>>117547
Thank you for this, I was actually able to read those articles.
After briefly skimming the articles, I did not find any mention of these topics. In addition, searching for a direct quote with a fragment of a sentence produced zero results. Either this article does not exist, it was removed, or it could be behind some other site with the actual contents hidden (like in a pdf).
However, the subject matter and prose does seem somewhat similar to the articles they've actually written. On top of this, the existence of AIDungeon and NovelAI and their potential does not make the proposed threat out of the realms of reality. In fact with the right parameters, you probably could produce such posts that this supposed article proposes now if you vet the output and train the network right. So while the article may not even exist, I would argue the threat it proposes is very much real, even if no one has implemented it yet.
>>117554
>Why?
There's an ideological battle underway, and 'dangerous' elements need to be disposed. That infamous hacker 4chan and instant racial hatred 8chan has proven that "lesser" sites can have perceivable effects to the public. The anonymous and 'out of the way' nature of imageboards are unpredictable and have no effective counter versus 'open' sites like twitter, where one can be 'canceled', or banned by a more easily pressured group. 8chan only went down after the DDoS protection refused to host the site any longer, which is an extremely rare incident, so the existence and influence of the site are a problem unless they drum up enough of a storm like Tarrant did.
>other problems
Rather than focus on a few issues, countries will instead try to tackle everything. That just means they hand off an additional assignment to one of several departments/organizations/councils to handle. Though if I had to guess, an NGO would be more likely to try and hunt down imageboards than government agencies, at least outwardly.
On a separate note, at least as of last year (February 2021), these appear to be sites they're aware of. However, the researchers were only investigating /pol/ boards, so whether they know about this site or the webring is up in the air.