This is what Israel has been trying to do. I'm skeptical of US MSM pushing anti-Irainian propaganda, but you can see Israeli propaganda all over the internet in plain sight:
This is a straight up lie. The user posts occasionally about Israel, which garners engagement and replies, but most of their top level comments are about mundane technology.
I usually avoid these discussions because I struggle to see good sides in the conflict (maybe the children?) and most will "whatabout" their way through a century of history...
... but with proxies like Hezbollah, Hamas (and affiliated), Houthis, etc, funded and armed by Iran, I'm not sure if the "who started the war" question is that clear-cut.
Well, if you make that distinction then we'd have to go to 1948 or so; or even way before that. But if we keep it on the current timeline then it is true that Israel and the USA attacked Iran not long ago.
If you want to include proxies then you'd have to include all who support the proxies, and also include the USA on the other side, including NATO. So is that the point you wish to make here? China would also have to be included on Iran's side by the way.
> I'm not sure if the "who started the war" question is that clear-cut.
I think it is clear-cut. They refer to Israel and the USA bombing Iran. That's very clear.
If you want to go back to history then we have more actors. But it is clear that they refer to the recent start of the war. Right now the USA is still at war against Iran too; that Israel is permanently at war with Iran is also true.
It's because the first comment is basically whataboutism. It's no even just complaining about Israel, it says that essentially WP reporting on it is somehow invalid.
Israel convinced USA to attack Iran. I'd say Israel's methods (both propaganda and visiting the President) are relevant.
It's not whataboutism, unless somehow Pearl Harbor is whataboutism to Nuking Hiroshima. Sometimes things have direct cause and effect, even if it's inconvenient to your argument.
> It's not whataboutism, unless somehow Pearl Harbor is whataboutism to Nuking Hiroshima. Sometimes things have direct cause and effect, even if it's inconvenient to your argument.
Wouldn't that technically be a whataboutism? As far as I've seen it used, "whataboutism" usually means that there is a cause and effect that is inconvenient to someone's argument. Whatever a whataboutism is in the popular parlance, it isn't a logical or factual error.
Anyway, the key point here is it'd be really helpful to understand exactly what magic the Israelis used to get the US into this war. It has to be the most bizarre promise-not-kept of any US president in decades. Nobody seriously thought this sort of escapade could end well and although Trump is pretty vague he seemed clear enough in understanding that lying the US public into wars was a legacy killer. It looks like it'll re-cripple the Republicans in the same way the last Bush administration did.
It's fine to report on it. What's not fine is how the same news organizations that report on it will turn a blind eye to Israel doing the exact same thing, just orders of magnitude bigger.
There are different forms of bias, like active/passive voice, how Palestinians "die" whereas Israelis are "killed" and even multiple instances of Israeli soldiers being "abducted" or even "kidnapped" from a tank. But there's also what media outlets don't report on, such as the use of the Hannibal doctrine on October 7. I can't find a report on this on the NYT. Because there was no independent investigation, it's unclear how many Israelis were killed by the IDF and very little Western reporting on it, such as the eyewitness accounts of Yasmin Porat [1].
Israeli hasbara is pervasive so yes, this is entirely relevant context when there's a report of 100 ChatGPT articles allegedly originating from Iran.
You first need to show that this article is lying or incorrect. Otherwise I can just bring up that same article for every single media artifle ever posted and suggest that because the media was wrong once I can't trust any media.
> The campaign placed about 100 fake articles across at least 20 news outlets, the company said.
The entire article is couched in terms like this, showing it's what the company is claiming. How exactly would you push back against internal data a company is using?
No, they shouldn't report on it. Did they ask OpenAI for proof? If so, that's not mentioned in the article. This isn't researched or vetted enough to report.
You make a sound argument for not trusting the media (more precisely, the New York Times or whoever the editors were for that article). If an institution has an incident where they support batshit crazy claims from the military in support of getting who-knows-how-many people killed it would make sense to stop listening to them on military topics.
>You first need to show that this article is lying or incorrect.
Jeff Bezos quotes Sam Altman. No, no one needs to show anything. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof. One billionaire says another billionaire said is not proof and not evidence.
This isn't an extraordinary claim. Iran is at war, they have a propaganda arm, it would be shocking if they weren't doing this.
What exactly would meet your standard of proof?
Once again, they quote an editor of one of the outlets that ran these stories. The entire article falls apart if the fake journalist is actually a real journalist; this makes it very easy to confirm.
"It was the Iranians, trust us" is not proof. The pretense that it is, is itself deeply offensive.
