The rise of AI has been cited as a cause for widespread antisemitism online as masses of holocaust denial content starts surging around the internet.
The United Nation, UNESCO and the World Jewish Congress released a report citing AI as a cause for concern regarding the spread of antisemitic content online, (via The Hill.)
In the report, the rise of misinformation via AI, such as Google’s tools telling people to eat glue, has serious consequences, especially for conspiracy theories such as Holocaust denial. With AI chatbots fuelled by datasets pulled from Reddit and other sources, many conspiracy theories are being exacerbated by artificial intelligence due to a lack of dataset moderation.
“If we allow the horrific facts of the Holocaust to be diluted, distorted or falsified through the irresponsible use of AI, we risk the explosive spread of antisemitism and the gradual diminution of our understanding about the causes and consequences of these atrocities,” explained UNESCO Director-General Audrey Azoulay.
Azoulay stressed the importance of enforcing UNESCO’s recommendation of AI ethics guidelines to ensure “that younger generations grow up with facts, not fabrications.”
Due to the mass amount of information powering AI products, especially with companies such as Google partnering with Reddit to fuel datasets, the mass expansion of artificial intelligence is hard to trust. If a percentage of Holocaust Denial content is included in a dataset — despite clearly being false information — it has the potential to influence AI answers.
In the 1940s, the German Nazi Party killed over 6 million Jewish people in Holocaust, alongside disabled people, black people, homosexuals, Polish people and others. However, less than a hundred years later — despite clear data and evidence — Holocaust denial is still a major problem across social media platforms.
With genocides happening across the world in places such as Gaza, it’s important to remember the facts of the Holocaust so it doesn’t happen again.