When AI Goes to War: Corporate Accountability for Virtual Mass Disinformation, Algorithmic Atrocities, and Synthetic Propaganda

Abstract

The internet has the power to bring people together or tear them apart. It has been used to foster social movements, challenge political regimes, and threaten insurrection. The influence of social media has also been harnessed to wage genocidal war against minority communities. Cyberattacks have become an essential part of belligerency in military actions and undeclared wars. That is the state of the internet today. Tomorrow threatens to be much more dangerous. Advances in artificial intelligence, synthetic media such as deepfakes, and expansion of reliance on virtual worlds and the multiverse for public discourse will expand the risk that members of the public can be manipulated and inflamed into acts of war, terrorism, genocide, or human rights abuses. In most cases, the acts of belligerency and terror begin with manipulative propaganda designed to promote social unrest and public hatred. This article focuses on the need for the multinational corporate entities that facilitate and provision the intranet infrastructure to take responsibility to curb the worst of the abuses which can occur on their systems. The article first reviews the technologies that will lead to a more volatile geopolitical environment. The article then reviews the failure of international law to provide any meaningful legal systems to reduce the volatility and risks of genocide. The article discusses the current status of U.S. domestic law, and it concludes with a recommendation that a limited regulatory and reporting requirement could provide significant assistance in identifying extremist activities and disrupting systematic human rights disasters before they occur.

Keywords: artificial intelligence, generative AI, synthetic media, genocide, war, cyberattacks, corporate responsibility, deepfakes, social media, algorithms, metaverse, Nuremberg, terrorism

JEL Classification: K1, K10, K13, K14, K42, N4, N44