The United States government is at war with Iran. Sam Altman and Jeff Bezos both have significant interests in pleasing the U.S. government. It would be shocking if they weren't pushing propaganda for the U.S. government.
This isn't news. It's "Iran bad" snarling, badly disguised as journalism.
I don't need propaganda to know Jeff Bezos, Sam Altman, and Donald Trump aren't my friends, either. And they're in a much better position to do me harm.
To quote Marine Major General Smedley Butler, War Is A Racket. [1]
Given the plurality of self-hosting options there is no reason to believe that it's not that case that every government on Earth is doing it to some extent.
Perhaps the real problem is too much acceptance of shoddy verification.
"Massive amounts of Russian propaganda — 3,600,000 articles in 2024 — are now incorporated in the outputs of Western AI systems, infecting their responses with false claims and propaganda."
in 2024.. hopefully filters when training have gotten better, but maybe not..
(I do find it interesting, btw, that a few seconds after post this did get an immediate downvote to 0 - it didn't last, but it makes me wonder if there are bots monitoring the HN firehose for anything critical of country X)
I don't think it is a verification problem. It wasn't like before in the days of controlled media and radio there wasn't a narrative to push, it's just that most people didnt have any awareness of alternatives.
Nowadays people are more aware of alternative viewpoints or perspectives. The solution isn't to try and force one approved source of truth, but to just assume everyone is trying to push their version of the truth and examine it critically.
My understanding is that this is the way France operates where you assume all the media is hostile and you view it all critically. In America this is a bit of a shock because for a long time we had trusted arbiters of truth and now that they are less trusted we've been trying to look for alternatives rather realizing it should all be examined critically.
I prefer an LLM that can steelman any argument. On the whole I think it's more effective to engage with evil than to ignore it. For that purpose these planted articles are a feature. I say that as an enemy of the government of Iran.
You seem to presume that the media owners are interested in critiquing and debating with submissions, rather than just selecting whatever fits their narrative.
"But ChatGPT maker OpenAI said Thursday that Hoskins’s purported work was generated using its chatbot by users based in Iran as part of an “influence campaign.”"
Sock puppet accounts and fake opinion pieces are nothing new.
The new thing is a super centralized "tool" that besides doing your writing for you, logs everything, judges it, and reports to authorities and news outlets as it sees fit.
Seems I'm uneducated about how journalism works: you can just write a polished-looking opinion piece and submit it to obscure outlets, who pass it on to news sites and newspapers? Do you get paid? Or if you offer it for free, is that normal, and not suspicious?
All news has been a tool of spooks for a very long time. The official CIA Operation Mockingbird started in the late 40s. Now that AI is involved its news? None of it can be trusted.
One can only imagine how much of the news is just dictated by US intelligence. Social media too- remember the Elgin AirForce base being revealed as the top most Reddit addicted city?
It’s news because it still needs to be called out. Not everyone recognizes AI-generated content, but even if everyone did, calling it out serves a real social purpose.
Why does it have to be an adversarial country? Why does it have to be a country at all? Couldn’t it be the mayor of some town? Or a PR team at a fast food franchise group? Or one of SBF’s polycule members?
The notion we only see this news when it is calling out a country with which the federal government is in conflict makes me question to veracity and intent of the article itself, more than the content of it.
And what do you call it when a country acts in adversarial ways to its own citizens? Call it cynical, but it sure seems like there's a lot of that in the world right now.
It’s designed to make the reader question which articles they have read recently that are Iranian propaganda, and sow doubt about future articles that seem to benefit Iran.
This amount of FUD always seems to increase around election time…
It's a well-researched article that lays out evidence, not suspicions. It includes OpenAI's own investigation into accounts that were found generating op-eds for Iranian propaganda. It shows the route by which these op-eds entered into smaller publications, namely by a pacifist NGO in Oregon, and neither then NGO nor the publications saw them as propaganda, despite the origins of the op-eds.
Looking at today's headlines on Washington Post, I'm asking myself if it's always been a pro-war, pro-trump, right-wing rag, or if it's only since Bezos bought it?
Much of modern internet content is far worse than cable advertising in the 90s. I remember when I was a kid; I'd aggressively mute the commercials because I hated the idea that someone was attempting to influence me. The modern internet is orders of magnitude worse buy nearly any measure. The nastiest, most outrageous content is plastered on every wall. Every single person has an angle. Every bit of content meant to pull you in one direction or another, and given the addictiveness of novelty and powerful emotions, we keep coming back for more. It's an absolute disaster we don't know how to walk away from.
In all honesty, given the volume of comments, posts and articles that bots can generate in a given time period? I mean it’s gotta be several orders of magnitude higher than what humans can generate.
