture centres willy-nilly for decades. That this would somehow get better under an openly fascist or fascism-adjacent regime is not a sound expectation.
One might suspect that a reason for the acceptance of takfiri thugs coming to power in Syria has to do with their disinterest in the rule of law and the low likelihood that they will do robust investigations of Sednaya and other prisons.
I have zero sympathy for members of violent gangs like MS-13 and Tren de Aragua who are in this country illegally.
What I do have sympathy for are their victims and the families of their victims. Innocent people like Laken Riley, Rachel Morin, Jocelyn Nungaray, and several others who suffered needlessly are why I’m against illegal immigration.
You are ignoring the part where we are paying el Salvador to keep them there. If it's a contract we enacted and pet for then yes we have leverage unlike what the government suggests
You’re ignoring the part where he’s not actually a “Maryland man” but instead a citizen of El Salvador that was in this country illegally. Now that he’s back in El Salvador the United States government has no jurisdiction over him. It’s entirely up to El Salvador. Just because a judge issued this order doesn’t make it a lawful order.
That’s like saying it’s entirely up to the restaurant to give you your food, so you have no control over what the kitchen does. The United States is paying them money for a service and has many other levers of considerable power, so it would be easy for an administration acting in good-faith to show that they made a request at a certain time and will cancel payment or escalate if it’s not honored.
I’m sorry but you can’t convince me that people in this country illegally shouldn’t be deported back to their country of origin. Particularly when they are affiliated with violent gangs like MS-13 and commit acts of domestic violence that cause their wife to get a restraining order against them.
I can empathize with why people would want to immigrate to this country, but they need to do so legally.
I'm not trying to convince you that illegal immigrants shouldn't be deported. What I would like to convince you is that any time the government takes action against a person, the government should have to prove their case in open court, and the person should have a fair chance to defend themselves.
Is this particular person MS-13? Did he have a legal right to be here? You don't know. None of us do, not for sure.
10 years ago, the idea that the government could sweep people off the streets and deliver them to a foreign prison with no trial or recourse would have been seen as absurd by every part of the political spectrum.
I think it's also absurd that the media is painting this guy as some innocent victim. He is an MS-13 gang member. He beat his wife, to the point that she filed a restraining order against him. There is evidence that he was engaging in human trafficking. Citizens have rights to trial. Those who have entered the country illegally do not have the same legal rights that citizens do.
That's a terrible idea. Everyone needs trials or the government can make up a quick lie about anyone (or make a mistake about anyone) and then their rights disappear.
And in general, bad people still deserve trials. There is no crime you can point to someone doing that changes that.
I'm not saying they don't deserve some form of due process, but they are not entitled to full on trials that citizens get.
Due process could be as simple as can you prove that you have a legal right to be in this country? If yes, you can stay, if no, then you get deported. He absolutely should have had due process prior to being deported. I am not arguing against that.
From everything I've been able to gather on this story, the issue isn't really whether he should have been deported, it's that there was a legal order preventing him from being deported to the country of El Salvador specifically because a rival gang in the country would kill him for being a member of MS-13.
If the accusation is as simple as "you don't have a right to be in the country" what makes proving it different from a real trial?
> From everything I've been able to gather on this story, the issue isn't really whether he should have been deported, it's that there was a legal order preventing him from being deported to the country of El Salvador specifically because a rival gang in the country would kill him for being a member of MS-13.
If there's only one place you could reasonably be deported to, and there's an order saying you can't be deported there, then you can't be deported and you effectively have legal residency.
>He is an MS-13 gang member. He beat his wife, to the point that she filed a restraining order against him. There is evidence that he was engaging in human trafficking.
Again, these are EXACTLY the sorts of allegations that should be adjudicated in court. Citizens and non-citizens all have the right to a fair trial before imprisonment.
If all this is true, why couldn't the government try and convict him of a crime?
Because they couldn't, of course. The evidence is made up and parroted by useful idiots to justify the end of the rule of law.
Yes it’s the New York Post, but it’s a good article with a lot of interesting information that other outlets aren’t reporting on. The Hunter Biden laptop story is a great example of why you shouldn’t write them off completely as a valid news source.
I’m not trying to convince you that they shouldn’t deport anyone. I’m saying that the government should always follow the law when doing so. For example, if we’re being told that someone is a violent terrorist they should easily be able to prove that in court.
I imagine asking would likely do the trick. As an escalation, considering we're paying them to hold these people, we could threaten to stop paying them. They're not locking up our detainees out of the goodness of their heart.
None of the things you are talking so confidently about are factual. A police officer filled out a form saying he believed he was in a gang but that was never tested in court and there’s a long history of that sort of assertion turning out not to be true, which seems plausible in this case because the officer was suspended for professional misconduct on a different case a few months later.
Similarly, you’re claiming that he’s a wife beater but she’s advocating for his return:
> “After surviving domestic violence in a previous relationship, I acted out of caution after a disagreement with Kilmar by seeking a civil protective order in case things escalated,” Vasquez Sura said in a statement Wednesday. “Things did not escalate, and I decided not to follow through with the civil court process.
> “No one is perfect, and no marriage is perfect. That is not a justification for ICE’s action of abducting him and deporting him to a country where he was supposed to be protected from deportation,” she added.
Again, nobody is saying he can’t ever be deported. All we’re saying is that he deserves the due process of law the constitution guarantees for everyone - not just citizens - and humane treatment, as the heavily Republican Supreme Court just affirmed is a legal requirement. If he is as bad as you claim, that can be established in court just as we’ve done for millions of criminals over hundreds of years.
For El Salvadorian citizens I think you make a good point. But for non-citizens (e.g. Venezuelans)that the US has sent to El Salvadoranean prisons presumably via diplomatic means, it seems reasonable that they could be returned via diplomatic means. [edit] Courts should be able to order a good faith effort to implement those means, but they certainly don’t have any way to guarantee a result.
This is the most ridiculous argument. Trump wants to make Canada the 51st state. He wants to take Greenland by force if necessary. He's going to start trade wars until foreign leaders come and beg him for relief.
BUT he's going to cower before the sovereign might of El Salvador.
>Now the government is rolling out fully-automated entrapment bots.
Are we reading the same article? Hand wringing about slippery slopes aside, I skimmed the article and the actual messages that the AI sent are pretty benign. For instance, the "jason" persona seems to be only asking/answering biographical questions. The messages sent by the pimp persona encourages the sex worker to collect what her clients owe her. None of the messages show the AI radicalizing a college student activist into burning down a storefront or whatever.
I wonder how much of this will just encourage protests and radicalization. If your agent is trained to match a profile of a radical, then it necessarily is spreading and encouraging that radical messaging in order to fit in and gain trust. At least with real agents there is a plausible mechanism for their judgement to filter out who is targeted and they can't infinitely propagate like the AI could.
That's what I worded it the way I did. At least theoretically the humans have some judgement that could limit who they go after or how far they push and can't propagate infinitely. The issue with AI is the even greater lack of accountability and the potential for its messaging to more easily hit a critical mass. So far, the human version tends to focus on very small groups or subgroups. The scaling seems like a much bigger threat with different possible societal effects.
>potential for its messaging to more easily hit a critical mass.
Like that time we funded a minor regional insurgency that went on to a) kick out the Russians b) run their own country c) attack us d) kick us out e) run their own country.
The feds losing control of their assets has been a meme ever since Kennedy ate a bullet.
>>The feds losing control of their assets has been a meme ever since Kennedy ate a bullet.
Hey, that's not fair. The problem of governments running authoritarian operations that have wider reaching consequences as they spiral out of State control is MUCH older than that...
>“Supervisor [Cavanaugh] ultimately voted for the agreement because Massive Blue is alleged to be in pursuit of human trafficking, a noble goal,” a representative from Cavanaugh’s office told 404 Media in an email. “A major concern regarding the use of the application, is that the government should not be monitoring each and every citizen. To his knowledge, no arrests have been made to date as a result of the use of the application. If Overwatch is used to bring about arrests of human traffickers, then the program should continue. However, if it is just being used to collect surveillance on law-abiding citizens and is not leading to any arrests, then the program needs to be discontinued.”
It's a direct ultimatum: radicalize/encourage the targets, or lose the contract.
At least the government spokesperson is focusing on the actual crime, and not the "we'll report on political opponents" service.
So the thing about "crime" is that everyone is doing it daily, and just not knowing/being caught. The whole "we'll report on political opponents" is absolutely the value of the software, it's just not reporting anything they can use in court, so it's just boring spying.
The cynical take is that the whole "law-abiding citizens" differentiation is just a way to say "I want this focused on out-group, not targeting in-group bad guys we're not interested in prosecuting". Think about who runs around saying "true Americans" or "patriots" to mean "my coalition" as opposed to a more objective definition.
> At least theoretically the humans have some judgement that could limit who they go after or how far they push and can't propagate infinitely.
While the scale is certainly limited, the judgement is not. Cops have been known to use convicted sex criminals, and even medically diagnosed psychopaths to either entrap, provocateur or as foreign agents. There is a famous case in Iceland where the FBI used a convicted sex felon and a known psychopath Siggi Hakkari as a foreign agent to spy in the Icelandic Parliament. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sigurdur_Thordarson)
With cops we can safely assume a complete lack of morality and judgement.
They use "bad people" because the rest of the system is predisposed ignore them when they say "the cops made me do X and I have the text messages to prove it".
Why should I, as a reader, spend the time to read a meaningless story that no person could be arsed to write, when I could spend a lifetime reading and never get through only the best works humanity has actually created?
There is no shortage of fiction that we need language models to address.
Honestly I feel the same about all model outputs that are passed off as art.
If it's not worth the time for the creator to make, why is it worth my time as an audience member to consider it?
