Artificial intelligence could create a ‘modern-day Reichstag fire': leading expert

Although there have been past panics about the dangers that come with the advance of new technology, artificial intelligence is an entirely different animal that has the ability to distort humans' basic sense of reality.

That’s according to a leading AI researcher, who told The Atlantic’s Matteo Wong “that the apparent AI revolution could not only provide a new weapon to propagandists, as social media did earlier this century, but entirely reshape the historiographic terrain, perhaps laying the groundwork for a modern-day Reichstag fire.”

The emergence of ChatGPT, the artificial intelligence chatbot that reportedly can pass law school tests, figures to be a powerful tool for those seeking to propagate disinformation.

Horvitz told The Atlantic that bad actors could use “deepfakes on a timeline intermixed with real events to build a story.”

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“A propagandist could simply connect the news to their entirely fabricated—but fully formed and seemingly well-documented—backstory seeded across the internet, spreading a fiction that could consume the nation’s politics and public-health response,” Wong writes.