Imagine being in control of a fleet of a million social media bots, all with distinct ways of writing and wording their arguments, all with the capacity to engage content that passes through a sentiment analysis and classification filter. A million social media bots, which could all push, say, pro-life, or anti-gun narratives, generating massive amounts of coherent text on the subject. They can engage with dissenters automatically, endlessly, with a demoralizing amount of content, using multiple accounts to reinforce eachother.
Do you foresee some form of this happening? What do you think will be the outcome? If it happens, will people be aware of it, or will it be labeled a conspiracy theory? Have state actors been doing this for awhile now? How will people regain trust in one another if there is a looming suspicion that you are not engaging with someone genuine? Are services where conversation can take place prepared to verify and ban non-humans users on a massive scale?
0. https://github.com/openai/gpt-3
1. This has been possible for a while. GPT-3 is impressive, but I don't see it enabling too many fundamentally new things because many interesting applications are in the tails of the distribution where you don't have data. You can spam social media using simpler techniques based on smaller generative models (well before GPT, but still recent as in ~5 years ago), paraphrasing, and crowdsourcing. Running GPT-3 inference is quite expensive right now, but of course costs will go down over time. I'm not sure how much the lower budget will matter though - politics and large companies have had a big enough budget to do this anyway and it probably has been happening. The costs for this have been low enough for a while.
2. What makes an argument made by a machine less valid than an argument made by a human? If the machine can make a valid argument by pattern-matching your text to historical data and responses, why is that bad? That's what humans do as well, just more unconsciously.
3. I believe the culture around this will and has been changing. There are already bots everywhere, and people are slowly getting used to it. I believe there will be places where you can interact with verified humans, but not to argue or get facts (why would you want to talk to humans for that? They're bad at it.), but rather to foster relationships and get emotional support.
It is the same with politicians, both sides show evidence why they are right and the others are wrong. Who can I believe? I have no clue. If I'm interested in a topic I'm gonna research it myself, otherwise, I just listen to my gut feeling.