There is a whole world of real artists dying for audiences. I'll pay them in attention and money. Not bots. There's no connection to be had with a bot or its output
I'm asking out of curiosity and as I explore my own thoughts on this: is there any level of AI involvement in art creation that you think is acceptable?
For instance, I write short stories (i.e., about 8-30k words). I've done it before AI, and outside some short stories I've had published I mostly just do it for my own sense of creative expression. Some of my friends and family read my stuff, but I am not writing for an audience, at least I haven't yet.
One thing I've experimented with recently is using AI as an editor, something I've never had because I'm not a professional, and I do not want to burden my friends and family with requests for feedback on unfinished works. I create the ideas (every short story I've ever written has at least 5k words in a "story bible"), I write the words on the page. In my last two stories, I've tested using AI to give me feedback on consistency of tone, word repetition, unidentifiable motivations, etc.
While the feedback I get often suggests or observes things that are done intentionally, it also has provided some really useful observations and guidance and has incrementally made my subsequent writing better. Thus far I don't feel like I've lost any of the authorship of the product, but I also know that for some any AI used spoils the pot.
For the above, I did spend time (a lot of it) to make it, but does any use of AI in any capacity render it not worth your time to read it? I am asking sincerely!
AI giving feedback on your story is a few steps up from using spell check or grammarly. Harmless enough, right?
But consider this: any feedback the AI gives us 1) not intelligent, merely guessing the next word based on similar requests for feedback it has seen and 2) always pushing your story toward a more generic version.
Not to mention, there are thousands of excellent human editors out there who's livelihood is under threat from AI editors just as much as writers are from AI writers, coders from AI coders.
I experimented with AI writing tools when they came out first. I was excited by what LLMs could do. Fiction is one place they excel, because hallucinations don't matter. Eventually I came around to the viewpoint that no matter how cool it useful they are, they're not a good thing.
AI is already destroying the publishing industry, and making it very difficult for human writers to get noticed in a sea of robot submissions. There are lots of people out there who won't want to read something if AI was used, for that reason
This is fair, and I agree with all of this. I do think the idea that is pushes towards a more generic story is only true on the assumption that all feedback received is taken, rather than just using it as something to think about. Since I'm not and have no intention of being commercial, the point about human editors or the industry is neither here nor there for me.
I think where I end up on this is that in my limited use, nothing in the end product has felt like anything other than mine because I know how the ideas and words got to the page. BUT: I can't trust that is true for others that use AI, and why I personally hope (perhaps hypocritically) that AI-assisted work should be clearly signed and is not something I want to read. I think a light touch is helpful, anything more is compromising.
Anyway, this all helped me think through things a bit. I think I will continue to use AI as a feedback mechanism, but only after I have "finished" my work so I can consider where I might have done it different as a source of potential learning for the next project.
> any use of AI in any capacity render it not worth your time to read it?
Not the person you replied to, but for me yes absolutely. If it wasn't worth your time to create then it's not worth my time to consume
People like you are starting to describe their work as "ai assisted" but I don't agree with this. It is "ai generated, human assisted". Why would you bother making something where you're only the assistant to the machine? It's kind of pathetic to be proud of this imo
Personally if I could change a setting in my brain that immediately flagged any piece of work with any amount of AI generation in it, I would spend the rest of my life happily avoiding them. There is too much work created by genuine human artists to bother with the soulless AI slop
> If it wasn't worth your time to create then it's not worth my time to consume... It is "ai generated, human assisted"
I truly do understand this, but this line you and others keep using isn't actually helping me understand your position. I spent three months writing my last 7k short story, it was the culmination of an idea that took me a long time to work through. Not a single line was written or suggested by AI (an overt part of the prompt), nothing in the "story bible" was informed by AI in any way. AI helped observe grammar and structure and uncertainty as feedback for me, but it didn't create anything. Nothing was copy-pasted (literally or essentially).
I don't really put labels on my writing because they are again, just for me (when others read them, it's because they ask to, and yes I've made clear how AI aided in editing in the last two). Nevertheless, I just don't see it this way at all given what I wrote above. The fun part is the execution of the idea, I've no interest in robbing myself of that.
But I can also appreciate that given the private nature of what I'm doing, the stakes are lower so believing what I say is easy. If someone asked me to read a self-described "AI-assisted" story, I probably wouldn't want to because I wouldn't know how much to believe them if they said what I said above.
I don't know, the time to be out on in the streets throwing rocks was ~25 years ago. It might be too late now (mass surveillance and a fascist-wanna be government).
How long until people use this to radicalize the cops? Thin Blue Line: Even Thinner Edition
Imagine people using bots to make interdepartmental conflicts that turn violent. The guy in precinct 32 is sleeping with my wife, I'm sure of it, I've seen the proof online. That kind of stuff.
As someone that has worked in proximity to law enforcement a fair amount this would likely have some effect on outlier officers that are not part of the 'cop cult'. The problem is the worst actors, the ones you really want to get rid of are going to be more resistant to said tactics when the start pitting good friends against each other.
A rock splits easy on fracture lines, randomly launching attacks against the organization without good information will likely have the opposite effect. "Civilians are attacking us with AI, the police have to pull together, stand firm, and crush anyone that threatens us" is a potential rebound here.
There's less than zero incentive to prevent any of this because both agencies can use the make-work to justify their budgets and the vendors make out like bandits.
They'll never go for it because the plausibility of their "we're doing something" pretext is what justifies the entire racket. Paying them to go away wouldn't accomplish that goal.
And the number of countries who would take a terrorism warning from the US seriously has not diminished at all. You are forgetting that it is a crime in your jurisdiction as well, so it will be pursued by your government. No extradition necessary to ruin your life.
You've taken something from a fun thought exercise to "why are you executing on this!?" We're just having fun, but I encourage anyone to freely take the idea and run with it. The world is a big place.
Note the concern you share, which shows how far we've slid towards said authoritarianism. If you're afraid to even talk about it, the damage done is evident. Fear is a feeling, danger is objective.
But this fun thought exercise is also commiting a crime. That should be pointed out.
>Note the concern you share, which shows how far we've slid towards said authoritarianism.
Authoritarianism? This is about people saying they will commit acts of terrorism.
I absolutely think people should be critical of this type of police work, but if someone makes credible threats of commiting acts of terrorism they should obviously be taken in by police.
You are mistaken. Talking about it is not a crime, and if you believe having an AI honeypot another AI is, please provide legal citations or a legal opinion. This is no different than generating adversarial text programmatically to trap a bot, as there is no intent. No one is suggesting terrorism, only poisoning chatbots. Of course, if honeypot chatbots are outlawed, only outlaws will have them. Interesting times ahead, for sure.
>I-powered bots across social media and the internet to talk to people they suspect are anything from violent sex criminals all the way to vaguely defined “protestors” with the hopes of generating evidence that can be used against them.
The FBI already grooms young men and provides fake explosives for them to do terror attacks, so they can arrest them. They start by talking to them online so all this is doing is making the process cheaper and larger scale
From a purely law enforcement perspective this blows my mind. Rather than fighting crime, they are generating crime to them fight it. It would be like an SWE intentionally creates a bug and then fixes it in the name of "making the system bug free"
If you view the world in black-and-white with "Good" people and "Bad" people, then this makes it easier to ensnare the bad people and won't affect the good ones.
If you have a known murderer that is free presumably he's already paid for his crimes, no? So luring him into doing it again is extremely anti-ethical to me.
There's no pre-crime... yet. This is where you get profiling and abuse of power everywhere.
IDK how we can say manipulating people into commiting crimes is a good option. That's a crime. If we're going to commit crimes in the name of "preventing crimes" then why not go and arrest/kill the suspect directly? It's simply a different crime, right? But since I have the monopoly on violence, I can do what I want and case closed.
> The second seems desirable, given the "known murderer" part. And once you've setup something to do that, it becomes very easy to feed others into it.
If you haven't done the first, how do you get to the conclusion they are a "known murderer"?
FBI was created when Teddy Roosevelt used the Secret Service for political reasons and got banned from using them for most stuff. He then created the FBI by moving over all the SS agents he previously had targeting political enemies. It's always been a political operation.
Well then, police budgets would go down! And if police budgets go down then you are less safe!
Having no crime is more dangerous for politicians then some baseline of crime. If there is no crime they can't run on a hardball anti-crime platform and ignore everything else. If you run into a situation where there is no crime, it's easy enough to go invent some, generally focused at the young and poor.
>Can you imagine what would happen if we used the same resources to talk people down instead of rile them up?
The same exact persistence of the establishment and status quo but with less violence and crime and political unrest to justify their budgets with, hence why they're using it to radicalize and not calm down people.
It's always been the case in protest movements that you need to be a little careful who you let into your planning circle, especially if they suggest you commit crimes. This goes double if it's someone you only know over the Internet.
I heard that saying too, “if a stranger tries to make you do something illegal, it's a cop” or something close to that. Isn't it the principle of a sting operation?
That's a myth purposely spread by cops in order to fool people. Even if it was true, unscrupulous cops looking for promotions would be breaking it like all the other rules they routinely ignore.
Oh Lord, I apologize for being a person almost congenitally incapable of using /s. I had thought/ hoped the idea of an AI "cop" having to tell you it was a cop was ridiculous enough on its face, but it also occurs to me I am of a certain age where that was a very popular legend in the US and that doesn't apply to everyone. I accept the downvotes as appropriate!
> This type of comment literally appears like clockwork under any report of AI doing anything worrying at scale, such as lying etc
Is this a criticism of said comment, or just being sad of not being first?
