Social media and attention engineering

There is no better everyday example of how AI and machine learning are tied together. In a tweet in May 2022, Tesla CEO and now Twitter owner Elon Musk pointed toward these concerns with the Twitter feed algorithm.

Figure 2.2: Elon Musk’s take on Twitter’s algorithm

Using social media data to manipulate voting trends and public opinion came into the spotlight with the infamous Cambridge Analytica scandal during the 2016 US presidential elections. Cambridge Analytica harvested Facebook data to change audience behavior for political and commercial causes. The use of bots, natural language, and visual image generation kept growing with the advent of technologies such as OpenAI’s GPT3 and Deepfakes. It is getting harder to distinguish between bots and real individuals as advanced technologies enable fake and AI-generated images and text. Deepfaking is a technique to generate human images that can...