radicalization
The AI Civil War Is Here
The story unfolds so rapidly that it can all seem, at a glance, preordained. After transferring to Columbia last fall, as Chungin "Roy" Lee tells it, he used AI to cheat his way through school, used AI to cheat his way through internship interviews at Amazon and Meta--he received offers from both--and in the winter broadcasted his tool on social media. He was placed on probation, suspended, and, more keen on AI than education, dropped out this spring to found a start-up.That start-up, Cluely, markets the ability to "cheat on everything" using an AI assistant that runs in the background during meetings or sales calls. Last month, it finished a 15 million fundraising round led by Andreessen Horowitz, the storied venture-capital firm. Lee unapologetically believes that the arrival of omniscient AI is inevitable, that bots will soon automate every job.
Unifying the Extremes: Developing a Unified Model for Detecting and Predicting Extremist Traits and Radicalization
Lahnala, Allison, Varadarajan, Vasudha, Flek, Lucie, Schwartz, H. Andrew, Boyd, Ryan L.
The proliferation of ideological movements into extremist factions via social media has become a global concern. While radicalization has been studied extensively within the context of specific ideologies, our ability to accurately characterize extremism in more generalizable terms remains underdeveloped. In this paper, we propose a novel method for extracting and analyzing extremist discourse across a range of online community forums. By focusing on verbal behavioral signatures of extremist traits, we develop a framework for quantifying extremism at both user and community levels. Our research identifies 11 distinct factors, which we term ``The Extremist Eleven,'' as a generalized psychosocial model of extremism. Applying our method to various online communities, we demonstrate an ability to characterize ideologically diverse communities across the 11 extremist traits. We demonstrate the power of this method by analyzing user histories from members of the incel community. We find that our framework accurately predicts which users join the incel community up to 10 months before their actual entry with an AUC of $>0.6$, steadily increasing to AUC ~0.9 three to four months before the event. Further, we find that upon entry into an extremist forum, the users tend to maintain their level of extremism within the community, while still remaining distinguishable from the general online discourse. Our findings contribute to the study of extremism by introducing a more holistic, cross-ideological approach that transcends traditional, trait-specific models.
Beyond Dataset Creation: Critical View of Annotation Variation and Bias Probing of a Dataset for Online Radical Content Detection
Riabi, Arij, Mouilleron, Virginie, Mahamdi, Menel, Antoun, Wissam, Seddah, Djamรฉ
The proliferation of radical content on online platforms poses significant risks, including inciting violence and spreading extremist ideologies. Despite ongoing research, existing datasets and models often fail to address the complexities of multilingual and diverse data. To bridge this gap, we introduce a publicly available multilingual dataset annotated with radicalization levels, calls for action, and named entities in English, French, and Arabic. This dataset is pseudonymized to protect individual privacy while preserving contextual information. Beyond presenting our freely available dataset, we analyze the annotation process, highlighting biases and disagreements among annotators and their implications for model performance. Additionally, we use synthetic data to investigate the influence of socio-demographic traits on annotation patterns and model predictions. Our work offers a comprehensive examination of the challenges and opportunities in building robust datasets for radical content detection, emphasizing the importance of fairness and transparency in model development.
A Lexicon for Studying Radicalization in Incel Communities
Klein, Emily, Golbeck, Jennifer
Incels are an extremist online community of men who believe in an ideology rooted in misogyny, racism, the glorification of violence, and dehumanization. In their online forums, they use an extensive, evolving cryptolect - a set of ingroup terms that have meaning within the group, reflect the ideology, demonstrate membership in the community, and are difficult for outsiders to understand. This paper presents a lexicon with terms and definitions for common incel root words, prefixes, and affixes. The lexicon is text-based for use in automated analysis and is derived via a Qualitative Content Analysis of the most frequent incel words, their structure, and their meaning on five of the most active incel communities from 2016 to 2023.
Investigative Pattern Detection Framework for Counterterrorism
Muramudalige, Shashika R., Hung, Benjamin W. K., Libretti, Rosanne, Klausen, Jytte, Jayasumana, Anura P.