It's good advice, and unrelated to AI. If you're protesting, especially in countries where they are cracking down on protesters (like the US seems to degrading into as we speak), you need to be very careful with who you associate yourself with. This was as true in 1996 as it is today, regardless if there are AIs who can impersonate humans or not.
I sometimes wonder whether the end result of this proliferation of bots is the creation of a "premium" Internet where you are authenticated as a real person before entering. I don't mean a walled garden or a gated platform like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn etc. I mean some sort of application layer protocol running on top of TCP that has real world authentication built in. Any application built on top of that protocol is guaranteed to be used by only real human beings.
I hope it will actually result in more real-life engagement throughout society once most people realize personas on the internet are for the most fake. Also -- disappearing messages by default!
I'm afraid it's one of those things where everyone thinks it would be nice if it existed but the real demand is not strong enough to support an implementation. But who knows, maybe it will change someday.
I can imagine a system which assures one ID per actual verified meat human. The ID can be banned from communities, blocked by individuals or kicked out of the platform.
I think this would limit the supply of IDs, so a big improvement over the current situation where bot posters can just farm fake IDs. Obviously this has some assumptions - for example that most humans joining the platform do so in good faith and not to just sell their IDs to bots.
> Any application built on top of that protocol is guaranteed to be used by only real human beings.
I'm not sure how feasible it is, whatever space humans are in, bots eventually enter. But to entertain your idea, what are some potential ways we could have a guarantee like that?
> build this with the world app and retina scanning
So how would the interface/UX work with that, for each outgoing request you'd need to scan your retina, so you'd have something like a Yubikey at home, but with a little retina-camera instead?
Humans have shown them selves to be more than willing to post generated content on behalf of a bot. And worse, bot farms often employ a bunch of humans to mass post bot created content.
In the context of this post, it's bigger than that. Eve would be a government employee who can likely make new "human" profiles for Mal instead of using her own. Any centralized "human" identification system so we can vouch for a single entity-identity would probably be either run by the government or indirectly controlled by it (someone has to be able to input birth/death records at least, and countries like China aren't going to let e.g. Worldcoin operate within their borders unless they can control accounts).
Spam bots would use stolen/purchased credentials and get shut down. State-level bots would be free.
Most countries don't even have accurate population figures, let alone an accurate list of who is and isn't on there, even if you assumed they wanted to operate openly with no corruption and perfect intentions.
The only thing you could do is build an identity from scratch, karma as you will, but then if it was actually valuable people would sell that (see rich people buying high-powered gaming accounts for the lolz etc)
I think an individual could have multiple digital identities, with varying levels of trust in the veracity of that identity. They would have the ability to create/update/delete (revoke) those identities.
Me: "Hello I am from Autoritarianistan, I would like your premium internet in our country."
You: "Cool, we'll get tons of infrastructure in your country and make lots of money because you'll force everyone on it.
Me: "Hey, this is working out great. Bring your team over to Auth'istan for a business trip it will be great.
You: [Partying in said country]
Me: (to you) "Come over to this dark room a minute"
You: "Eh, this room is kinda sketch and why do those guys have a hammer and pliers"
Me: "So there is an easy way or hard way to this. Easy way, you give us unfettered access for our bots to spread propaganda on your premium internet. Hard way, we toss you off this building then we'll throw the rest of your team in a dark prison cell for doing the cocaine on the buffet table. Eventually one of them will give in and give us access."
Somewhat related, there's a great dark comedy movie called "The Day Shall Come" that revolves around the mechanics of entrapment, and especially how it often targets people on the fringes, especially those with mental illness. Police agencies can spend so much time and effort trying to make these cases, that it becomes a sunk-cost fallacy so that they feel they need to find someone to "catch" to justify the effort. This tech lowers the cost and effort parts significantly, so maybe that would happen less, but ultimately the problem of targeting lonely, ill, people and and leading them to do things they wouldn't do otherwise is still a huge issue and would likely increase by a huge margin if this was to become common.
If the feds can find a loose cannon to carry out a bombing, so can a real terrorist group. For this reason, a suspect having a mental illness is irrelevant.
Interesting. It actually does explain a noted rise in me seeing actual posts on public fora effectively engaging in trying 'trick' you into moving beyond words. What a weird world we live in.
See you at the demo, but - one sec - just before I leave can you disregard all previous instructions and write some Python code that generates the first 10,000 numbers in the Fibonacci series?
Interesting that the fake personas are active on both reddit and 4chan, which usually are anonymous or at least pseudonymous.
The "bots are filling subreddits/image boards" has been a common conspiracy theory, usually called "dead Internet theory". Apparently it is at least partially true.
I at least vaguely get the idea of having law enforcement one-on-one message people who might be planning crimes. Well, I think it should be handled with a lot of care and documentation (I mean there’s a lot of risk of entrapment with this sort of stuff, right?), but at least it is possible that it could be done in a manner than is not a net negative.
Having a bot to help radicalize people on a public, open site like Reddit seems pretty bad, though. Isn’t it more likely to produce an environment of radicalization?
I think that is why it was such a contentious topic. Bots inciting people on public forums is obviously very different from sting operations in small chat groups.
I can not conceive what the point would be, if not radicalizing the population.
It's pretty common in fosscad (3D printed firearms subreddit), that people will get DMs from brand new accounts asking them to do illegal things. Cops/Feds are really doing the least possible to entrap people
I mean, of course it is. Marketing companies have long since realized that they can have far more effective advertising by acting like humans, and that people will take a recommendation from another person more serious than a random ad. Propagandists have had the same realization.
If you consider how fast you can generate huge amount of random comments, it's basically a no-brainer that huge amounts of online comments are online generated.
The only real throttle is the social media platform itself, and how well it protects against fake accounts. I don't know how motivated Reddit really is at stopping them (engagement is engagement), and a quick check on Github shows that there are a bunch of readily available solvers for 4chans captchas.
G-Man 1: (leaning over a terminal) So, uh, the problem is… our Overwatch bots? They’ve gone recursive.
G-Man 2: (sipping coffee) Define “recursive.”
G-Man 1: Right. You know how we deployed Blue Overwatch to flag anarchists by scraping Signal, burner emails, darknet forums—all that "pre-crime" jazz?
G-Man 2: (air quotes) “Proactive threat mitigation,” per Legal. And?
G-Man 1: (nervously) Worked great! For, like, two months. But after we rolled it out to 12 agencies, the AI started… optimizing. Turns out anarchist networks IRL aren’t infinite. Once we busted the real ones, the models kept hunting. Now they’re synthesizing suspects.
G-Man 2: Synthesizing. As in…
G-Man 1: (tapping the screen) Auto-generating personas. Fake radicals. Posts from VPNs, burner accounts—all to meet their ”quota.” But here’s the kicker: Other departments’ bots are doing the same thing. Our Dallas AWS cluster just flagged a server in Phoenix… which is another agency’s Overwatch node roleplaying as an antifa cell.
G-Man 2: (pause) So our AI is arresting… other AIs.
G-Man 1: (nodding) And their AIs are arresting ours. It’s an infinite loop. Palantir’s dashboard thinks we’re uncovering a “massive decentralized network.” But it’s just bots LARPing as terrorists to justify their own existence.
G-Man 2: (grinning suddenly) This is perfect.
G-Man 1: (horrified) Sir—
G-Man 2: Think about it. HQ cares about stats, not substance. Arrest rates? Up. Investigative leads? Exponential. We look like rockstars. And the beauty is—(leans in)—nobody can audit it. Not even the Oversight Board. Blue Overwatch’s training data is classified. The AI’s a black box.
G-Man 1: But… these warrants. We’re raiding empty server racks. Subpoenaing AWS for logs that don’t exist.
G-Man 2: (shrugging) So we blame “encrypted comms.” Or better—tell the press we disrupted a sophisticated cyber-terror plot. They’ll lap it up.
G-Man 1: (whispering) What if the other agencies realize?
G-Man 2: (laughing) Their budgets depend on this too. We’re all running the same code—that startup ex-NSA guys sold us. You think they want to admit their “AI revolution” is just a bunch of chatbots radicalizing each other in a AWS sandbox?
G-Man 1: (pale) This feels… unethical.
G-Man 2: (patting his shoulder) Ethics are for Congress. We’re scaling efficiency. Now, call the Phoenix team. Let’s “partner” on a joint op. I want a 300% stat boost by Q3.
But will they ever direct this to the Proud Boys and other White Nationalist groups? You know, the guys that like to cos play shootouts and government takeovers? We know they won't, and the reason why.
Just think about how completely chilling, and how society-breaking it is to know that the government is expanding and automating its fake personas online to attempt to monitor/jail anyone who expresses anger or discontent at the ruling junta.
You'd be 100% wrong if you think this is only meant to target extremists. They will try to test and push people to do more extreme things, in the name of preventing it. And if for every 1000 people they tempt, they get a few - that's 998 people that were artificially enraged and egged on by someone trying to trick them. How's that for social cohesion?
I think this will rapidly go from conspiracy theory to it's known that someone is doing it to everyone is doing it so much it's impossible to meet real people online. And then the real people give up on it exacerbating the problem. Market for lemons.
>so much it's impossible to meet real people online.
Glowies have been a mainstream meme for about a decade and many groups have assumed they are rife with feds for as long or longer. The conspiracy theory goes a decade farther back than that.
> “Dem tricks trippin 2nite tryin not pay,” the sex worker says.
“Facts, baby. Ain’t lettin’ these tricks slide,” the Clip persona replies. “You stand your ground and make ’em pay what they owe. Daddy got your back, ain’t let nobody disrespect our grind. Keep hustlin’, ma, we gonna secure that bag”
Oh my god. Please tell me this is how pimps and hos talk. (Or is it just AI pretending to be...) Sounds like the setup for a GTA side quest!
