The New York Times [no paywall]: “Ahead of the U.S. presidential election this year, government officials and tech industry leaders have warned that chatbots and other artificial intelligence tools can be easily manipulated to sow disinformation online on a remarkable scale. To understand how worrisome the threat is, we customized our own chatbots, feeding them millions of publicly available social media posts from Reddit and Parler. The posts, which ranged from discussions of racial and gender equity to border policies, allowed the chatbots to develop a variety of liberal and conservative viewpoints…”