AI Election Influence, Security Backlogs and the SAP Agent Test

But speaking of crazy thoughts for the day, we're going to talk about the midterm elections.

Because, well, it's been two years since the last major one, and that one was kind of insane.

And since then, AI has just, I mean, it's exploded.

It's everywhere.

And the capabilities that are provided are mind-boggling.

But it turns out that...

AI is being used pretty extensively in various disinformation campaigns.

And the folks at CISA, which has been arguably gutted, are now getting some help from the Department of Defense, a.k.a. the Department of War, to help us protect these elections, or at least that's the idea and the concept.

But, John, it looks like the folks in Russia are stepping up their campaigns as well.

And my question to you, you know, can we trust our eyes and ears anymore? What's going on here? And how does this

play out? So from what I could gather from the story, the Defense Department and CISA announced these plans recently.

I mean, they've had two years between major elections, so they want to secure the midterm elections, but they announced this idea against admittedly traditional threats like vulnerable systems, insider threats, and compromised databases.

But the two questions I have, and I have a lot of issues with this, is that they waited so long, and they're also part of an administration that gutted CISA in the first place.

And they're also working within an administration that's doing everything it can to try to foment confusion and chaos before these elections.

And in a sense, also, maybe they're missing the point because within the story, there's a CTO at Lumio, Gary Barlett, who points out that the adversary today doesn't necessarily compromise the infrastructure so much as AI-generated content, right? We're talking about influence campaigns, disinformation to undermine our trust.

So this is going on.

At the same time, there's a story that we did involving some claims that CLOD has been used in pro-Russian campaigns in the Central African Republic.

And this model has been used to create propaganda content and support different disinformation campaigns.

We then several countries, including the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Kenya, Sudan, and Mali.

So I really, I wonder if this is for show, because this idea that defense departments are going to try to kind of try to protect us during the election, because at the same time, we're hearing rumors of martial law being imposed, ICE agents or agents of the federal government being deployed at voting centers to dissuade people from voting.

So I don't know.

I mean, this is kind of, it seems like a half-hearted measure that was kind of thrown out for some political reason, kind of to undermine our fears that we have about our own administration.

That was my takeaway.

It's kind of funny about this whole thing because if you listen to folks, they're trying to make an argument that says there's some sort of fine line between disinformation and freedom of speech and therefore I'm allowed to do and say whatever in the name of freedom of speech.

you know, as a student of history, I go back to like, you know, Jefferson versus Adams and they had these pamphlets and they made up all kinds of crap in those pamphlets that had no bearing on reality.