We’ve all experienced a request from a Facebook account that seems real but isn’t, or an opinionated tweet that has no human behind it. Often fake accounts appear on your feed echoing the opinion you already have. Maybe you feel foolish for believing the fake account if you realize the fraud at all, but what’s the actual harm?

In a recent perspective by Rand Corporation, the authors make the case that “the emergence of ubiquitous, powerful generative AI poses a potential national security threat in terms of the risk of misuse by U.S. adversaries (in particular, for social media manipulation) that the U.S. government and broader technology and policy community should proactively address now.”

Senior behavioral scientist William Marcellino joins A Public Affair host Esty Dinur to help explain how social media manipulation is currently playing out and what might be done about it.

William Marcellino is a senior behavioral scientist at RAND, professor of text analytics at the Pardee RAND Graduate School, and lecturer at Carnegie Mellon University and Johns Hopkins University. He was trained as a sociolinguist and corpus linguist, and at RAND he develops AI applications, including RAND-Lex, RAND’s proprietary text analytics suite. Marcellino teaches text analytics & natural langauge processing (NLP), as well as qualitative research methods. His research focuses on information as a warfighting function, AI technology application & acqusition for DoD, military resilience, and misinformation/disinformation & conspiracy theories over social media.

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