I’ve covered the CIA’s venture capital arm, In-Q-Tel, before (yes the CIA has a venture capital arm. In that instance, I raised concerns about Palantir, a company started by Peter Theil in 2004 and in which I-Q-Tel was an early investor. The post was titled: Is Peter Thiel Assisting the Government in the Creation of an Authoritarian State? I hadn’t seen much regarding the CIA’s investment activities since then, until yesterday when I read about their latest investment in a company called Narrative Science. The company specializes in computers turning data into news stories. The negative implications of something like this in the hands of the CIA are endless. I’d call it HFP: High Frequency Propaganda. From Mashable:
Chicago-based Narrative Science got its start by turning baseball box scores into readable accounts of games — not unlike a piece you might see in your local newspaper’s sports pages.
Naturally, Narrative Science raised many questions about the impact on journalism: Will we still need writers to pen rote accounts of the day’s events if robots can do the job just fine? Should more journalists move away from the “here’s what happened” to the “here’s why it matters”? And so on.
Despite its immediate impact in the journalism world, Narrative Science finds most of its clients in the financial services, marketing and research fields. The CIA fits into the latter category — the agency collects mounds of raw data, and its researchers would most likely appreciate an automated hand in turning all those figures into readable, actionable reports for agents and higher-ups.
“Narrative Science’s artificial intelligence platform analyzes data and communicates this information in a way that is easy to read and understand,” said Steve Bowsher, Managing Partner at IQT, in a press release. “We believe these advanced analytic capabilities can be of great value to our customers in the Intelligence Community.”
I wonder, will the robots be given human names in order to make it appear as if an actual human wrote the stories? Crazy.
Full article here.
In Liberty,
Mike
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Not sure this is anything new. I always thought the MSM stories were written by robots.
Yes, they’re automating the disinformation factory. Any member of the United Auto Workers could have told you this was coming.
Less light-heartedly, it’s not hard to envision a tidal wave of anonymous or straw man blogs, and “staff writer report” by-lines, all composed by such programs, inserting key fictions into the public consciousness. We have known for years that repetition is the key to programing thought. Promulgating ten thousand–a hundred thousand?– automated blogs covering every conceivable segment of the political, economic and social spectrum is a great way of subverting the internet’s and alternative press’s hard-won reputation for truth-telling.
What was it William Casey, that sinister freak, said? Something to the effect: “We know we will have won when everything the American public reads in the papers, and therefore believes, is false, planted there by us.”
Psychopath.
Lord I am tired of these guys.
Representative government has turned into a freak show, not because of anything that I have done, but because of what the unelected representatives (the appointed ones, the bureaucrats who just follow orders) have wrought. Machines will do an even better job of just following orders than journalists.
Who does the CIA really serve?