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Tech Billionaire Allegedly Behind A False Flag Operation Played A Role

In Creating Fake News Software, Nonprofit Confirms

Chris White | Energy Reporter

Reid Hoffman, a billionaire who was allegedly involved in a false information campaign in Alabama, played a
crucial role in developing software capable of creating “deepfake” news articles, sources confirmed.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk suggests he distanced himself from OpenAI in 2018 after disagreements about the
direction researchers were taking the group.

One of the big tech billionaires responsible for financing a project creating “deepfake” news articles is a
prominent Hillary Clinton supporter and Democratic donor.

The liberal billionaire who allegedly backed a misinformation campaign during the midterm elections played a significant role in
funding a group responsible for creating a controversial fake news project.

Reid Hoffman greatly increased his financial contributions to artificial intelligence research group OpenAI, The Daily Caller News
Foundation has learned. The group recently developed software allowing people with the know-how to craft so-called “deepfake” news
articles, The Guardian reported.

“OpenAI has lots of co-founders, by the way, with most involved ones being our CTO Greg Brockman and Chief Scientist Ilya
Sutskever,” Jack Clark, the nonprofit’s head of policy, told TheDCNF, referring to OpenAI executives Greg Brockman and Ilya
Sutskever.

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Clark confirmed the LinkedIn founder stepped up his funding in 2018.

News of Hoffman’s role in the project comes at a strange time for both OpenAI and the tech guru. The wealthy Democratic donor
became embroiled in controversy after The New York Times and other outlets reported in December 2018 and January about his role
in a false flag operation in Alabama. Hoffman, for his part, apologized for his role in the effort to troll voters.

Republican U.S. Senate candidate Roy Moore walks on stage at his election night party in Montgomery, Alabama, U.S., December 12, 2017.
REUTERS/Carlo Allegri

Hoffman-financed groups — New Knowledge (NK) and American Engagement Technologies (AET) — allegedly used social media in

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2017 to undermine support for Republican Roy Moore’s senatorial campaign and boosted his opponent, Democrat Doug Jones, who
narrowly won the race. Jones has since publicly called for an investigation into the caper.

Operatives involved in the ploy created thousands of Twitter accounts posing as Russian bots in order to boost Jones. There is
evidence the campaign caused a splash. Major media outlets — both in Alabama and nationally — fell for the gambit and amplified
the false narrative in October 2017. (RELATED: What The Media’s ‘Russian Bots’ Coverage Is Getting All Wrong)

Hoffman spent roughly $100,000 on the projects — the identical amount Facebook says the Russian Internet Research Agency spent
trolling people on social media leading up to the 2016 election. It’s unclear if it had any effect on the outcome of Alabama’s election.
Analysts believe allegations Moore sexually assaulted underage women three decades ago likely played a larger role.

The effort was the subject of a closed-door presentation in Washington, D.C., to a group of liberal technology experts, with Hoffman
at the forefront, The Washington Post reported in December 2018, citing anonymous sources. The well-heeled tech titan was left
reeling after former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s loss in 2016, so he went on to become one of the biggest funders of efforts to
elect Democrats in 2018.

Much of that money went to New Knowledge, but some of that cash went into the coffers of MotiveAI, a group responsible for creating
digital outlet News for Democracy, which itself created Facebook ads during the midterms designed to undercut support for
conservative candidates.

News for Democracy ran ads touting failed Senate candidate Beto O’Rourke of Texas on a Facebook page targeting evangelicals,
media reports note. Another page called “Sounds Like Tennessee” ran at least one ad attacking since-elected Republican Sen. Marsha
Blackburn of Tennessee. The latter page focused primarily on sports and other local issues.

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Senator-elect Doug Jones (D-AL) speaks during a December 13, 2017 in Birmingham, Alabama. Jones stated that US President Donald
Trump called him today to congratulate him on his victory. (Photo by Mark Wallheiser/Getty Images)

Hoffman’s funding of these groups appears to coincide with his work for OpenAI, an artificial intelligence research group that
published software called GT2 that is capable of generating fake news from two sentences — such pieces are being dubbed “deepfake”
articles. Deepfakes are effectively news articles that look deceptively real but are actually highly manipulated phonies.

