The Rise of the Chatbots

During the 2016 U.S. presidential race, a Russian "troll-farm" calling itself the Internet Research Agency sought to harm Hillary Clinton's election chances and help Donald Trump reach the White House by using Twitter to spread false news stories and other disinformation, according to a 2020 report from the Senate Intelligence Committee. Most of that content apparently was produced by human beings, a supposition supported by the fact that activity dropped off on Russian holidays. Soon, though, if not already, such propaganda will be produced automatically by artificial intelligence (AI) systems such as ChatGPT, a chatbot capable of creating human-sounding text. "Imagine a scenario where you have ChatGPT generating these tweets. The number of fake accounts you could manage for the same price would be much larger," says V.S. Subrahmanian, a professor of computer science at Northwestern University, whose research focuses on the intersection of AI and security problems.