Law-enforcement investigations aimed at preventing attacks by violent extremists have become increasingly important for public safety. The problem is exacerbated by the massive data volumes that need to be scanned to identify complex behaviors of extremists and groups. Automated tools are required to extract information to respond queries from analysts, continually scan new information, integrate them with past events, and then alert about emerging threats. We address challenges in investigative pattern detection and develop an Investigative Pattern Detection Framework for Counterterrorism (INSPECT). The framework integrates numerous computing tools that include machine learning techniques to identify behavioral indicators and graph pattern matching techniques to detect risk profiles/groups. INSPECT also automates multiple tasks for large-scale mining of detailed forensic biographies, forming knowledge networks, and querying for behavioral indicators and radicalization trajectories. INSPECT targets human-in-the-loop mode of investigative search and has been validated and evaluated using an evolving dataset on domestic jihadism.
Artificial Intelligence and Algorithms: Technology and the Evolution of Online Extremism - European Eye on Radicalization
Mariana Diaz Garcia, works with the UNICRI under the framework of the Knowledge Center Security through Research, Technology and Innovation (SIRIO). Extremist groups have used a variety of technologies to recruit members, spread their ideology, and plan and execute attacks. The internet has long been used by terrorists and other violent extremists as a communication and propaganda tool. They now exist across a variety of platforms and occupy different online ecosystems. Terrorist and violent extremist content continues to circulate on well-known sites like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram despite ongoing content moderation efforts.
The Radicalization Risks of GPT-3 and Advanced Neural Language Models
McGuffie, Kris, Newhouse, Alex
In this paper, we expand on our previous research of the potential for abuse of generative language models by assessing GPT-3. Experimenting with prompts representative of different types of extremist narrative, structures of social interaction, and radical ideologies, we find that GPT-3 demonstrates significant improvement over its predecessor, GPT-2, in generating extremist texts. We also show GPT-3's strength in generating text that accurately emulates interactive, informational, and influential content that could be utilized for radicalizing individuals into violent far-right extremist ideologies and behaviors. While OpenAI's preventative measures are strong, the possibility of unregulated copycat technology represents significant risk for large-scale online radicalization and recruitment; thus, in the absence of safeguards, successful and efficient weaponization that requires little experimentation is likely. AI stakeholders, the policymaking community, and governments should begin investing as soon as possible in building social norms, public policy, and educational initiatives to preempt an influx of machine-generated disinformation and propaganda. Mitigation will require effective policy and partnerships across industry, government, and civil society.
OpenAI API
We're releasing an API for accessing new AI models developed by OpenAI. Unlike most AI systems which are designed for one use-case, the API today provides a general-purpose "text in, text out" interface, allowing users to try it on virtually any English language task. You can now request access in order to integrate the API into your product, develop an entirely new application, or help us explore the strengths and limits of this technology. Given any text prompt, the API will return a text completion, attempting to match the pattern you gave it. You can "program" it by showing it just a few examples of what you'd like it to do; its success generally varies depending on how complex the task is.
Why Tech Will Never Be Able to Predict the Next Mass Shooting
Following the horrific mass shootings in El Paso and Dayton over the weekend, President Trump has called on private enterprises, particularly social media companies, to develop new tools for surfacing "red flags" that could help identify violent shooters before they act. Trump says these tools could enable the government to act earlier to prevent mass casualties. With the current state of AI technology and the ongoing negligence of social media platforms to protect human life, this simply isn't a feasible idea. Predictive algorithms are hard to make. For simple, basic algorithms to make predictions, they need a lot of data.
Detecting Radical Text over Online Media using Deep Learning
Kaur, Armaan, Saini, Jaspal Kaur, Bansal, Divya
Social Media has influenced the way people socially connect, interact and opinionize. The growth in technology has enhanced communication and dissemination of information. Unfortunately,many terror groups like jihadist communities have started consolidating a virtual community online for various purposes such as recruitment, online donations, targeting youth online and spread of extremist ideologies. Everyday a large number of articles, tweets, posts, posters, blogs, comments, views and news are posted online without a check which in turn imposes a threat to the security of any nation. However, different agencies are working on getting down this radical content from various online social media platforms. The aim of our paper is to utilise deep learning algorithm in detection of radicalization contrary to the existing works based on machine learning algorithms. An LSTM based feed forward neural network is employed to detect radical content. We collected total 61601 records from various online sources constituting news, articles and blogs. These records are annotated by domain experts into three categories: Radical(R), Non-Radical (NR) and Irrelevant(I) which are further applied to LSTM based network to classify radical content. A precision of 85.9% has been achieved with the proposed approach