Shaun Sutner: Hi, I'm Shaun Sutner news director
for info management at Tech Target's news
division. I'm here with Esther Ajao, our AI writer
who's been writing extensively about AI and
disinformation in the Russia Ukraine war. We're
going to talk about that today. So you know who
obviously Russia is using disinformation but whose
is Ukraine using it to and who in Russia is using
it the government is a social influencers.
Esther Ajao: But I'll say most of you will believe
the government is using disinformation and to use
an AI to spread disinformation. When I've heard it
said that Russia is very good at spreading
disinformation, they've been doing it for years.
And so this is just a continuation of the things
that they've been doing. And we're especially
seeing it with the Russia Ukraine.
Shaun Sutner: Okay, for sure. Um, so, um, how is
the AI technology contributing to this war outside
of combat?
Esther Ajao: Right. So especially when it comes to
recommendation systems, on social media, you're
seeing algorithms for show people videos, and
audio that are meshed together that are not really
accurate. And so people are spreading that which
is spreading misinformation, also spreading
misinformation. You have bots, obviously, going on
people's social media space, typing in false
information. That's also spreading disinformation.
There's just a cyberwar going on all around. And
then of course, you have Russia trying to squelch
that on its in its own country by banning
Facebook, and also by banning Twitter and other
social media platforms.
Shaun Sutner: And in the meantime, did not tik tok
also pull out of Russia.
Esther Ajao: Yes, they can pull out of Russia
because obviously, Russia's president signed a war
saying if you spread quote, unquote, fake news
about the war, you will get up to 15 years in
prison and so didn't want to.
Shaun Sutner: Yeah, um, so meanwhile, people can
still use Tik Tok in Ukraine, though, right to
spread misinformation.
Esther Ajao: Right. I mean, tik tok is definitely
still popular in Ukraine. I think the thing with
tik tok is, especially with recommendation
systems, is that and recommendation algorithms is
that the more you show interest in a particular
video, the more it produces more video, right? The
algorithm doesn't know which is false, and which
is fake, which is what a lot of AI experts are
like, how can we work together? How can social
media platforms work to show well, this is fake
news. And Facebook already does that in a little
bit of a way. But with tik tok you see a lot of
misinformation being spread where videos are
showing things that didn't necessarily happen, or
they mesh with audio that didn't necessarily,
Shaun Sutner: I think you're referring that that
situation to that fake video of the 13 Ukrainian
soldiers who
Esther Ajao: it was a mesh with audio that it
didn't match, or it was mesh with attacks. I said,
Oh, they all died. And obviously, they didn't die.
I mean, before it originally, I believe Ukraine's
president said, Oh, he confirmed that he died and
that Ukrainian officials said nope, they would
just take him down.
Shaun Sutner: Okay, so let's talk about some of
these technologies of how can machine learning
exploit human psychology to, to, you know,
warfare? And
Esther Ajao: right, I mean, like, I, I believe one
part of this is the fact that the more you see
something on social media, the more the algorithms
will keep showing it to you, right? So if I see a
building, this is just in retrospect, or in
theory, if I see our building being bombed, the
algorithms will keep showing me the same kind of
videos, the same kind of images, and that's
affecting me human as a human and thinking, Oh, my
goodness, is this really happening? So the
algorithms are working in that way, machine
learning has been trained to show you exactly what
it thinks that you want to see.
Shaun Sutner: So
Esther Ajao: what are you gonna say?
Shaun Sutner: Sorry? Yeah, so it's a closed loop.
And
Esther Ajao: It's basically a closed loop and
unless you like, fix something in youralgorithms,
there's no way to getout of it.