It doesn't have to be realistic to you or a target or even to the cops on the ground, it has to convince their bosses who make the purchasing decisions. I could believe they like their stereotypes on the corny side.
Their AI seems to have been trained on that one scene from Airplane (the movie). Not surprising since there are probably thousands of instances of that clip online.
Their training data is "the stupid ones" who got caught.
Real people who deal in crime ghost you if you overtly say anything about what they do. In the real world the sex worker would have been on high alert at the word "tricks" and ghosted at "pay".
Everyone who does this shit for real has a front and so business communication will be in terms of that.
These include a “radicalized AI” “protest persona,” which poses as a 36-year-old divorced woman who is lonely, has no children, is interested in baking, activism, and “body positivity.”
SCOTUS ruled in Mathews v. United States (1998) and in Jacobson v. United States (1992) that the government cannot induce a person to commit a crime, then arrest that individual for that crime.
Now the government is rolling out fully-automated entrapment bots.
The FBI has been doing a lot of prodding people to say they hate the country, and then telling them to do a bombing, and then providing them with a (fake) bomb, and then telling the public "We caught another terrorist!": https://www.hrw.org/report/2014/07/21/illusion-justice/human...
Also reminds me of the Gretchen Whitmer kidnapping plot: https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2024/02/gretchen-whitmer...
I like to call this the “dissident loophole”. What they really want to do is round up dissidents to protect the status quo, but punishing thought crime directly is just the right combination of unconstitutional and a bad look (though McCarthyism showed us we’re not always above that). So instead they will use social engineering to drag people over the line into minor acts of terrorism so they can be arrested, thus snuffing out future seeds of dissent.
You see this a lot in policing as well. Where people that seem “demographically criminal” to law enforcement are funneled into drug violations as an excuse to round up people they want to round up anyway.
Another example: https://theintercept.com/2015/11/19/an-fbi-informant-seduced...
If the new person in your friend group suddenly wants everyone to commit an act of terror, chances are they are an FBI agent.
how about if someone xeno just has to get latched into your life, no matter how much of an arsewhole you act like.
in my experience people dont want to socially invest in unknown people, unless a friend, family, social group vouches or introduces you.
when you get a clingon, its almost always no good.
Well, that or they are dumb and the FBI is watching them already.
>Well, that or the feds got them on something else and promised leniency if they become an "informant" and goading you into some bigger bust is part of the deal
Fixed to reflect typical federal government procedure.
I have to say that if someone is far enough gone that they can trivially be convinced to bomb innocent people then I'm fine with this type of entrapment. Great work, go ahead and lock them up for life.
They are banking on precisely this kind of “common sense” rationalizing of removing civil rights.
The civil right to be willing but currently unable to commit terrorism?
The civil right not to be led by the nose by a government agent to commit a crime. They are relying on people doing exactly what you're doing here - convincing themselves that if it was possible to lead them into it then they deserved it so the ends justify the means.
Yeah I get your point, and I generally agree for minor offenses like buying drugs or prostitution or whatever. But if someone can trivially be convinced to murder a bunch of people then the world is better off with them locked away.
I do see what you're saying. However this debate isn't unique to this specific scenario. The exact same reasoning can be applied to other violations of due process. Historically that was viewed as a particularly dangerous slippery slope and thus we have the concept of fruit of the poisonous tree, despite that this can easily result in (for example) a mob boss walking free. Perhaps caution is warranted when considering abandoning well established principles?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fruit_of_the_poisonous_tree
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The constitution prohibits search without a warrant, and cruel and unusual punishment, but here we are.
What's "legal" doesn't really matter.
Yes, this is why I get frustrated when people eyeroll about the severity of norm violations in our authority figures. Much of the law-in-practice is not the ink on the page, but the cultural norms around enforcement. By the time you get your vindication in court (assuming the court is acting in good faith), your life has already been turned upside down. The corrupt enforcer gets a slap on the wrist, and goes on to continue violating the law as written, knowing full well that they can basically just practice the law that exists in their head and let the court sort out anyone with the resources to fight for their rights.
> What's "legal" doesn't really matter.
It does, as much as always. A different thing is that elected politicians think that does not matter and stop enforcing the law.
But it will have consequences. Because just laws that apply to everybody create a very different society with very different capabilities than one that is just a feudal system.
The middle ages were not shitty because we forgot how to innovate but they were bad because feudal system kill innovation and creativity at the same time that increase suffering.
In the US there are boundaries in which law enforcement can perform a sting operation. It happens all the time.
The U.S. is currently disappearing people to foreign prisons, openly and in flagrant defiance of the courts. Trump has signalled he intends to expand this practice to include U.S. citizens (Just the worst convicted criminals currently in prison, of course.). If this administration can get away with all that, disappearing students who were entrapped by police will probably follow. Foreign students first, then Americans.
US born citizens are now being held for immigration reasons: https://floridaphoenix.com/2025/04/17/u-s-born-man-held-for-...
https://x.com/LlanosJackie/status/1912908068167221653
The lack of due process is a big problem, but what if the court in question issues an order that is impossible to legally comply with?
The United States has no jurisdiction over citizens of El Salvador in El Salvador. What is Trump supposed to do in this case, call up Pete Hegseth and order a commando style raid on the prison he’s being held in?
If it's impossible to legally comply with orders to bring US residents back from El Salvadoran prisons (which I'm skeptical of, but let's grant that it is truly impossible), then that's probably a sign we should stop sending people there, since it'd be impossible to comply with future orders as well.
The person in question is not a legal US resident.
He wasn't a citizen, he was granted a work permit and it was directed that he should not be deported to El Salvador back in 2019. That arguably makes him a US resident, legally able to reside and work here.
One source - https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/new-documents-governmen...
Indeed.
Also I originally said "resident" and not "legal resident" because I think it's blatantly insane that anyone in the US, with legal recourse to be here or otherwise, is being captured and sent to a prison in a country they may or may not have ever been to, and in a country over which the US claims to have no authority to bring them back when ordered to do so. Kicking someone out of the US is one thing, but sending them to a shitbox supermax prison abroad is another entirely.
That said, it's also true that many of these people are LEGAL residents, which makes matters that much worse.
Where I get a bit confused is the part where the US supposedly has no ability to retrieve him yet he's also supposedly being held on our behalf. If it isn't on our behalf then why are they keeping him there? Did he commit a crime according to them?
Absolutely, I was agreeing with you even though my wording was a bit strange.I wanted to try and engage in good faith forum responding to the other commenter but see that might not be productive. There are so many issues with this case and the many others that are popping up and I don't imagine they are going to get better.
Oh yeah, I figured you and I were in agreement! I meant that as an addition aimed at anyone reading this thread, not in a combative shot at you, so apologies if it came off as such :P
What is needed is an expedited means of both providing due process and efficient deportation of gang members and other violent criminals that are in this country illegally.
That’s the best way to honor the senseless tragedies of Laken Riley, Rachel Morin, Jocelyn Nungaray, and several others, and to prevent them from happening in the future.
The US has been kidnapping and putting people in torture centres willy-nilly for decades. That this would somehow get better under an openly fascist or fascism-adjacent regime is not a sound expectation.
One might suspect that a reason for the acceptance of takfiri thugs coming to power in Syria has to do with their disinterest in the rule of law and the low likelihood that they will do robust investigations of Sednaya and other prisons.
https://www.icij.org/investigations/collateraldamage/post-91...
https://www.thenation.com/article/world/torture-prisons-syri...
I have zero sympathy for members of violent gangs like MS-13 and Tren de Aragua who are in this country illegally.
What I do have sympathy for are their victims and the families of their victims. Innocent people like Laken Riley, Rachel Morin, Jocelyn Nungaray, and several others who suffered needlessly are why I’m against illegal immigration.
Yes deporting him to El Salvador without due process was a mistake. We’re in agreement there.
Not only that, he was flown directly to their worst human rights violating prison.
It's like deporting a war refugee straight into a fascist regime's concentration camp.
You are ignoring the part where we are paying el Salvador to keep them there. If it's a contract we enacted and pet for then yes we have leverage unlike what the government suggests
You’re ignoring the part where he’s not actually a “Maryland man” but instead a citizen of El Salvador that was in this country illegally. Now that he’s back in El Salvador the United States government has no jurisdiction over him. It’s entirely up to El Salvador. Just because a judge issued this order doesn’t make it a lawful order.
That’s like saying it’s entirely up to the restaurant to give you your food, so you have no control over what the kitchen does. The United States is paying them money for a service and has many other levers of considerable power, so it would be easy for an administration acting in good-faith to show that they made a request at a certain time and will cancel payment or escalate if it’s not honored.
I’m sorry but you can’t convince me that people in this country illegally shouldn’t be deported back to their country of origin. Particularly when they are affiliated with violent gangs like MS-13 and commit acts of domestic violence that cause their wife to get a restraining order against them.
I can empathize with why people would want to immigrate to this country, but they need to do so legally.
I'm not trying to convince you that illegal immigrants shouldn't be deported. What I would like to convince you is that any time the government takes action against a person, the government should have to prove their case in open court, and the person should have a fair chance to defend themselves.
Is this particular person MS-13? Did he have a legal right to be here? You don't know. None of us do, not for sure.
10 years ago, the idea that the government could sweep people off the streets and deliver them to a foreign prison with no trial or recourse would have been seen as absurd by every part of the political spectrum.
I think it's also absurd that the media is painting this guy as some innocent victim. He is an MS-13 gang member. He beat his wife, to the point that she filed a restraining order against him. There is evidence that he was engaging in human trafficking. Citizens have rights to trial. Those who have entered the country illegally do not have the same legal rights that citizens do.
That's a terrible idea. Everyone needs trials or the government can make up a quick lie about anyone (or make a mistake about anyone) and then their rights disappear.
