As Motherboard and The Verge report, YouTuber Yannic Kilcher has created an AI language model that trained it using three years of content from the Politically Incorrect (/pol/) board on 4chan, a place notorious for racism and other forms of bigotry.
After applying the model to bots, Kilcher let the AI loose on the same 4chan board (/pol/) and unsurprisingly, an incredible wave of hate ensued.
In a 24-hour period, the bots wrote 15.000 posts that often included or interacted with racist content. They accounted for more than 10 percent of the posts on /pol/ that day, Kilcher claims.
Nicknamed GPT-4chan (from OpenAI's GPT-3), the model learned to not only capture the words used in /pol/'s posts, but also to add an overall tone that Kilcher said combined "offensiveness, nihilism, trolling and deep mistrust".
The creator of the video took care to avoid 4chan's defenses against proxies and VPNs. He was able to use a VPN to make the bot's posts appear to be coming from the Seychelles.
AI did some Mistakes, όπως μερικές κενές δημοσιεύσεις, αλλά ήταν αρκετά πειστική τόσο που αρκετοί χρήστες χρειάστηκαν περίπου two days to realize something was wrong.
Many forum members only noticed one of the bots, according to Kilcher, but the model generated so much buzz that people started accusing each other of being bots days after Kilcher disabled them.
"It's a reminder that trained AI is only as good as the material it learns from," the paper concludes.