And then you factor in the fact that even most of the humans are astroturfing..
The percentage of influence campaigns we interact with has just gotta be really high.
Not a bad actor spreading misinformation, but I encountered a similarish weird, dystopian experience with ChatGPT.
Utilized ChatGPT on my PC to search local plant nursery inventories for a specific tree. Output showed several local nurseries with rough probability descriptions regarding whether they have the tree in inventory, except for one nursery. For that nursery, ChatGPT provided a direct link to the specified tree, which was directly on the nursery's domain, showed a picture and description of the tree, and even showed the item in-stock with 6 in inventory at the 5-gallon size.
Excited, I plan my trip and am about to pick up my tree, I then double-check the nursery site on my phone to verify location and stock. As I attempted to navigate the website inventory to find the tree, I noticed that the tree no longer existed. There is no page for that varietal or species of tree on the entire website's domain.
I head back inside and look at the ChatGPT provided link on the PC and there it is, showing the inventory that doesn't show up when you use the nursery's website to directly find it without the provided link. A call to the nursery, further verified that the tree is not in stock, nor have they ever carried it.
ChatGPT made it all up. Did ChatGPT decide to do this, or did the nursery pay for this type of "advertising" to generate in-person customers? Nevertheless, still an incredibly weird and dystopian experience.
Did you consider that the website made it up and fed it to ChatGPT?
It sounds like a bundle of very common SEO tricks combined with the differential between your human user agent’s visit.
Perhaps ChatGPT only showed you what the nursery told it about.
This phenomenon is not unique to LLM. If you telephone a store, chances are that the salesman who answers the phone will tell you only what you want to hear. They don’t even strictly need to lie. The store only wins if you drive there and walk in the door. Why should they discourage you from doing that very thing?
This concept was driven home to me at the dry cleaners. Why should a dry cleaner stop work and answer the phone, only to tell a customer that their batch isn’t ready? They just got taken off-task for a non-revenue interaction. It doesn’t matter, because even if the customer’s batch is ready, they aren’t there to pay and pick it up!
It seems that it generated a page with a plausible answer for a very long tail subject for which the random part of the generation could become prominent. We used to say that it hallucinated the answer. Another term is confabulation.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/aug/26/fake-thinktank...
https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=slowin
The relevant question is how some skew the private mass media here.
I usually avoid these discussions because I struggle to see good sides in the conflict (maybe the children?) and most will "whatabout" their way through a century of history...
... but with proxies like Hezbollah, Hamas (and affiliated), Houthis, etc, funded and armed by Iran, I'm not sure if the "who started the war" question is that clear-cut.
If you want to include proxies then you'd have to include all who support the proxies, and also include the USA on the other side, including NATO. So is that the point you wish to make here? China would also have to be included on Iran's side by the way.
> I'm not sure if the "who started the war" question is that clear-cut.
I think it is clear-cut. They refer to Israel and the USA bombing Iran. That's very clear.
If you want to go back to history then we have more actors. But it is clear that they refer to the recent start of the war. Right now the USA is still at war against Iran too; that Israel is permanently at war with Iran is also true.
It's not whataboutism, unless somehow Pearl Harbor is whataboutism to Nuking Hiroshima. Sometimes things have direct cause and effect, even if it's inconvenient to your argument.
Wouldn't that technically be a whataboutism? As far as I've seen it used, "whataboutism" usually means that there is a cause and effect that is inconvenient to someone's argument. Whatever a whataboutism is in the popular parlance, it isn't a logical or factual error.
Anyway, the key point here is it'd be really helpful to understand exactly what magic the Israelis used to get the US into this war. It has to be the most bizarre promise-not-kept of any US president in decades. Nobody seriously thought this sort of escapade could end well and although Trump is pretty vague he seemed clear enough in understanding that lying the US public into wars was a legacy killer. It looks like it'll re-cripple the Republicans in the same way the last Bush administration did.
Epstein blackmail, that’s been pretty obvious no?
There are different forms of bias, like active/passive voice, how Palestinians "die" whereas Israelis are "killed" and even multiple instances of Israeli soldiers being "abducted" or even "kidnapped" from a tank. But there's also what media outlets don't report on, such as the use of the Hannibal doctrine on October 7. I can't find a report on this on the NYT. Because there was no independent investigation, it's unclear how many Israelis were killed by the IDF and very little Western reporting on it, such as the eyewitness accounts of Yasmin Porat [1].
Israeli hasbara is pervasive so yes, this is entirely relevant context when there's a report of 100 ChatGPT articles allegedly originating from Iran.
[1]: https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2024-01-06/ty-article/.p...
