The United States hopes to use machine learning to create and distribute propaganda overseas in a bid to “influence foreign target audiences” and “suppress dissenting arguments,” according to a U.S. Special Operations Command document reviewed by The Intercept.
The document, a sort of special operations wishlist of near-future military technology, reveals new details about a broad variety of capabilities that SOCOM hopes to purchase within the next five to seven years, including state-of-the-art cameras, sensors, directed energy weapons, and other gadgets to help operators find and kill their quarry. Among the tech it wants to procure is machine-learning software that can be used for information warfare.
To bolster its “Advanced Technology Augmentations to Military Information Support Operations” — also known as MISO — SOCOM is looking for a contractor that can “Provide a capability leveraging agentic Al or multi‐LLM agent systems with specialized roles to increase the scale of influence operations.”
They should have been doing this a decade ago. Russia, China, and India currently are, and I fully believe that’s how we ended up here.
We absolutely need to be running offense in foreign social media, governments, etc
Yeah, but this is about domestic social media.
But you’re absolutely right. Western countries created a giant propaganda machine and then left it wide open for anyone to use it for pennies with almost no restrictions. Of course our enemies would exploit that.