Unreliable data!

Mohammad Rahbari

The video shows a Chinese artificial intelligence that can automatically manage 50 social media accounts throughout the week and at all hours of the day. Due to the rapid development of artificial intelligence, it is likely that 50 accounts will be just for testing, and the AI will be able to handle many more accounts.

This means that governments and those with money and power will now manipulate reality more easily, at a lower cost, and possibly with a higher quality, in order to influence public opinion. Of course, the manipulation of public opinion through data manipulation and propaganda with robots and organized actions has been happening by powers and governments within social networks for about a decade now, but with the rapid development of artificial intelligence, this type of work, which is called computational propaganda, is likely to become more complex and new dimensions.

As a result of this situation, social media data may be artificially generated to influence our attitudes. That is, by using computing tools and robots that are becoming smarter every day, with likes and comments, a space should be created where we imagine that a person or an idea has many supporters or opponents, and by creating a musical chariot effect among other users, they can match that belief.

In the social sciences, the musical chariot effect refers to a phenomenon in which people tend to align their behavior, beliefs, or choices with what the majority of the group or society does. Thus, by artificially increasing the positive comments or likes of a post, the impression is created among others that the content of that article has many supporters and they are unconsciously more inclined to accept it.

Due to the rapid development of artificial intelligence and the type of use it is made (as we see in this video), it is necessary to critically evaluate the number of supportive or critical comments or the number of likes of a post on social media in the coming years.