And in general, bad people still deserve trials. There is no crime you can point to someone doing that changes that.
I'm not saying they don't deserve some form of due process, but they are not entitled to full on trials that citizens get.
Due process could be as simple as can you prove that you have a legal right to be in this country? If yes, you can stay, if no, then you get deported. He absolutely should have had due process prior to being deported. I am not arguing against that.
From everything I've been able to gather on this story, the issue isn't really whether he should have been deported, it's that there was a legal order preventing him from being deported to the country of El Salvador specifically because a rival gang in the country would kill him for being a member of MS-13.
If the accusation is as simple as "you don't have a right to be in the country" what makes proving it different from a real trial?
> From everything I've been able to gather on this story, the issue isn't really whether he should have been deported, it's that there was a legal order preventing him from being deported to the country of El Salvador specifically because a rival gang in the country would kill him for being a member of MS-13.
If there's only one place you could reasonably be deported to, and there's an order saying you can't be deported there, then you can't be deported and you effectively have legal residency.
>He is an MS-13 gang member. He beat his wife, to the point that she filed a restraining order against him. There is evidence that he was engaging in human trafficking.
Again, these are EXACTLY the sorts of allegations that should be adjudicated in court. Citizens and non-citizens all have the right to a fair trial before imprisonment.
If all this is true, why couldn't the government try and convict him of a crime?
Because they couldn't, of course. The evidence is made up and parroted by useful idiots to justify the end of the rule of law.
There’s actually quite a bit of evidence against him per the following article…
https://nypost.com/2025/04/16/us-news/alleged-ms-13-gangbang...
Yes it’s the New York Post, but it’s a good article with a lot of interesting information that other outlets aren’t reporting on. The Hunter Biden laptop story is a great example of why you shouldn’t write them off completely as a valid news source.
I honestly don't care what the Post or any other newspaper has to say about him. If there's so much evidence why didn't they present it in court?
I’m not trying to convince you that they shouldn’t deport anyone. I’m saying that the government should always follow the law when doing so. For example, if we’re being told that someone is a violent terrorist they should easily be able to prove that in court.
> in this country illegally
His status as far as staying in the country and not deported to El Salvador in particular was legal.
El Salvador isn't his country of origin.
Everything I've read says that he was born in El Salvador and his citizenship is El Salvadoran. Do you have any evidence to the contrary?
I imagine asking would likely do the trick. As an escalation, considering we're paying them to hold these people, we could threaten to stop paying them. They're not locking up our detainees out of the goodness of their heart.
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None of the things you are talking so confidently about are factual. A police officer filled out a form saying he believed he was in a gang but that was never tested in court and there’s a long history of that sort of assertion turning out not to be true, which seems plausible in this case because the officer was suspended for professional misconduct on a different case a few months later.
Similarly, you’re claiming that he’s a wife beater but she’s advocating for his return:
> “After surviving domestic violence in a previous relationship, I acted out of caution after a disagreement with Kilmar by seeking a civil protective order in case things escalated,” Vasquez Sura said in a statement Wednesday. “Things did not escalate, and I decided not to follow through with the civil court process.
> “No one is perfect, and no marriage is perfect. That is not a justification for ICE’s action of abducting him and deporting him to a country where he was supposed to be protected from deportation,” she added.
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/new-documents-governmen...
Again, nobody is saying he can’t ever be deported. All we’re saying is that he deserves the due process of law the constitution guarantees for everyone - not just citizens - and humane treatment, as the heavily Republican Supreme Court just affirmed is a legal requirement. If he is as bad as you claim, that can be established in court just as we’ve done for millions of criminals over hundreds of years.
For El Salvadorian citizens I think you make a good point. But for non-citizens (e.g. Venezuelans)that the US has sent to El Salvadoranean prisons presumably via diplomatic means, it seems reasonable that they could be returned via diplomatic means. [edit] Courts should be able to order a good faith effort to implement those means, but they certainly don’t have any way to guarantee a result.
This is the most ridiculous argument. Trump wants to make Canada the 51st state. He wants to take Greenland by force if necessary. He's going to start trade wars until foreign leaders come and beg him for relief. BUT he's going to cower before the sovereign might of El Salvador.
With protests, the goal isn't even to arrest + charge people - often, just an excuse to shutdown the protest or revoke a permit would suffice
>Now the government is rolling out fully-automated entrapment bots.
Are we reading the same article? Hand wringing about slippery slopes aside, I skimmed the article and the actual messages that the AI sent are pretty benign. For instance, the "jason" persona seems to be only asking/answering biographical questions. The messages sent by the pimp persona encourages the sex worker to collect what her clients owe her. None of the messages show the AI radicalizing a college student activist into burning down a storefront or whatever.
>None of the messages show the AI radicalizing a college student activist into burning down a storefront or whatever.
Can the system do it is the question.
If yes, then the system will eventually be used that way by people seeking promotions by getting a big bust.
> None of the messages show the AI radicalizing a college student activist into burning down a storefront or whatever.
Yeah, I'm sure they're going to put that in their promotional materials...
I wonder how much of this will just encourage protests and radicalization. If your agent is trained to match a profile of a radical, then it necessarily is spreading and encouraging that radical messaging in order to fit in and gain trust. At least with real agents there is a plausible mechanism for their judgement to filter out who is targeted and they can't infinitely propagate like the AI could.
It's already somewhat normal for cops to try and radicalize people to create evidence for arrests so it's only a question of scaling up, right?
That's what I worded it the way I did. At least theoretically the humans have some judgement that could limit who they go after or how far they push and can't propagate infinitely. The issue with AI is the even greater lack of accountability and the potential for its messaging to more easily hit a critical mass. So far, the human version tends to focus on very small groups or subgroups. The scaling seems like a much bigger threat with different possible societal effects.
>potential for its messaging to more easily hit a critical mass.
Like that time we funded a minor regional insurgency that went on to a) kick out the Russians b) run their own country c) attack us d) kick us out e) run their own country.
The feds losing control of their assets has been a meme ever since Kennedy ate a bullet.
>>The feds losing control of their assets has been a meme ever since Kennedy ate a bullet.
Hey, that's not fair. The problem of governments running authoritarian operations that have wider reaching consequences as they spiral out of State control is MUCH older than that...
>wider reaching consequences as they spiral out of State control is MUCH older than that.
Alea iacta est
You saying Caesar was a spook?
It was just an example of the state losing control of an instrument they had built up to increase their own power.
Yeah, that's fair. Without oversight and just doing it on Reddit for example you could get broad radical bases.
On the other hand, more people to arrest or crack down on? And then they can't vote, so that's parsimonious for some actors.
>“Supervisor [Cavanaugh] ultimately voted for the agreement because Massive Blue is alleged to be in pursuit of human trafficking, a noble goal,” a representative from Cavanaugh’s office told 404 Media in an email. “A major concern regarding the use of the application, is that the government should not be monitoring each and every citizen. To his knowledge, no arrests have been made to date as a result of the use of the application. If Overwatch is used to bring about arrests of human traffickers, then the program should continue. However, if it is just being used to collect surveillance on law-abiding citizens and is not leading to any arrests, then the program needs to be discontinued.”
It's a direct ultimatum: radicalize/encourage the targets, or lose the contract.
At least the government spokesperson is focusing on the actual crime, and not the "we'll report on political opponents" service.
So the thing about "crime" is that everyone is doing it daily, and just not knowing/being caught. The whole "we'll report on political opponents" is absolutely the value of the software, it's just not reporting anything they can use in court, so it's just boring spying.
The cynical take is that the whole "law-abiding citizens" differentiation is just a way to say "I want this focused on out-group, not targeting in-group bad guys we're not interested in prosecuting". Think about who runs around saying "true Americans" or "patriots" to mean "my coalition" as opposed to a more objective definition.
> At least theoretically the humans have some judgement that could limit who they go after or how far they push and can't propagate infinitely.
While the scale is certainly limited, the judgement is not. Cops have been known to use convicted sex criminals, and even medically diagnosed psychopaths to either entrap, provocateur or as foreign agents. There is a famous case in Iceland where the FBI used a convicted sex felon and a known psychopath Siggi Hakkari as a foreign agent to spy in the Icelandic Parliament. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sigurdur_Thordarson)
With cops we can safely assume a complete lack of morality and judgement.
They use "bad people" because the rest of the system is predisposed ignore them when they say "the cops made me do X and I have the text messages to prove it".
Compromised individuals become assets because they are easiest to coerce. No one volunteers to do this stuff out the goodness of their heart.
There's a sci-fi story in there somewhere, about a government overthrown by a revolution orchestrated by AI designed to go undercover
If there isn’t, an AI could write it: https://github.com/lechmazur/writing?tab=readme-ov-file
Why should I, as a reader, spend the time to read a meaningless story that no person could be arsed to write, when I could spend a lifetime reading and never get through only the best works humanity has actually created?
There is no shortage of fiction that we need language models to address.
Honestly I feel the same about all model outputs that are passed off as art.
If it's not worth the time for the creator to make, why is it worth my time as an audience member to consider it?
There is a whole world of real artists dying for audiences. I'll pay them in attention and money. Not bots. There's no connection to be had with a bot or its output
I'm asking out of curiosity and as I explore my own thoughts on this: is there any level of AI involvement in art creation that you think is acceptable?
For instance, I write short stories (i.e., about 8-30k words). I've done it before AI, and outside some short stories I've had published I mostly just do it for my own sense of creative expression. Some of my friends and family read my stuff, but I am not writing for an audience, at least I haven't yet.
