INFO Professor Jen Golbeck comments on AI and the far right
(Credit: The Don Lemon YouTube Channel)
INFO professor Jen Golbeck appeared on a recent episode of The Don Lemon Show to speak on internet culture, protests, and the role of AI in far-right amplification on social media. She noted the role of AI in radicalization before ChatGPT: “All these platforms that feed you content do it to optimize your engagement. Extreme content is more engaging. Facebook did an internal study that found that 68% of people who joined far-right groups on Facebook joined them because Facebook’s algorithm recommended those groups.”
However, after the rise of ChatGPT, Golbeck’s concerns have shifted. “It’s so easy now to set up a troll farm with a bunch of bots on platforms generating very realistic sounding text with arguments that people are going to believe,” she said. “Social media has been transformative for allowing voices that are traditionally marginalized in the media to be seen and consumed. But the oppressive forces know that too, and they have found that false amplification, by creating bots that make it sound like there’s a big movement behind something, is powerful. And now the AI is there to make it so easy to generate all these different seeming voices.”
Click here to see the full episode