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Disinformation Campaigns Could Have Real-World Impact, as 50 Countries Host Polls
Daily Bad-Actor AI Activity Will Escalate by Mid-2024, the Year of Global Elections, New Study Finds
Tech Times
As more than 50 countries gear up for national elections in 2024, concerns about exploiting artificial intelligence (AI) by malicious actors to spread disinformation have intensified, prompting researchers at George Washington University to conduct a new study.
Predicting the risk of bad-actor-AI
Scienmag
Bad actors are predicted to begin using AI daily by the middle of 2024, according to a study. Neil F. Johnson and colleagues map the online landscape of communities centered around hate, beginning by searching for terms found in the Anti-Defamation League Hate Symbols Database, along with the names of hate groups tracked by the Southern Poverty Law Center. From an initial list of “bad-actor” communities found using these terms, the authors assess communities linked to by the bad-actor communities.
Malicious AI Activity Likely to Escalate into Daily Occurrence in 2024
GW Today
As more than 50 countries including the U.S. gear up for national elections, GW’s Neil Johnson has published the first quantitative scientific analysis of AI misuse by bad actors.
‘Bad actor’ AI predicted to pose daily threat to democracies by mid-2024
New Atlas
A new study has predicted that AI activity by ‘bad actors’ determined to cause online harm through the spread of disinformation will be a daily occurrence by the middle of 2024. The findings are concerning given that more than 50 countries, including the US, will hold national elections this year, the outcomes of which will have a global impact.
Simplifying Complexity: The Mathematics of War, Part 2
Simplifying Complexity
In our last episode, Neil Johnson explained how there was an underlying power law with a slope of 1.8 that described the number of casualties that occur in wars.
Today’s episode digs deeper into where this power law comes from, the route that Neil’s research took to explain it, and how the arrival of the internet finally provided the missing datasets required to understand the underlying structure of something seemingly as chaotic as war.
Neil is Professor of Physics and Head of the Dynamic Online Networks Lab at George Washington University.
Simplifying Complexity: The Mathematics of War, Part 1
Simplifying Complexity
When we think of what caused a certain number of people to die in a specific war, we tend to think about a number of factors. for example, the terrain or political drivers. But what if the number of deaths that occur in a war is actually dictated by something far less obvious?
Neil Johnson, Professor of Physics and Head of the Dynamic Online Networks Lab at George Washington University, has returned to explain how studying the casualties of war can give us a greater understanding of the causes of war.
The laws of division: physicists probe into the polarization of political opinions
Physics World
Across the world, varying factions of society seem to be angrier and more divided than ever. But as Anna Demming explains, physicists are doing their best to shed light on what has gone wrong
American white nationalists are fleeing US sites for Russian platforms. Here’s why.
The Independent
The Russian government doesn’t need to do anything to encourage the spread of extremism ‘because it’s already cooking,’ Neil Johnson tells Gustaf Kilander
Physics-inspired model for online content dynamics
Nature Research Highlights
Harmful online information can lead to many forms of online anti-X hate, where X can be races, ethnicity, or even vaccines. Such anti-X hate can drive certain groups to extremism and induce dangerous misbehavior, such as the incident of the US capital riot in January 2021.