The Department of Defense wants technology so it can fabricate online personas that are indistinguishable from real people.

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.deEnglish
      8·
      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
        8·
        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.worldEnglish
        1·
        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.deEnglish
          5·
          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
      2·
      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
    13·
    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.

  • chicken@lemmy.dbzer0.com
    11·
    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?

      • PolandIsAStateOfMind@lemmy.ml
        1·
        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.

  • Korkki@lemmy.world
    9·
    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.

    • coolusername@lemmy.ml
      71·
      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

  • 9point6@lemmy.world
    71·
    2 months ago

    Telling on themselves a bit given the implication is that they’re so far behind every other country who’re definitely already doing the same

    • hightrix@lemmy.world
      10·
      2 months ago

      More likely, they’ve been doing this for many years and it is basically obsolete, so they are spilling the beans now.

      Or not and we really are doomed.

    • davel [he/him]@lemmy.mlEnglish
      101·
      2 months ago

      definitely

      Definitely, given the overwhelming mountain of evidence you’re sitting on 👍 Meanwhile, the US isn’t the largest intelligence/security state in the world by leaps and bounds. It’s just a little-bitty backward country whose military-industrial complex invented the internet.

      • Warl0k3@lemmy.world
        44·
        2 months ago

        We are pathetically behind in the cyber warfare sphere, though. Like at this point it’s embarrassing, we don’t even have the semblance of security education or standards for digital hardening. it’s just fucking awful, and we are being obliterated by chinese/russian/anyone else troll farms and hackers because of it. massive data breaches are a weekly occurrence.

        Its just… we’ve got the NSA, sure, and they are good at what they do. But what they do is not what we need. Right now, you can scatter some USB drives outside any gvmt office here and some poor dumb HR rep or whatever will invariably plug it in to their work desktop, and they’ll totally fail to understand why it was bad for them to do that.

        • davel [he/him]@lemmy.mlEnglish
          141·
          2 months ago

          We are pathetically behind in the cyber warfare sphere, though.

          Not relative to other countries.

          we are being obliterated by chinese/russian/anyone else troll farms

          We are not; we are told we are. It’s propaganda coming from our own security state, pointed at us. Why? To manufacture our consent to censorship. They are telling us that other countries are doing to us what they are doing to other countries, and have been since even before the internet existed.

          Listen to this complete inversion of reality from Biden: How would it be if the United States were viewed by the rest of the world as interfering with the elections directly of other countries, and everybody knew it?

          • Warl0k3@lemmy.world
            12·
            2 months ago

            Yeah… this is an example of what I’m talking about. It’s the romanticized version of the wild west online right now, and whenever you talk about the need for increased security, you’re subjected to a propaganda lecture (edit for clarity:) lecture about propaganda and the political implications of fucking twitter or something. Everyone is so primed to respond along the party line to the idea of troll farms that the conversation about how they’re used outside of influencing our elections never even occurs to people. Most don’t even realize it’s an issue that could be discussed.

            So lets be clear here, while you’re absolutely correct about what you’re saying, that’s not related to what I was saying.

            The near constant spear phishing, network intrusion, ransomware, impersonation, false landings, etc. attacks that every government, medical, social and technical system in the country is being constantly subjected to is the issue I am qualified to speak about. It’s an area where the US isn’t even attempting to fight back, and as beautiful as headline-darling things like stuxnet were, the developers that worked on it haven’t figured out how to mitigate ex: the rampant identity theft throttling the country. My favorite new one has been the theft of identity and thence blackmail of recently paroled prisoners, since a bad actor can easily get them returned to prison by just, say, using their credit card at a walmart out-of-state, or applying for public benefits in a different city. This happens all the time and nobody, at all, is talking about it. It’s so common I was brought in to write a set of tools that auto-generate the letter informing out-of-state LEO agencies that the person was the victim of identity theft and should not be found in violation of their parole terms, since that was so common it was all their entire staff were spending their time doing.

            That’s just the one example that has occured to me, if you want more I can go on for very literal hours (just ask my students (who are no doubt quite stick of the topic…)). There’s no systems, or even the political or social will to investigate developing systems, that could even begin to address the most basic issues in this realm. That is the problem I was screaming helplessly into the void about.

            • davel [he/him]@lemmy.mlEnglish
              3·
              2 months ago

              Yeah, I work in this industry, in the US. I’m familiar with the specific attacks you mentioned. I’ve been paid to lose sleep over these things. I’ve worked extra hours dealing with DDOS attacks and suspected intrusions and zero-day fire drills. I know.

              But this isn’t unique to the US. It’s basically the same everywhere. And the US isn’t uniquely “behind.” Everyone’s behind. If the US is unique at all, it’s that we happen to own & run more internet services than anyone else.

              • Warl0k3@lemmy.world
                12·
                2 months ago

                I’m familiar with the specific attacks you mentioned

                (I made “false landings” up.)

                No, it’s not unique to the US. But we’re by far the most dependent on technology out of any country and knowing this we talk a big game and do nothing to back said game up. The frequency with which [any agency you care to name] fails information security audits is pretty much just one long interrupted string of failures, and having worked with many western non-US governmental groups, the difference in security culture is pretty shameful.