how to massacre a country with AI, on a budget

So let’s say you’re an evil dictator, and you want to kill a bunch of people in some more affluent country. Actually invading them is expensive, and worse, would tend to get them to pull together and be more patriotic in a time of crisis. You really need to take advantage of how AI will let you scale and obfuscate the project. Fortunately for evil dictators everywhere, (new) Google is on it.

Soon Google’s AI Mode will use your emails, your calendar events, and your files stored in Google Drive to personalize responses.

So now the attack plan can be a lot cheaper.

1. Generate a bunch of plausible-looking health misinformation. You can do this pretty easily with code that takes real, paywalled, medical research papers and swaps in new results sections that make the normal recommended treatments out to have extra risks, and adds positive outcomes for existing or new trials of dangerous alternatives to whatever the safe, effective treatment is. Remember that a bunch of health misinfo, scams, and other bullshit are already in LLM training sets, so go with the grain of existing conspiracy theories, not against them.

2. Get the material from step 1 into the Google accounts of people in the target country. Use sports streams as bait (nobody can both afford to and figure out how to watch all the NFL games, so that should be pretty easy if you were going after the USA during the NFL season. Look for similar streaming opportunities in other places.) People are used to clicking on confusing stuff to prove that they’re not a bot, so take advantage of the confusion to get them a bunch of Google calendars (with misinfo attached to event agendas) and shared Google Drive folders.

3. Sit back and watch Google’s AI drive customers away from the legit health care business and toward dangerous alternatives, while feeding back revenue into steps 1 and 2. Sellers of ineffective or dangerous quack remedies have great affiliate marketing programs, but be careful using them. If the attribution cartel succeeds, it will be easier to launder the sales you generate for sites selling miracle lung bleach crystals or whatever, but conventional affiliate links should be reserved for throwaway accounts.

The personalized customer journey here is

1. Someone notices a health issue for themselves or a family member, and checks Dr. Google

2. Instead of getting to a high-PageRank Cleveland Clinic page or some other well-known resource, like they would have with old Google, they get a personalized recommendation based on all the slop that has built up in their Google Drive and Calendar from trying to watch football.

3. The personalized recommendation drives them to an expensive, harmful product instead of a legit treatment—and, as the evil dictator with the affiliate code, you get a piece of the action.

4. You inflict a casualty on the enemy in a revenue-positive way.

Note: I don’t actually work for evil dictators, but they have plenty of smart people messing with (and in some cases drawing a paycheck from) the Big Tech companies, so they have already thought of this stuff. The people who I’m really hoping will read things like this are the state legislators who need to draft privacy laws from the point of view of preventing actual harms, and not just inflicting a bunch of bullshit compliance work on normal companies. Today, big platform companies consistently under-invest in trust and safety programs, and a combination of regulator action and independent cases is needed. More: data-driven

Bonus links

Google Has Chosen a Side in Trump’s Mass Deportation Effort by Joseph Cox. (At the Federal level, New Google is making a big bet that if they buy the administration a gilded ballroom and help out with their Gestapo shit, then they’ll get a pass on their other crimes. This decision could and probably should have the opposite effect in the blue states.)

Valve is about to win the console generation by Xe Iaso. One of the bigger things that I don’t think people really appreciate about the Steam Machine (or even the Steam Deck for that matter) is that the freedom to install whatever program, framework, background service, or OS you want means that every Steam Machine can be used to make games. Some of their promotional images show a Steam Machine in a dual-monitor setup split between Blender and Godot. I don’t think you realize how big of a deal this is. By making every Steam Machine also powerful enough to do full on game development, Valve is making it so much easier to become an independent game developer. Just add ideas, skill, and time.

The Death of Community Memory by JA Westenberg. Companies pay for Slack per user per month. The cost of storage is real but abstracted. Meanwhile, the cost of fragmenting and decaying knowledge is completely invisible until it’s too late.

How a ransomware gang encrypted Nevada government’s systems by Bill Toulas. According to the report, a State employee searched Google for a system administration tool to download and was instead shown a malicious advertisement that led to a fraudulent website impersonating the legitimate project. This fake website offered a malware-laced version of the admin utility, which deployed a backdoor on the employee’s device. (If you’re seeing Google ads on your work computer, your organization has a security problem.)

Nevada Supreme Court upholds decision from lower court against TikTok by Emerson Drewes. According to the attorney general’s office, the ruling upholds that the federal Communications Decency Act, or Section 230, does not provide blanket immunity to social media platforms if accused of designing their products to be harmful.

Emmanuel Clase And Luis Ortiz Indicted For Elaborate Pitch-Rigging Scheme by Tom Ley. (The other side of this problem depends on finding people who are willing to bet on individual pitches in a game. States that have legalized gambling apps need to, among other things, require disclosure of how people are targeted for app install ads.)