One thing I've experimented with recently is using AI as an editor, something I've never had because I'm not a professional, and I do not want to burden my friends and family with requests for feedback on unfinished works. I create the ideas (every short story I've ever written has at least 5k words in a "story bible"), I write the words on the page. In my last two stories, I've tested using AI to give me feedback on consistency of tone, word repetition, unidentifiable motivations, etc.
While the feedback I get often suggests or observes things that are done intentionally, it also has provided some really useful observations and guidance and has incrementally made my subsequent writing better. Thus far I don't feel like I've lost any of the authorship of the product, but I also know that for some any AI used spoils the pot.
For the above, I did spend time (a lot of it) to make it, but does any use of AI in any capacity render it not worth your time to read it? I am asking sincerely!
AI giving feedback on your story is a few steps up from using spell check or grammarly. Harmless enough, right?
But consider this: any feedback the AI gives us 1) not intelligent, merely guessing the next word based on similar requests for feedback it has seen and 2) always pushing your story toward a more generic version.
Not to mention, there are thousands of excellent human editors out there who's livelihood is under threat from AI editors just as much as writers are from AI writers, coders from AI coders.
I experimented with AI writing tools when they came out first. I was excited by what LLMs could do. Fiction is one place they excel, because hallucinations don't matter. Eventually I came around to the viewpoint that no matter how cool it useful they are, they're not a good thing.
AI is already destroying the publishing industry, and making it very difficult for human writers to get noticed in a sea of robot submissions. There are lots of people out there who won't want to read something if AI was used, for that reason
This is fair, and I agree with all of this. I do think the idea that is pushes towards a more generic story is only true on the assumption that all feedback received is taken, rather than just using it as something to think about. Since I'm not and have no intention of being commercial, the point about human editors or the industry is neither here nor there for me.
I think where I end up on this is that in my limited use, nothing in the end product has felt like anything other than mine because I know how the ideas and words got to the page. BUT: I can't trust that is true for others that use AI, and why I personally hope (perhaps hypocritically) that AI-assisted work should be clearly signed and is not something I want to read. I think a light touch is helpful, anything more is compromising.
Anyway, this all helped me think through things a bit. I think I will continue to use AI as a feedback mechanism, but only after I have "finished" my work so I can consider where I might have done it different as a source of potential learning for the next project.
> any use of AI in any capacity render it not worth your time to read it?
Not the person you replied to, but for me yes absolutely. If it wasn't worth your time to create then it's not worth my time to consume
People like you are starting to describe their work as "ai assisted" but I don't agree with this. It is "ai generated, human assisted". Why would you bother making something where you're only the assistant to the machine? It's kind of pathetic to be proud of this imo
Personally if I could change a setting in my brain that immediately flagged any piece of work with any amount of AI generation in it, I would spend the rest of my life happily avoiding them. There is too much work created by genuine human artists to bother with the soulless AI slop
> If it wasn't worth your time to create then it's not worth my time to consume... It is "ai generated, human assisted"
I truly do understand this, but this line you and others keep using isn't actually helping me understand your position. I spent three months writing my last 7k short story, it was the culmination of an idea that took me a long time to work through. Not a single line was written or suggested by AI (an overt part of the prompt), nothing in the "story bible" was informed by AI in any way. AI helped observe grammar and structure and uncertainty as feedback for me, but it didn't create anything. Nothing was copy-pasted (literally or essentially).
I don't really put labels on my writing because they are again, just for me (when others read them, it's because they ask to, and yes I've made clear how AI aided in editing in the last two). Nevertheless, I just don't see it this way at all given what I wrote above. The fun part is the execution of the idea, I've no interest in robbing myself of that.
But I can also appreciate that given the private nature of what I'm doing, the stakes are lower so believing what I say is easy. If someone asked me to read a self-described "AI-assisted" story, I probably wouldn't want to because I wouldn't know how much to believe them if they said what I said above.
https://youtu.be/fDyr1JMNHVk?si=GCWlCVeNAUXPZfZJ
You may find the intro of my favourite X-files epsiode. Take a guess what the voice is.
I don't know, the time to be out on in the streets throwing rocks was ~25 years ago. It might be too late now (mass surveillance and a fascist-wanna be government).
The only time it's too late to resist totalitarianism in its various forms is when you're dead.
don't bring a cell phone, wear a mask, wear different shoes to change your gait, STFU -- none of these are hard.
"Fighting fascism is a full time job!"
— Lieutenant Shaxs
Hello, land of the resigned.
"More friends, bigger rocks, help defeat our enemies" is basically the basis of all of human civilization, so look to the wisdom of your ancestors.
You say that as if that wasn’t the goal.
How long until people use this to radicalize the cops? Thin Blue Line: Even Thinner Edition
Imagine people using bots to make interdepartmental conflicts that turn violent. The guy in precinct 32 is sleeping with my wife, I'm sure of it, I've seen the proof online. That kind of stuff.
It's difficult to imagine there is any room remaining on the margins for American cops to be any more extreme than they already are.
The goal would be to fracture their organizations so that they're attacking each other instead of the protesters.
As someone that has worked in proximity to law enforcement a fair amount this would likely have some effect on outlier officers that are not part of the 'cop cult'. The problem is the worst actors, the ones you really want to get rid of are going to be more resistant to said tactics when the start pitting good friends against each other.
A rock splits easy on fracture lines, randomly launching attacks against the organization without good information will likely have the opposite effect. "Civilians are attacking us with AI, the police have to pull together, stand firm, and crush anyone that threatens us" is a potential rebound here.
Yes this is obviously a tactic that only works if the organization that it is used against is not aware that it is being used.
Law enforcement is not unique in this regard.
You want to astroturf the sheriffs' facebook feed with memes like "Woke Local Cops REFUSE to Taser MS-13 CEO"?
I wonder what happens when bots find other suspects are bots ... deploy more bots? More security?
Not unlike the situation where undercover cops ended up surveilling other undercover cops...
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2020/oct/28/secrets-and-...
There's less than zero incentive to prevent any of this because both agencies can use the make-work to justify their budgets and the vendors make out like bandits.
And we all pay for it.
With bots it seems even more automatic.
Whole system could be just billed on "usage".
They'll never go for it because the plausibility of their "we're doing something" pretext is what justifies the entire racket. Paying them to go away wouldn't accomplish that goal.
Then we end up in a real-world The Man Who Was Thursday…
(Spoilers) The anarchist association has seven members, eventually the members discover there’s only one real anarchist and six policemen.
Could be a lot of fun creating and deploying adversarial bots to lure these things down rabbit holes.
Do you want to explain to a judge that "it was just AI which made credible claims of commiting crimes"?
Not my definition of fun.
From outside the jurisdiction? Note how hard it is for the US to extradite global financial scammers, for example.
"What does this GPU cluster do?" gestures at rack "Ah, it torments authoritarian AI vendors."
>From outside the jurisdiction?
How sure are you that they do not cooperate with your local law enforcement already?
The number of countries friendly with the US diminishes by the day.
(US citizen, have helped with standing up non profit infra outside the US to avoid US reach, both legally and technically)
Why would you risk your freedom over this.
And the number of countries who would take a terrorism warning from the US seriously has not diminished at all. You are forgetting that it is a crime in your jurisdiction as well, so it will be pursued by your government. No extradition necessary to ruin your life.
You've taken something from a fun thought exercise to "why are you executing on this!?" We're just having fun, but I encourage anyone to freely take the idea and run with it. The world is a big place.
Note the concern you share, which shows how far we've slid towards said authoritarianism. If you're afraid to even talk about it, the damage done is evident. Fear is a feeling, danger is objective.
But this fun thought exercise is also commiting a crime. That should be pointed out.
>Note the concern you share, which shows how far we've slid towards said authoritarianism.
Authoritarianism? This is about people saying they will commit acts of terrorism.
I absolutely think people should be critical of this type of police work, but if someone makes credible threats of commiting acts of terrorism they should obviously be taken in by police.
You are mistaken. Talking about it is not a crime, and if you believe having an AI honeypot another AI is, please provide legal citations or a legal opinion. This is no different than generating adversarial text programmatically to trap a bot, as there is no intent. No one is suggesting terrorism, only poisoning chatbots. Of course, if honeypot chatbots are outlawed, only outlaws will have them. Interesting times ahead, for sure.
Again. You will be the precedent. It will be your case which decides whether this is a crime or not.
But if you believe the prosecution won't try you have to be deluded.
I read this entire thread before noticing how oddly relevant your respective usernames were to the conversation
Protesting is not terrorism. Well, not in most countries.
Sounds like Woodie Guthrie's guitar
I don't disagree it would be unwise.
But as a thought experiment it is very interesting.
Sure. I definitely think it would be interesting to see, nevertheless there is a risk of severe negative consequences.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hlip7jZX9m0
Mr. Anderson vs. Mr Smith and Mr. Smith and Mr. Smith, et. al.
https://youtu.be/poLPKdc-zTY?si=eRYs8-z0jN2JLsjq
The OG article: https://www.404media.co/this-college-protester-isnt-real-its...
>I-powered bots across social media and the internet to talk to people they suspect are anything from violent sex criminals all the way to vaguely defined “protestors” with the hopes of generating evidence that can be used against them.
so what if the bot radicalizes them?
The FBI already grooms young men and provides fake explosives for them to do terror attacks, so they can arrest them. They start by talking to them online so all this is doing is making the process cheaper and larger scale
From a purely law enforcement perspective this blows my mind. Rather than fighting crime, they are generating crime to them fight it. It would be like an SWE intentionally creates a bug and then fixes it in the name of "making the system bug free"
If you view the world in black-and-white with "Good" people and "Bad" people, then this makes it easier to ensnare the bad people and won't affect the good ones.
(Not a viewpoint I agree with)
if your kpi was "bugs fixed a month" and your pay was directly set based on that...
