Defence Force chief General Angus Campbell has warned that artificial intelligence technologies are becoming so advanced that it may become impossible for people to distinguish fact from fiction, allowing adversaries to subjugate rival nations without ever needing to launch a physical attack.
Declaring that we live in an era of “truth decay”, Campbell said the Chinese military was especially invested in forms of psychological and information warfare that sought to confuse and divide foreign citizens.
Defence Force chief Angus Campbell said deep fake videos posed serious national security threats. Credit: Alex Ellinghausen
“Today, we are more connected and have access to more information than any other time in history, and also more disinformation,” Campbell told an Australian Strategic Policy Institute forum on Thursday night.
“We rightly pride ourselves on being an open, diverse and liberal society – in other words, exposed.
“Healthy and functioning societies such as ours depend upon a well-informed and engaged citizenry.
“Unfortunately, it is often said, we are increasingly living in a post-truth world where perceptions and emotions often trump facts.”
In a speech that focused on non-traditional methods of warfare, Campbell said increasingly sophisticated “deep-fake” videos posed a profound national security threat by making it harder for people to determine what foreign leaders were actually saying.
He noted that a “crude deep-fake video” of US President Joe Biden criticising transgender women emerged in February, and a deep fake of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy was released in March 2022 in which he apparently urged his troops to lay down their arms in the face of Russia’s
invasion.
Campbell said disinformation operations had “the potential to fracture and fragment entire societies so that they no longer possess the collective will to resist an adversary’s intentions”.
“As these technologies quickly mature, there may soon come a time when it is impossible for the average person to distinguish fact from fiction,” he said.
“And although a tech counter-response can be anticipated, the first impression is often the most powerful.
“This tech future may accelerate truth decay, greatly challenging the quality of what we call public ‘common sense’, seriously damaging public confidence in elected officials, and undermining the trust that binds us.”
Russia’s use of bot farms and trolls to influence public debate during the Brexit referendum in the United Kingdom and the 2016 US presidential election was a warning of what could come, he said.
While all nations used psychological tactics to gain an advantage over their rivals, Campbell said “there is no denying that the most developed doctrinal approaches that seek to ‘win without fighting’ is observed in non-Western institutions, particularly the [Chinese] People’s Liberation Army”.
Campbell, who has led the nation’s Defence Force since 2018, said the Chinese military had a “three warfares strategy” encompassing psychological operations, media operations and legal operations.
“While these operations are, of course, not new phenomena, informatic disruption is exponentially, instantaneously and globally enhancing the prevalence and effectiveness of a three warfares approach, by any reasonably sophisticated practitioner.
“Such an approach may bypass the need for a physical attack and strike directly at the psychological, changing perceptions of reality, with profound implications for deterrence.”
As crossbench and Greens MPs lobby the government to release a declassified version of a secret Office of National Intelligence report on the national security risks of climate change, Campbell said a hotter environment with larger, more intense climate events more often would be the norm.
“It has immediate disaster mitigation and response challenges, along with food and water security implications, and longer-term human migration impacts,” he said.
“This disruption is happening faster and less predictably than we all hoped. Without the global momentum needed, we may all be humbled by a planet made angry by our collective neglect.”
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