Calling artificial intelligence and deepfakes a “technological leap forward,” former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said Thursday that people using AI for anti-democratic purposes are honing their skills by working with its image.
“Because they have such a library of data on me, they use it to train and see how much more sophisticated they can get,” Clinton said during a conference at Aspen Digital. interview focused on elections and artificial intelligence.
“I’m concerned because having defamatory videos about you is not fun, I can tell you that,” Clinton added, calling the technology a “totally different type of threat.”
Clinton said she was amazed at how social media-fueled misinformation and the prevalence of AI-generated misinformation have grown, saying that during the 2016 election she and her team failed to understand which then constituted a new threat.
“We knew something was going on, but we didn’t understand the full extent of the very clever way in which it was insinuated in social media,” Clinton said. “It worked: there are people today who think I did all these terrible things because they saw it on the Internet… in their Facebook feed.”
Clinton said what was scary about so many people believing the misinformation swirling around her in 2016 was how “primitive” the technology was at that time.
Clinton also used the interview to call for the repeal of Section 230, which is part of the Telecommunications Act of 1996 and which generally grants immunity to online computer services in terms of third-party content generated by their users. Many experts believe Section 230 is a key factor allowing misinformation to flourish online.
Two Supreme Court challenges last year left Section 230 intact. Clinton called it a mistake.
“It’s very difficult to be as angry at the tech companies as we are and I think it’s rightly so, since they benefited from this impunity… in the late 90s,” he said. -she declared. “Shame on us that we’re still sitting around talking about this – Section 230 needs to go.”
Clinton said she believed tech companies’ profits would not decline if that happened.
“They will continue to make a ton of money if they change their algorithms to avoid the kind of harm caused by sending people to the lowest common denominator every time they log in,” she said. “You need to stop this reward for this kind of negative and virulent content.
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