Emily St. John Mandel discusses her new novel Exit Party, a political dystopia set in 2031 after a U.S. coup, featuring characters from her previous works including Ari and Anton Waker from The Singer's Gun and Lucas Alkaitis from The Glass Hotel. The novel explores themes of national collapse, disinformation, and alternate realities through interconnected characters and a painting that moves through time.
An authoritarian action tracker monitoring seven tactics used to undermine democracy in the United States, ranked by escalation rate. The most rapidly escalating tactics include aggrandizing executive power, politicizing independent institutions, and targeting vulnerable communities, while stoking violence shows no change.
China's state security minister warns that AI-powered cognitive warfare—including deepfakes, synthetic media, and bot armies—threatens the country's political and ideological security. The article explains how AI is particularly suited for exploiting the 'illusory truth effect,' enabling authoritarian actors to repeat messaging at scale to gradually erode public skepticism and shape opinion without necessarily convincing populations of new ideas.
OpenAI created GPT-2, a powerful AI text generator trained on 10 million articles, capable of writing plausible news stories and fiction with few artifacts. The company unusually withheld public release, citing risks of malicious misuse such as generating disinformation and fake quotes.
X identified a 200,000-account bot farm suspected of Chinese origin, with 200 accounts spreading claims that AI data centers drive up electricity prices and strain power grids. The accounts used fake American names and AI-generated content to manipulate debate on U.S. AI and energy policy, though legitimate local concerns about data centers also exist independently of foreign propaganda.
A Hacker News user questions how AI poses an extinction-level threat when it operates only online, arguing that physical infrastructure like factories and weapons systems lack internet connectivity and programmable flexibility. They contend that realistic AI dangers are limited to hacking, disinformation, and code vulnerabilities, while apocalyptic scenarios require either mass human manipulation or future internet-connected robots.
Jan Marsalek, the fugitive Wirecard executive and alleged Russian spy, orchestrated a disinformation campaign in Austria starting in 2022 with associate Orlin Roussev to portray Ukraine as a Nazi state and turn Austrian public opinion against it.
The author argues for a public boycott of generative AI, contending that frontier labs are developing dangerous technology without adequate safety plans or public consent. While dismissing extinction risks, the author warns of credible dystopian scenarios from AI-generated pathogens, disinformation, and infrastructure attacks, and calls for a pause on deploying unreliable, unaligned AI systems until technical and political solutions emerge.
Y Combinator created Flock a decade ago. Hacker News allegedly spread disinformation about the company while governments banned it, though some local governments have since made deals with Flock.
AI-generated deepfakes have become increasingly sophisticated and accessible, enabling fraud, blackmail, political manipulation, and other harmful activities across financial, government, and entertainment sectors. Content streaming providers must deploy advanced detection and validation technologies on next-generation platforms to combat this escalating threat, though experts debate whether technology alone can solve the problem without stronger regulation.