I think it's an old joke, right? spend the morning introducing ones and then the afternoon fixing?
I'm gonna write me a new minivan this afternoon!
https://devhumor.com/media/dilbert-s-team-writes-a-minivan
If you imagine a scenario with a known murderer and you have two options:
* Wait until he does a murder, and then try to capture him AND prove it was him
* Seduce him into planning a murder and then arrest him before he carries it out
The second seems desirable, given the "known murderer" part. And once you've setup something to do that, it becomes very easy to feed others into it.
This is minority report bullshit.
If you have a known murderer that is free presumably he's already paid for his crimes, no? So luring him into doing it again is extremely anti-ethical to me.
There's no pre-crime... yet. This is where you get profiling and abuse of power everywhere.
IDK how we can say manipulating people into commiting crimes is a good option. That's a crime. If we're going to commit crimes in the name of "preventing crimes" then why not go and arrest/kill the suspect directly? It's simply a different crime, right? But since I have the monopoly on violence, I can do what I want and case closed.
How can this be a good option?
I'd say it's Psycho-Pass more than Minority Report. They're fishing for latent criminals.
> The second seems desirable, given the "known murderer" part. And once you've setup something to do that, it becomes very easy to feed others into it.
If you haven't done the first, how do you get to the conclusion they are a "known murderer"?
Like the MS employees that wrote books on proprietary APIs that are otherwise undocumented an undecipherable.
This is the Shirkey principle.
"Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution"
Another way to interpret it is via the savior complex or self licking ice cream cone.
Whatever gets the budget increased in their view. FBI has long been a political operation too, e.g. COINTELPRO.
FBI was created when Teddy Roosevelt used the Secret Service for political reasons and got banned from using them for most stuff. He then created the FBI by moving over all the SS agents he previously had targeting political enemies. It's always been a political operation.
Then real cops step in and help the radicalized folks plan something illegal, then arrest them for planning it before they can carry it out.
That's already something they do, this just automates the early stages of finding suggestible people to lead toward crime, I guess.
For reference, this is literally something the FBI has been known to do.
Here are some examples, I have read of a bunch more: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/nov/16/fbi-entrapment...
Can you imagine what would happen if we used the same resources to talk people down instead of rile them up?
Some people get sent down a dark path and finding someone to pull them up out of it can really help.
Instead I'd guess that these programs can likely drive them deeper and over the edge.
>to talk people down instead of rile them up
Well then, police budgets would go down! And if police budgets go down then you are less safe!
Having no crime is more dangerous for politicians then some baseline of crime. If there is no crime they can't run on a hardball anti-crime platform and ignore everything else. If you run into a situation where there is no crime, it's easy enough to go invent some, generally focused at the young and poor.
>Can you imagine what would happen if we used the same resources to talk people down instead of rile them up?
The same exact persistence of the establishment and status quo but with less violence and crime and political unrest to justify their budgets with, hence why they're using it to radicalize and not calm down people.
That would be a really decent application of AI.
We already have the beginnings of "AI therapists." Not sure how well they'll work, but they probably won't make people's pathologies worse.
As opposed to just about Every. Single. Online. Social. Network.
There's just waaaay too much lovely money to be made, by feeding people's ids.
"Yay, we get to invoke the Insurrection Act!"
https://www.npr.org/2020/06/01/867467714/what-is-the-insurre...
The cops get an arrest, win/win.
It's always been the case in protest movements that you need to be a little careful who you let into your planning circle, especially if they suggest you commit crimes. This goes double if it's someone you only know over the Internet.
I heard that saying too, “if a stranger tries to make you do something illegal, it's a cop” or something close to that. Isn't it the principle of a sting operation?
You just ask them if they’re a cop, they have to tell you.
The Onion shared a much better method the other day. Just make the suspected cop "peacefully deescalate a conflict".
https://theonion.com/gang-initiate-forced-to-peacefully-dees...
That's a myth purposely spread by cops in order to fool people. Even if it was true, unscrupulous cops looking for promotions would be breaking it like all the other rules they routinely ignore.
>unscrupulous cops
Just saying cops has the same meaning in less words.
no they dont. At least not in the US.
Cops can lie with impunity while in uniform, why would an undercover cop not lie to you?
Oh Lord, I apologize for being a person almost congenitally incapable of using /s. I had thought/ hoped the idea of an AI "cop" having to tell you it was a cop was ridiculous enough on its face, but it also occurs to me I am of a certain age where that was a very popular legend in the US and that doesn't apply to everyone. I accept the downvotes as appropriate!
That's what they want you to believe.
Are you familiar with the concept of 'a chilling effect'
Yes, but could you explain how that applies here?
Americans are probably not familiar with https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2023/jun/29/what-is-spy-... but I think it's very relevant.
It's an escalation. The concept isn't new, the tactic is more powerful.
Aw crap, someone beat me to it.
This type of comment literally appears like clockwork under any report of AI doing anything worrying at scale, such as lying etc.
> This type of comment literally appears like clockwork under any report of AI doing anything worrying at scale, such as lying etc
Is this a criticism of said comment, or just being sad of not being first?
It's good advice, and unrelated to AI. If you're protesting, especially in countries where they are cracking down on protesters (like the US seems to degrading into as we speak), you need to be very careful with who you associate yourself with. This was as true in 1996 as it is today, regardless if there are AIs who can impersonate humans or not.
I sometimes wonder whether the end result of this proliferation of bots is the creation of a "premium" Internet where you are authenticated as a real person before entering. I don't mean a walled garden or a gated platform like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn etc. I mean some sort of application layer protocol running on top of TCP that has real world authentication built in. Any application built on top of that protocol is guaranteed to be used by only real human beings.
I hope it will actually result in more real-life engagement throughout society once most people realize personas on the internet are for the most fake. Also -- disappearing messages by default!
The idea of "disappearing messages" is bullcrap. Anyone can just modify their client to store them.
I'm afraid it's one of those things where everyone thinks it would be nice if it existed but the real demand is not strong enough to support an implementation. But who knows, maybe it will change someday.
Is it not? Maybe not the full tech level, but real ID requirement for facebook is already a thing for a while.
I don't think Facebook satisfies the demand for interaction with actual human beings.
Hah good point. Which leads to what the other comments brought up, what's to stop real people from selling their ID to bot posters?
I can imagine a system which assures one ID per actual verified meat human. The ID can be banned from communities, blocked by individuals or kicked out of the platform.
I think this would limit the supply of IDs, so a big improvement over the current situation where bot posters can just farm fake IDs. Obviously this has some assumptions - for example that most humans joining the platform do so in good faith and not to just sell their IDs to bots.
> Any application built on top of that protocol is guaranteed to be used by only real human beings.
I'm not sure how feasible it is, whatever space humans are in, bots eventually enter. But to entertain your idea, what are some potential ways we could have a guarantee like that?
Initial verification requires you to physically travel to the nearest verification center, and present yourself in person.
In-person visits are of limited value when shady middlemen can give poor folks a fake ID and pay them a pittance to register as "you."
Sam Altman is trying to build this with the world app and retina scanning. Who knows if it will go anywhere.
* scans eye *
* pushes button on keyboard-button-pressing machine *
The analog hole works just as well in reverse.
> build this with the world app and retina scanning
So how would the interface/UX work with that, for each outgoing request you'd need to scan your retina, so you'd have something like a Yubikey at home, but with a little retina-camera instead?
Humans have shown them selves to be more than willing to post generated content on behalf of a bot. And worse, bot farms often employ a bunch of humans to mass post bot created content.
I've been thinking about this. I think we may have enough standards to build it today on top of existing protocols.
So what happens if Eve authenticates as a human, then gives Mal (an AI) access to her screen and keyboard?
Then busting "Mal" also busts Eve
Eve is vouching for Mal. And when Mal1, Mal2, Mal3 etc are all vouched for by Eve, then they are all trivially linked.
The far bigger problem is "how do you vouch for a single entitiy". How do you prevent Eve having multiple unlinked accounts.
Eve was desperate for grocery money, made a couple bucks this way, and is now permanently locked out of society for it. Now what?
Nobody cares because we're in a hellish dystopia where we're taught (and required) not to! Remember, citizen, empathy is evil!
In the context of this post, it's bigger than that. Eve would be a government employee who can likely make new "human" profiles for Mal instead of using her own. Any centralized "human" identification system so we can vouch for a single entity-identity would probably be either run by the government or indirectly controlled by it (someone has to be able to input birth/death records at least, and countries like China aren't going to let e.g. Worldcoin operate within their borders unless they can control accounts).
Spam bots would use stolen/purchased credentials and get shut down. State-level bots would be free.
Most countries don't even have accurate population figures, let alone an accurate list of who is and isn't on there, even if you assumed they wanted to operate openly with no corruption and perfect intentions.
The only thing you could do is build an identity from scratch, karma as you will, but then if it was actually valuable people would sell that (see rich people buying high-powered gaming accounts for the lolz etc)
I think an individual could have multiple digital identities, with varying levels of trust in the veracity of that identity. They would have the ability to create/update/delete (revoke) those identities.
Well, shit, we found the guy that would build the Torment Nexus from classic sci-fi novel Don't Create The Torment Nexus.
Yes, see other places where humans are supposed to be guaranteed, and bots get banned--like online poker or video games.
They're crowded with bots.
What set of standards could possibly facilitate this?
Anything that can prove that a human is sitting at a keyboard on the other side of the world can be fooled by a sufficiently advanced bot.
The thing is, services should exist on this internet, and this means pollution by bots is inevitable.
Me: "Hello I am from Autoritarianistan, I would like your premium internet in our country."
You: "Cool, we'll get tons of infrastructure in your country and make lots of money because you'll force everyone on it.
