The Existential Threat of AI-Enhanced Disinformation Operations

A recent Washington Post article about artificial intelligence (AI) briefly caught the publics' attention. A former engineer working for Google's Responsible AI organization went public with his belief that the company's chatbot was sentient. It should be stated bluntly: this AI is not a conscious entity. It is a large language model trained indiscriminately from Internet text that uses statistical patterns to predict the most probable sequence of words. While the tone of the Washington Post piece conjured all the usual Hollywood tropes related to humanity's fear of sentient technology (e.g., storylines from Ex Machina, Terminator, or 2001: A Space Odyssey), it also inadvertently highlighted an uncomfortable truth: As AI capabilities continue to improve, they will become increasingly effective tools for manipulating and fooling humans.