Never mind the chatbots, there are already humans out there working to influence us
I don’t want to be cynical but really!…
Ordinary people have always worked to undermine elections and spread misinformation - the only real difference is the medium and scale.
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The key issue, as in many other aspects of life, has always been voters’ ability or inability to evaluate the reliability, or otherwise of sources of information.
How Finland starts its fight against fake news in primary schools | Finland | The Guardian
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I saw the Guardian article on the Finnish school program and remembered my school, back in the 70s had a course, People and Politics, that taught us to edit and critique news, amongst other things. Very progressive.
I have been reading some early test conversations by journalists and tech programmers and find a couple of things stand out.
Chatbots are far too wordy. In trying to provide answers to questions they give multiple answers. Probably because those are all collected in their data harvest and the chatbot cannot edit. Unlike a human reader. Too much repetition.
Another oddity, specifically the chatbot Bing/Sydney is the overuse of emoji faces. This is probably a geek input in the programming to make the chatbot seem less mechanical but it makes it instead seem a bit unhinged. As do the repetition statements.
I expect these glitches may get ironed out by programmers as reports of the limited release experiments are analysed.
Not yet!
No doubt, more fun to come 
A handy guide
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This interview with Geoffrey Hinton is not actually warning that AGI would in itself eliminate humanity but rather that bad actors may get hold of its enormous power.
Hinton also says things are really speeding and we likely will see singularity within 20 years
Aside from texting, it seems AI is now being energetically used by scammers
You’ve not seen the Terminator and the Matrix movies?
Fact follows fiction 
With Science Fiction that’s always been the case. 
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