Big tech is giving money for the antidote

Extremism, the Rise of Video, and the Use of Artificial Intelligence on a Large Scale: The Case of Tech Against Terrorism

There are a number of troubling developments regarding extremists use of artificial intelligence, including the adoption of video tools.

“The biggest trend we’ve noticed [in 2024] is the rise of video,” says Purdue. Artificial intelligence-generated video was very basic a year ago. This year, with the release of OpenAI’s Sora, and other video generation or manipulation platforms, we’ve seen extremists using these as a means of producing video content. We’ve seen a lot of excitement about this as well, a lot of individuals are talking about how this could allow them to produce feature length films.”

Extremists have already used this technology to create videos featuring a President Joe Biden using racial slurs during a speech and actress Emma Watson reading aloud Mein Kampf while dressed in a Nazi uniform.

WIRED reported last year on how extremists linked to Hezbollah were using Artificial Intelligence to disrupt the database that allows Big Tech platforms to quickly remove terrorist content in a coordinated fashion.

Adam Hadley, the executive director of Tech Against Terrorism, says the group has already uploaded tens of thousands of images created by far-right extremists.

“This technology is being utilized in two primary ways,” Hadley tells WIRED. It is also being used to create text, images and videos through open-source tools, and that is just as generative artificial intelligence is revolutionizing productivity. The risk of producing and spreading violent content on a large scale is outlined in these two uses.

Big Tech Is Giving Campaigns Both the Venom and the Antidote for GenAI: Tools for Analyzing Data and Translating Text

The Biden campaign is facing its first major cheapfake scandal this week. Doctored clips of Biden at the G7 Summit and a Hollywood fundraiser have spread across platforms like X, claiming to show Biden wandering off, mumbling unintelligibly, or, uh, even pooping his pants. It is exactly what the right wing media apparatus wants to play up Biden’s age, despite the clips being edited in a similar way to Nancy Pelosi’s drunk video from last cycle.

While we are all starting to get stressed over simple editing techniques once more, Big Tech is training political campaigns on their generative artificial intelligence tools. Could a little direction help mitigate the issue? Maybe. Could it make it worse? Yeah, probably.

Google has also started integrating AI into its cybersecurity workshops with campaigns. In these sessions, participants are instructed on how to use tools to compare different policy proposals. The tools they show can help campaigns analyze data and translate text from images.

The general manager of Microsoft said in an interview earlier this month that she believes a campaign could use artificial intelligence.

Source: Big Tech Is Giving Campaigns Both the Venom and the Antidote for GenAI

Microsoft in 20 Countries and Five continents – Results from the First Two Trainings in the US and Europe Earlier in the Microsoft 3-Day Training Series

In a statement to WIRED last week, Microsoft said that it’s completed 90 trainings with more than 2,300 participants in 20 countries and five continents, including Africa, Asia, Europe, North America, and South America. There have been more than 40 trainings held in the US this year with over 600 participants, the company said. The US trainings began this February, while the European workshops started late last year.