Slopaganda: The interaction between propaganda and generative AI

At least since Francis Bacon, the slogan “knowledge is power” has been used to capture the relationship between decision-making at a group level and information. We know that being able to shape the informational environment for a group is a way to shape their decisions; it is essentially a way to make decisions for them. This paper focuses on strategies that are intentionally, by design, impactful on the decision-making capacities of groups, effectively shaping their ability to take advantage of information in their environment. Among these, the best known are political rhetoric, propaganda, and misinformation. The phenomenon this paper brings out from these is a relatively new strategy, which we call slopaganda. According to The Guardian, News Corp Australia is currently churning out 3000 “local” generative AI (GAI) stories each week. In the coming years, such “generative AI slop” will present multiple knowledge-related (epistemic) challenges. We draw on contemporary research in cognitive science and artificial intelligence to diagnose the problem of slopaganda, describe some recent troubling cases, then suggest several interventions that may help to counter slopaganda. This talk is based on joint work between Mark Alfano (Macquarie University), Michał Klincewicz (Tilburg University) and Amir Ebrahimi Fard (Independent Researcher).

Mark Alfano uses tools and methods from philosophy, psychology, and computer science to explore topics in social epistemology, moral psychology, and digital humanities. He studies how people become and remain virtuous, how values become integrated into people's lives, and how these virtues and values are (or fail to be) manifested in their perception, thoughts, feelings, deliberations, and actions. One of the guiding themes of his work is that normative philosophy without psychological content is empty, but scientific investigation without philosophical insight is blind. Currently an Associate Professor in Macquarie University's Department of Philosophy, Mark received a doctorate from the Philosophy Program of the City University of New York Graduate Center (CUNY GC) in 2011. He has been a postdoctoral fellow at the Notre Dame Institute for Advanced Study and the Princeton University Center for Human Values, as well as Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of Oregon, Associate Professor of Ethics & Philosophy of Technology at Delft University of Technology, and a professorial fellow at Australian Catholic University.