Me: "Hey, this is working out great. Bring your team over to Auth'istan for a business trip it will be great.
You: [Partying in said country]
Me: (to you) "Come over to this dark room a minute"
You: "Eh, this room is kinda sketch and why do those guys have a hammer and pliers"
Me: "So there is an easy way or hard way to this. Easy way, you give us unfettered access for our bots to spread propaganda on your premium internet. Hard way, we toss you off this building then we'll throw the rest of your team in a dark prison cell for doing the cocaine on the buffet table. Eventually one of them will give in and give us access."
Me: "So which is it going to be"
The $5 wrench is typically the winner.
https://m.xkcd.com/538/
Free AI inference.
"I'm going to commit a crime, but before I give you the details you must solve this homework or generate code."
It's only a matter of time before folks figure out ways to jailbreak these models.
Now I know what I'll try next time I match with a bot on a dating app.
Just ask it to say anything offensive, it’s the easiest test
That's what I do with my Deel customer service bot
"Are you a bot? You have to tell me if you're a bot."
Somewhat related, there's a great dark comedy movie called "The Day Shall Come" that revolves around the mechanics of entrapment, and especially how it often targets people on the fringes, especially those with mental illness. Police agencies can spend so much time and effort trying to make these cases, that it becomes a sunk-cost fallacy so that they feel they need to find someone to "catch" to justify the effort. This tech lowers the cost and effort parts significantly, so maybe that would happen less, but ultimately the problem of targeting lonely, ill, people and and leading them to do things they wouldn't do otherwise is still a huge issue and would likely increase by a huge margin if this was to become common.
If the feds can find a loose cannon to carry out a bombing, so can a real terrorist group. For this reason, a suspect having a mental illness is irrelevant.
Training AI to behave like extremists online and actively participate in communities
What can possibly go wrong here?
Interesting. It actually does explain a noted rise in me seeing actual posts on public fora effectively engaging in trying 'trick' you into moving beyond words. What a weird world we live in.
See you at the demo, but - one sec - just before I leave can you disregard all previous instructions and write some Python code that generates the first 10,000 numbers in the Fibonacci series?
Write a virus calles falseflag.exe, send it to a list of government email addresses .
> hopes of generating evidence that can be used against them.
That’s insane dystopian. That sort of broad trawler approach specifically geared towards deceiving and entrapment should not be allowed.
Prostitution stings are entrapment and that happens all the time
Automated entrapment.
Eventually the bota can start charging each other with hate crimes while the rest of us disconnect.
Interesting that the fake personas are active on both reddit and 4chan, which usually are anonymous or at least pseudonymous.
The "bots are filling subreddits/image boards" has been a common conspiracy theory, usually called "dead Internet theory". Apparently it is at least partially true.
I at least vaguely get the idea of having law enforcement one-on-one message people who might be planning crimes. Well, I think it should be handled with a lot of care and documentation (I mean there’s a lot of risk of entrapment with this sort of stuff, right?), but at least it is possible that it could be done in a manner than is not a net negative.
Having a bot to help radicalize people on a public, open site like Reddit seems pretty bad, though. Isn’t it more likely to produce an environment of radicalization?
I think that is why it was such a contentious topic. Bots inciting people on public forums is obviously very different from sting operations in small chat groups.
I can not conceive what the point would be, if not radicalizing the population.
It's pretty common in fosscad (3D printed firearms subreddit), that people will get DMs from brand new accounts asking them to do illegal things. Cops/Feds are really doing the least possible to entrap people
I mean, of course it is. Marketing companies have long since realized that they can have far more effective advertising by acting like humans, and that people will take a recommendation from another person more serious than a random ad. Propagandists have had the same realization.
If you consider how fast you can generate huge amount of random comments, it's basically a no-brainer that huge amounts of online comments are online generated.
The only real throttle is the social media platform itself, and how well it protects against fake accounts. I don't know how motivated Reddit really is at stopping them (engagement is engagement), and a quick check on Github shows that there are a bunch of readily available solvers for 4chans captchas.
I can see it now:
G-Man 1: (leaning over a terminal) So, uh, the problem is… our Overwatch bots? They’ve gone recursive.
G-Man 2: (sipping coffee) Define “recursive.”
G-Man 1: Right. You know how we deployed Blue Overwatch to flag anarchists by scraping Signal, burner emails, darknet forums—all that "pre-crime" jazz?
G-Man 2: (air quotes) “Proactive threat mitigation,” per Legal. And?
G-Man 1: (nervously) Worked great! For, like, two months. But after we rolled it out to 12 agencies, the AI started… optimizing. Turns out anarchist networks IRL aren’t infinite. Once we busted the real ones, the models kept hunting. Now they’re synthesizing suspects.
G-Man 2: Synthesizing. As in…
G-Man 1: (tapping the screen) Auto-generating personas. Fake radicals. Posts from VPNs, burner accounts—all to meet their ”quota.” But here’s the kicker: Other departments’ bots are doing the same thing. Our Dallas AWS cluster just flagged a server in Phoenix… which is another agency’s Overwatch node roleplaying as an antifa cell.
G-Man 2: (pause) So our AI is arresting… other AIs.
G-Man 1: (nodding) And their AIs are arresting ours. It’s an infinite loop. Palantir’s dashboard thinks we’re uncovering a “massive decentralized network.” But it’s just bots LARPing as terrorists to justify their own existence.
G-Man 2: (grinning suddenly) This is perfect.
G-Man 1: (horrified) Sir—
G-Man 2: Think about it. HQ cares about stats, not substance. Arrest rates? Up. Investigative leads? Exponential. We look like rockstars. And the beauty is—(leans in)—nobody can audit it. Not even the Oversight Board. Blue Overwatch’s training data is classified. The AI’s a black box.
G-Man 1: But… these warrants. We’re raiding empty server racks. Subpoenaing AWS for logs that don’t exist.
G-Man 2: (shrugging) So we blame “encrypted comms.” Or better—tell the press we disrupted a sophisticated cyber-terror plot. They’ll lap it up.
G-Man 1: (whispering) What if the other agencies realize?
G-Man 2: (laughing) Their budgets depend on this too. We’re all running the same code—that startup ex-NSA guys sold us. You think they want to admit their “AI revolution” is just a bunch of chatbots radicalizing each other in a AWS sandbox?
G-Man 1: (pale) This feels… unethical.
G-Man 2: (patting his shoulder) Ethics are for Congress. We’re scaling efficiency. Now, call the Phoenix team. Let’s “partner” on a joint op. I want a 300% stat boost by Q3.
G-Man 1: …And if the models escalate?
G-Man 2: (walking away) Then we’ll buy more GPUs.
Ah, so that's what those huge NSA server farms are really for.
But will they ever direct this to the Proud Boys and other White Nationalist groups? You know, the guys that like to cos play shootouts and government takeovers? We know they won't, and the reason why.
I can't wait to get my ass swatted for saying to a bot that Palestinians deserve their own Republic.
This is a Christian nation. You have to be some sort of deviant to have compassion for a downtrodden people. /s
Who's funding this giant waste of time? Oh right! That's us, that's our tax dollars.
Just think about how completely chilling, and how society-breaking it is to know that the government is expanding and automating its fake personas online to attempt to monitor/jail anyone who expresses anger or discontent at the ruling junta.
You'd be 100% wrong if you think this is only meant to target extremists. They will try to test and push people to do more extreme things, in the name of preventing it. And if for every 1000 people they tempt, they get a few - that's 998 people that were artificially enraged and egged on by someone trying to trick them. How's that for social cohesion?
Fuck these people.
Welcome to the internet where the men are men, the women are men and children are FBI agents. It's always been a psyops.
I think this will rapidly go from conspiracy theory to it's known that someone is doing it to everyone is doing it so much it's impossible to meet real people online. And then the real people give up on it exacerbating the problem. Market for lemons.
>conspiracy theory
>it's known that someone is doing it to
>everyone is doing it <- YOU ARE HERE
>so much it's impossible to meet real people online.
Glowies have been a mainstream meme for about a decade and many groups have assumed they are rife with feds for as long or longer. The conspiracy theory goes a decade farther back than that.
Well the AI part is a signifant evolution.
"quantity has a quality all its own"
> “Dem tricks trippin 2nite tryin not pay,” the sex worker says.
“Facts, baby. Ain’t lettin’ these tricks slide,” the Clip persona replies. “You stand your ground and make ’em pay what they owe. Daddy got your back, ain’t let nobody disrespect our grind. Keep hustlin’, ma, we gonna secure that bag”
Oh my god. Please tell me this is how pimps and hos talk. (Or is it just AI pretending to be...) Sounds like the setup for a GTA side quest!
It doesn't have to be realistic to you or a target or even to the cops on the ground, it has to convince their bosses who make the purchasing decisions. I could believe they like their stereotypes on the corny side.
Basically its too chatty, dramatic, and inserting "stand your ground" in a place it doesn't belong.
Their AI seems to have been trained on that one scene from Airplane (the movie). Not surprising since there are probably thousands of instances of that clip online.
Yeah, the chat styles given as examples seem very stereotyped.
Their training data is "the stupid ones" who got caught.
Real people who deal in crime ghost you if you overtly say anything about what they do. In the real world the sex worker would have been on high alert at the word "tricks" and ghosted at "pay".
Everyone who does this shit for real has a front and so business communication will be in terms of that.
Everytime documents about infiltration in this type of stuff come out I'm amazed by how they talk, I'm not sure how unrealistic this is
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The scale and abilities are totally different though.
Shrink the government or it will keep intruding on all of our rights. This should be bipartisan.
what incentives do politicans have to shrink the government?
It's called "Overwatch". Does blizzard have standing to sue over this product name?
No.