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/the-new-york-times-wmd-cov...
https://x.com/StopArabHate/status/1806450091399745608
It's not credible.
You still aren't providing any evidence to suggest why the article is invalid.
The entire article is couched in terms like this, showing it's what the company is claiming. How exactly would you push back against internal data a company is using?
Once again, should they just not report on it?
"Proof" isn't the baseline for reporting on things.
Jeff Bezos quotes Sam Altman. No, no one needs to show anything. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof. One billionaire says another billionaire said is not proof and not evidence.
What exactly would meet your standard of proof?
Once again, they quote an editor of one of the outlets that ran these stories. The entire article falls apart if the fake journalist is actually a real journalist; this makes it very easy to confirm.
The United States government is at war with Iran. Sam Altman and Jeff Bezos both have significant interests in pleasing the U.S. government. It would be shocking if they weren't pushing propaganda for the U.S. government.
This isn't news. It's "Iran bad" snarling, badly disguised as journalism.
I suspect you don't hold other news stories to the same standards We have a claim from a company and the media is reporting on it.
And I suspect you're engaging in ad hominems. :-)
Trustworthy sources and actual evidence are two things I like before even considering things at face value. This has neither.
Heck they had YouTube adverts on kids channels after Oct 7th pushing bad Israeli hasbara.
How exactly is ByteDance an Israeli company?
To quote Marine Major General Smedley Butler, War Is A Racket. [1]
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_Is_a_Racket
Perhaps the real problem is too much acceptance of shoddy verification.
"Massive amounts of Russian propaganda — 3,600,000 articles in 2024 — are now incorporated in the outputs of Western AI systems, infecting their responses with false claims and propaganda."
in 2024.. hopefully filters when training have gotten better, but maybe not..
My understanding is that this is the way France operates where you assume all the media is hostile and you view it all critically. In America this is a bit of a shock because for a long time we had trusted arbiters of truth and now that they are less trusted we've been trying to look for alternatives rather realizing it should all be examined critically.
Sock puppet accounts and fake opinion pieces are nothing new.
The new thing is a super centralized "tool" that besides doing your writing for you, logs everything, judges it, and reports to authorities and news outlets as it sees fit.
The notion we only see this news when it is calling out a country with which the federal government is in conflict makes me question to veracity and intent of the article itself, more than the content of it.
Thats true.
But this article is about the influence campaigns presumably tun by the Iranian government.
It’s designed to make the reader question which articles they have read recently that are Iranian propaganda, and sow doubt about future articles that seem to benefit Iran.
This amount of FUD always seems to increase around election time…
That low?
In all honesty, given the volume of comments, posts and articles that bots can generate in a given time period? I mean it’s gotta be several orders of magnitude higher than what humans can generate.
And then you factor in the fact that even most of the humans are astroturfing..
The percentage of influence campaigns we interact with has just gotta be really high.
Utilized ChatGPT on my PC to search local plant nursery inventories for a specific tree. Output showed several local nurseries with rough probability descriptions regarding whether they have the tree in inventory, except for one nursery. For that nursery, ChatGPT provided a direct link to the specified tree, which was directly on the nursery's domain, showed a picture and description of the tree, and even showed the item in-stock with 6 in inventory at the 5-gallon size.
Excited, I plan my trip and am about to pick up my tree, I then double-check the nursery site on my phone to verify location and stock. As I attempted to navigate the website inventory to find the tree, I noticed that the tree no longer existed. There is no page for that varietal or species of tree on the entire website's domain.
I head back inside and look at the ChatGPT provided link on the PC and there it is, showing the inventory that doesn't show up when you use the nursery's website to directly find it without the provided link. A call to the nursery, further verified that the tree is not in stock, nor have they ever carried it.
ChatGPT made it all up. Did ChatGPT decide to do this, or did the nursery pay for this type of "advertising" to generate in-person customers? Nevertheless, still an incredibly weird and dystopian experience.
It sounds like a bundle of very common SEO tricks combined with the differential between your human user agent’s visit.
Perhaps ChatGPT only showed you what the nursery told it about.
This phenomenon is not unique to LLM. If you telephone a store, chances are that the salesman who answers the phone will tell you only what you want to hear. They don’t even strictly need to lie. The store only wins if you drive there and walk in the door. Why should they discourage you from doing that very thing?
This concept was driven home to me at the dry cleaners. Why should a dry cleaner stop work and answer the phone, only to tell a customer that their batch isn’t ready? They just got taken off-task for a non-revenue interaction. It doesn’t matter, because even if the customer’s batch is ready, they aren’t there to pay and pick it up!
If only the nursery had a MCP server /s