One of the least credible ways in which North Carolina Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson (R) attempted to dismiss Thursday\u2019s report about wildly offensive comments he made on the message board of a pornographic site years ago was that it didn\u2019t sound like him.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis is not my voice,\u201d he told CNN\u2019s Andrew Kaczynski, whose team uncovered the comments. \u201cThese are not things that we would ever say or even think.\u201d<\/p>\n
The comments, Robinson referring to himself as a \u201cblack NAZI\u201d foremost among them, are very much in keeping with his voice \u2014 at least, his voice before he became his party\u2019s gubernatorial nominee. Robinson\u2019s antisemitic comments are well documented; other prior reporting offered insights into his proclivity for adult entertainment. The CNN report, if anything, was simply tying threads together.<\/p>\n
What\u2019s more, the report was robust. CNN\u2019s team not only uncovered the comments, published more than a decade ago on a site called \u201cNude Africa,\u201d but showed how details from that and other sites tied Robinson to the account and to the username \u201cminisoldr,\u201d under which the comments were posted. It\u2019s a digital trail that would be all-but-impossible to create artificially.<\/p>\n
Yet that\u2019s exactly what Robinson suggested had happened.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019m not going to get into the minutiae of how somebody manufactured these salacious tabloid lies,\u201d he said. \u201cBut I can tell you this: There\u2019s been over $1 million spent on me through AI by a billionaire\u2019s son who\u2019s bound and determined to destroy me. The things that people can do with the internet now is incredible. But what I can tell you is this, again, these are not my words.\u201d<\/p>\n
Kaczynski pushed back: Was he suggesting that someone had invented these comments and pinned them to Robinson?<\/p>\n
\u201cLook,\u201d Robinson replied, \u201cI have no idea how this was done.\u201d<\/p>\n
For years, the default response from politicians and public figures digitally linked to mistakes or scandals was to assert that they had been hacked. Former New York congressman Anthony Weiner sent a lewd photo to a young woman? Hack. A sports analyst posts an incorrect historical point? Hacked.<\/p>\n
The appeal is obvious. Americans have seen lots of Hollywood movies in which hackers do surreal, miraculous things that hackers can\u2019t or wouldn\u2019t do in real life. Since digital mechanisms are often inscrutable, people are deferential to the idea that maybe some computer geek did that thing that the elected official alleges. And then, almost inevitably, it turns out that it was exactly what it seemed at the outset.<\/p>\n
Now, as reflected in Robinson\u2019s comments, there\u2019s a new boogeyman: artificial intelligence. We have all seen the way in which AI can be used to generate startlingly realistic images and text; we know that major institutions are investing billions in amplifying the technology\u2019s capabilities. Those capabilities are still more limited than the public\u2019s imagination, in the same way that \u201chacking\u201d has been misunderstood, meaning that AI is an appealing new vehicle for claims that a primarily digital scandal somehow stems from devious robot influence.<\/p>\n
Before Robinson, there was Donald Trump, claiming that Democrats \u201cused AI\u201d in preparing videos for the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol or that a years-old photo of him was somehow perhaps generated through artificial intelligence. Trump has also claimed that Vice President Kamala Harris used AI to inflate the size of her crowds in photos, something that only someone strangely obsessed with crowd size might entertain.<\/p>\n
Seeking to rebut the CNN reporting, Robinson took the same tack. It is true, as he notes, that he has been the target of AI-generated imagery from a wealthy opponent. But the use of artificial intelligence in that case isn\u2019t to manufacture false assertions from Robinson. Instead, it\u2019s to present written statements from the Republican candidate as spoken ones. This can be evaluated on its own ethical merits, but it isn\u2019t really what Robinson is trying to suggest happened with the Nude Africa posts.<\/p>\n
Robinson waves away questions about how this would work for the simple reason that it wouldn\u2019t. It is perhaps possible that someone went into the Nude Africa database of past comments and inserted ones attributed to \u201cminisoldr.\u201d It\u2019s possible that an AI could be trained on Robinson\u2019s past comments, meaning they would use similar phrases as ones he used in public posts, as CNN documented. (Which, by the way, severely undercuts the idea that the posts were not in his voice.)<\/p>\n
This isn\u2019t as easy as it seems, given that the comments were part of ongoing interactions, including responses from other users. You\u2019d have to create those, too, and inject them into the database \u2014 but then you\u2019re making it relatively easy to validate those users and their digital trails. Oh, what a tangled web we weave when first we train an algorithm to deceive.<\/p>\n
And all of this to what end? To put slightly more outrageous words in Robinson\u2019s mouth? To tie him to a slightly more salacious community? It seems clear that one reason the CNN report was such a sensation was that there had been hours of hints that it was coming \u2014 hints that were centered around the North Carolina Republican Party\u2019s obvious interest in finding a last-minute replacement for their already-trailing-badly candidate. This became a big thing in part, it seems, because some Republicans wanted it to be a big thing.<\/p>\n
Others don\u2019t. Over the past 72 hours, CNN mentioned Robinson\u2019s name in more than 400 15-second blocks of airtime. MSNBC mentioned it in more than 200.<\/p>\n
Fox News has mentioned it 12 times, including on Bret Baier\u2019s news show. There, it was dismissed as an \u201cOctober surprise\u201d \u2014 suggesting that it was a campaign tactic \u2014 with Baier noting Robinson\u2019s claim that those weren\u2019t his words.<\/p>\n
Baier, at least, did not blame a robot.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
One of the least credible ways in which North Carolina Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson (R) attempted to dismiss Thursday\u2019s report about wildly offensive comments he made on the message board of a pornographic site years ago was that it didn\u2019t sound like him. \u201cThis is not my voice,\u201d he told CNN\u2019s Andrew Kaczynski, whose team […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":9876,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9875","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9875","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9875"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9875\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/9876"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9875"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9875"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9875"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}