Analysis & Opinions - The Atlantic

Bots Are Destroying Political Discourse As We Know It

| Jan. 07, 2020

They're mouthpieces for foreign actors, domestic political groups, even the candidates themselves. And soon you won't be able to tell they’re bots.

Presidential-campaign season is officially, officially, upon us now, which means it's time to confront the weird and insidious ways in which technology is warping politics. One of the biggest threats on the horizon: Artificial personas are coming, and they're poised to take over political debate. The risk arises from two separate threads coming together: artificial-intelligence-driven text generation and social-media chatbots. These computer-generated "people" will drown out actual human discussions on the internet.

Text-generation software is already good enough to fool most people most of the time. It's writing news stories, particularly in sports and finance. It's talking with customers on merchant websites. It's writing convincing op-eds on topics in the news (though there are limitations). And it's being used to bulk up "pink-slime journalism"—websites meant to appear like legitimate local news outlets but that publish propaganda instead....

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The full text of this publication is available via The Atlantic.
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For more information on this publication: Belfer Communications Office
For Academic Citation: Schneier, Bruce.“Bots Are Destroying Political Discourse As We Know It.” The Atlantic, January 7, 2020.

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