news.ycombinator.com
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> According to the petition, two people asked [Meta AI] to pick a number between 1 and 25. They gave no instructions and made no reference to the election. In one attempt, the AI answered 13. In the other, it answered 22. Those are the party ballot numbers of Lula and Flávio Bolsonaro, respectively. The groups question the coincidence. My confidence in the validity of their claims tanked right about here. I'm all for regulating transparency into social media algorithms. Meta most certainly is compromised by foreign actors. But can we choose less stupid hills to die on than numerology and GIFs? Headline is not remotely supported by the evidence.
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The example showcased is particularly weak, but the actual scandal with Meta AI is that when they are asked to produce campaign material, they spontaneously produce it with Bolsonaro's number (22), even when not asked. But then they refuse to produce it with other numbers like Lula's 13, saying they can't perform this for a specific candidate. When asked, they admit they were inconsistent in producing Bolsonaro-linked material, but in new chats they reliably continue to do so. See for example what was posted in this thread https://www.reddit.com/r/brasil/comments/1x965on/eu_n%C3%A3o... What would be useful here is leaking the system prompt for the Meta AI inside WhatsApp
Now look through this thread and be amazed at how most posters are apparently satisfied by this level of evidence and some are even calling for China-style Internet censorship in response. A good reminder that even enlightened progressives are helpless against cognitive bias when they want to believe the worst about their enemies.
Ok, but what about Vote + number? As stated so: "On Instagram, a search for the same word showed a GIF reading “Vote 13.”" It's one thing to discard it as "numerology and gifs" but it's another to willfully disrupt legal elections in a soverign country. Or is a decade a really long time and we've all forgotten about Cambridge Analytica? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambridge_Analytica
Have you considered that Meta could simply be compromised by Meta's own Management, which leads to inference in the elections of foreign countries? That is what seems to be happening here.
My wife is Brazilian. I think HN might be missing some cultural context here. IIUC in Brazil when you vote for a presidential candidate you literally enter the 2 number digit assigned to the candidate's party. When casting your vote for Bolsonaro you enter 22, or 13 for Lula. The machine then displays the candidate's info and you press a confirm button to finalize your vote. I personally agree that "give me a random number between 0 and 25" and getting 13 or 25 is not a strong argument by itself, but I also think that HN may not appreciate the significance of these numbers to the literal mechanics of voting in Brasil.