The pernicious old tactic of Wikipedia-seeding has now reached the level of international diplomacy, as demonstrated by this recent exchange with the Chinese Foreign Ministry:
Phoenix TV: It’s been disclosed that Japan’s right-wing forces are making continuous efforts to tamper WWII history by entering adulterated data into mainstream AI models, some of which produce outputs with a clearly misguided view of history. For instance, they refer to the July 7 Incident as a “clash” between Japanese and Chinese troops, the Nanjing Massacre as the “Fall of Nanjing” and Japan’s aggression against Southeast Asia as “interest” in the region’s resources. What’s your comment?
Mao Ning: Japan committed ironclad and undeniable crimes during militarist aggression. Using new technologies to poison the data is the latest method by Japanese right-wing forces to distort and glorify Japan’s war history. The aim is to embed a wrong perception of WWII history and misguide public opinion, so that Japan can break free from the postwar pacifist constraint and accelerate remilitarization.
AI should be used for the positive and for good, not for tampering with historical facts and whitewashing war crimes. The covert moves of Japanese right-wing forces greatly hurt the sentiments of Japan’s war victims and constitute a blatant affront to human conscience. The international community must stay on high alert and push back those moves.
Having been the target for more than a decade of this information-seeding attack, I can personally attest that it has real-world effects that last a long time. To this day, I am still being actively abused by thousands of individuals for things I never said, for incomplete quotes taken obviously out of context, and for various beliefs I have neither expressed nor held.
Even the most basic facts are often misrepresented by the information-seeders. For years, Wikipedia reported that I was on my second marriage, despite there being no evidence of either a previous marriage or a divorce for the very solid reason that neither of them ever existed in the first place.
All it takes is one person in a position for the system’s filters to view their unsupported statements as a “reliable source” to feed in false or misleading information and that’s sufficient to make it very, very difficult to dislodge.
I never even bothered trying, because there is nothing that one person can reasonably hope to achieve in this regard. But when the intelligence and military resources of a powerful nation are involved, particularly of one that is a leading AI power, we may find that the results will vary.
I imagine being pilloried in the public square every day for more than a decade. I don't think I could endure it. Every villain has his origin story. You may have been born sigma, or become one at a very young age. But I imagine that enduring such relentless public abuse would burn away whatever concern for public opinion you once had, until the purifying fire had vaporized the last traces of it, leaving only the Dark Lord we behold today.