Lawmakers sounded alarms in January about so-called deepfake videos that look remarkably real, with some experts warning they
will be the next phase in disinformation campaigns. They worry that this new type of AI can make it difficult for readers and social
media users to distinguish fact from fiction.

“It is almost too late to sound the alarm before this technology is released — it has been unleashed … and now we are playing a bit of
defense,” Senate Intelligence Committee Vice Chairman Mark Warner, a Virginia Democrat, told reporters in January. All of this
comes less than three months after reports of News for Democracy, NK, or AET.

GPT2 is considered ground-breaking, both in terms of the amount of output it is capable of producing and the authentic look of the
finished product. The data models “were 12 times bigger, and the dataset was 15 times bigger and much broader” than the previous
state-of-the-art AI model, Dario Amodei, OpenAI’s research director, told reporters.

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The AI system is fed text and asked to write sentences based on learned predictions of what words might come next. Access to the
GPT2 was provided to select media outlets, one of which was Axios, whose reporters fed words and phrases into the text generator
and created an entirely fake news story. The first two sentences in the graph below were written by Axios; the rest of the content
comes from GPT2:

On the heels of a sweeping new U.S. plan to retain dominance in artificial intelligence, the Pentagon has cast Chinese development
of intelligent weapons as an existential threat to the international order.

A day after the release of an executive order by President Trump that omits naming China, the Defense Department, in a new AI
strategy document, speaks in stark terms of a “destabilizing” Chinese threat.

It warns of a “new arms race in AI” and says the United States “will not sit idly by” as a “highly advanced new generation of
weapons capable of waging asymmetric warfare” is “possessed by aggressive actors.”

Related: New White House plan on China may spark a cyber arms race

“China uses new and innovative methods to enable its advanced military technology to proliferate around the world, particularly to
countries with which we have strategic partnerships,” the Pentagon said in its five-page strategy outline last week.

The new U.S. strategy will be a major component of the White House’s first National Security Strategy, coming in two parts in
September.

“The President has directed me to undertake a study of our strategy toward a world of artificial intelligence,” Defense Secretary
James Mattis told the Senate Armed Services Committee on Thursday.

OpenAI decided not to publish any of the code involved in GPT2 out of concern that bad actors might misuse the product to create
fake news. The group was constructed to not only develop new kinds of AI, but also to consider the ethics of publishing certain kinds of
software. Its researchers believe openly dispersing such developments helps prevent malevolent abuse of AI. (RELATED: Musk

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Distances Himself From AI Monitoring Group After It Created Convincing Fake News Software)

The group’s work is mostly the brainchild of tech entrepreneur Elon Musk, who left OpenAI in 2018 after he determined the nonprofit
was poaching on researchers who might be better used at his main companies: Tesla and SpaceX. Musk also suggested earlier in
February he left partially because of a disagreement about the direction of the group.

“Tesla was competing for some of same people as OpenAI & I didn’t agree with some of what OpenAI team wanted to do. Add that all
up & it was just better to part ways on good terms,” Musk wrote on Twitter Sunday, responding to a follower’s tweet mentioning the
project.

The Tesla CEO founded OpenAI in 2015 along with fellow tech titans Hoffman, Peter Thiel and Sam Altman.

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Tesla CEO Elon Musk attends the Tesla Shanghai Gigafactory groundbreaking ceremony in Shanghai, China January 7, 2019.
REUTERS/Aly Song

Tesla has not responded to TheDCNF’s repeated requests for comment about the specific reasons for Musk’s departure — the
automaker instead directed further questions about the subject to OpenAI, which refused to answer.

OpenAI’s Clark, for his part, suggested Tesla would be the best point of contact to address Musk’s thinking. Hoffman also refused to
respond to TheDCNF’s questions. Some analysts, meanwhile, believe the group’s concerns about bad actors exploiting AI for ill
intentions is exaggerated.

“We’re still very far away from the risks,” Anima Anandkumar, a Caltech professor and Nvidia’s machine learning research director,
told reporters.

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She said it’s too early to be withholding any research.

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