The plan, mentioned in a new 76-page wish list by the Department of Defense’s Joint Special Operations Command, or JSOC, outlines advanced technologies desired for country’s most elite, clandestine military efforts. “Special Operations Forces (SOF) are interested in technologies that can generate convincing online personas for use on social media platforms, social networking sites, and other online content,” the entry reads.

The document specifies that JSOC wants the ability to create online user profiles that “appear to be a unique individual that is recognizable as human but does not exist in the real world,” with each featuring “multiple expressions” and “Government Identification quality photos.”

In addition to still images of faked people, the document notes that “the solution should include facial & background imagery, facial & background video, and audio layers,” and JSOC hopes to be able to generate “selfie video” from these fabricated humans. These videos will feature more than fake people: Each deepfake selfie will come with a matching faked background, “to create a virtual environment undetectable by social media algorithms.”

    • django@discuss.tchncs.de
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      2 months ago

      They keep showing me strange street features from distant countries and ask me shit like “mark all the crosswalks”. And i look at it and think “no idea, what this is, no crosswalk i have ever seen looked like this, so i guess it it is something different”.

      And then i have to do the next captcha. Sometimes i am caught in captcha hell, where i have to solve captchas until i give up and close the browser.

      • TropicalDingdong@lemmy.world
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        2 months ago

        There is a short story in here about someone who can’t pass a captcha, loses their identity, and has to move on to becoming a fisherman in Norway.

      • snooggums@lemmy.world
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        2 months ago

        What sites are still using image captchas and not “Click here if you are not a robot”?

        I just realized I don’t surf the web randomly anymore, mainly because of crap like that.

        • django@discuss.tchncs.de
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          2 months ago

          When i click them, they oftentimes show me a captcha afterwards, as they apparently don’t believe me. I once solved captcha after captcha for like two minutes and then ragequit, finally accepting, that i am a robot.

    • chatokun@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      2 months ago

      The US always tries to do what they think others are doing. Half of their crazy ideas are because they heard a rumor and/or assumed the Soviets were doing it. Mind control, truth serums, ESP, cat spies.

  • Wolfram@lemmy.world
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    2 months ago

    Jesus, even before I read the article it read like the U.S wants to emulate disinformation campaigns others are using. The irony of three letter agencies condemning AI campaigns while the Pentagon is going “We want that”, is insane but its to be expected I guess.

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    2 months ago

    The listing notes that special operations troops “will use this capability to gather information from public online forums,” with no further explanation of how these artificial internet users will be used.

    Any chance that’s the real reason and not just a flimsy excuse? What kind of information would you even need a fake identity to gather from a public forum?

  • Korkki@lemmy.world
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    2 months ago

    As if any institution, org or group that has an agenda to push doesn’t have battalions of bots guiding the discussion of forums to whichever way they want and not just fake followers and likes. As if people would need permission or would ask for it even if they had to. You just cant have any real sense of the public opinion on the internet, if there ever was such a time.

      • PolandIsAStateOfMind@lemmy.ml
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        2 months ago

        .world is a carbon copy of reddit, and it’s full of bootlickers of US empire. Considering massive botfarms on reddit and links of it to US agencies if US is gonna invest in even more bots some of them are bound to end up there.

    • coolusername@lemmy.ml
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      2 months ago

      it’s the pentagon itself, not the CIA or state department. 100% the CIA and state department has been doing it for a long time already

  • NocturnalMorning@lemmy.world
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    2 months ago

    So we really are going for a dead internet. Nobody is going to want to interact with bots all day online. But maybe that’s the point, harder to organize organically on the streets without a presence online.