AI as disinformation machine

May 16, 2025.

This is an unplanned post. The one scheduled for this weekend is lighter, funner, funnier, intended to lift our spirits.

But an article in today’s Atlantic is too important to ignore, also too important to consign merely to a Note. Posts have permanence. This needs to stay on our radar.

Short version: Musk’s minions manipulated Grok — Twitter’s version of AI — to spew “white genocide” propaganda. Apparently timed to coincide with the Trump-Musk order bringing over Afrikaner farmers, apparently no matter what question a Twitter user posted, Grok responded with disinformation, claiming white genocide of Afrikaners. No proof for the claim. Twitter and Grok don’t care.

Musk’s people just showed their hand. As horrendous as intellectual property theft is — as Graham Lovelace reminds us on a near-daily basis — this is worse.

AI can, and clearly will, manipulate data to suit its own ends. There are no guardrails. As someone concerned with data privacy and not AI reported this week, AI has started scraping genealogical DNA databases. We’ve long known the DNA provided t Ancestry et al is being used for purposes in decidedly gray areas — primarily law enforcement, warrantless searches.

But now? Musk and his people could decide they don’t like me, so they could program Grok or ChatGPT to destroy my reputation. They can gin up fake felonies, or distort my resume, or change my scholarly works or blog posts to make them say things I didn’t say. It could happen to you too.

We. Have. No. Guardrails. In. Place.

There’s not only no legislation to limit IP theft. There’s no legislation to prevent defamation, slander, libel. Under the guise of AI, bad actors can do whatever they damn well please.

And we are defenseless.

This Atlantic article deserves a wider audience. I am providing a gift link below, so there’s no paywall. Please read it and understand what is happening in front of our faces.

The Day Grok Told Everyone About ‘White Genocide’

Thank you Ali Breland and Matteo Wong for taking on this topic. You have guts!

PS: I worry that we just imported more white nationalists. A recent Law & Order: SVU dealt with Afrikaner immigrants in the USA and their racist tattoos.

Dick Wolf has always been ahead of the curve, so I Googled Afrikaner and “white supremacy” and of course, his script was accurate. To learn more about Afrikaner white supremacy beliefs and the tattoos they use, check out the ADL’s information about the variations of the “Triskele” or “Triskelion” imagery. It will scare you to death. If you want to see all 215 white supremacy tats that ADL has catalogued, click here. You may not be able to sleep for a week.

What the hell is going on?

Comment worth keeping

For some reason reading this made me think about the early days of firearms; until fully automatic weapons were banned at the federal level, what was the crime landscape? Not like criminals would ever stop criming, but getting the artillery would have been a bit easier. So perhaps it’s not a stretch to say that unregulated AI is without question just as dangerous as a Thompson.

Actually, it is worse; far worse.

--Randy S. Eisenberg, May 16, 2025.

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