Imagine it is two weeks before a major election in a closely contested state. A controversial ballot measure is on the line. Suddenly, a wave of posts floods X, Reddit, and Facebook, all pushing the same narrative, all amplifying each other, all generating the appearance of a massive grassroots movement. Except none of it is real. …Trust in the information people encounter on X, Facebook, and Reddit, already eroded, could fall even farther.
It’s much more difficult to be propagandized by any means, including autonomous AI, when you’re not freely offering up your own time and devices daily to have it fed to you, individualized just for you by means of your own data, which you are also donating to the cause of propagandizing you.
I get why people do, there are lots of good reasons, but at a certain point the good outweighs the bad. And there’s no time like the present to make a change.
So if you’re reading this and you are still interacting with these centralized corporate-owned propaganda sites regularly, maybe it’s time to rethink that strategy.
A somewhat more hopeful take is that this strategy could be weaponized against misinformation too.
The truth has the advantage of objective evidence and the disadvantage of needing to be more complicated to incorporate objective evidence.
When it comes to news from out of town, there is no objective evidence, only appeal to authority. The few people willing to personally travel somewhere to testify that it is real can be written off as paid actors (or as AI-generated if you aren’t seeing their testimony live).
So in almost all scenarios with this technology, the truth would have the disadvantage but not the advantage. An arms race between pro-truth and anti-truth AI would be the anti-truth AI winning because it can tell the more convenient lie.
My hopeful take is that it will make proper citation an essential life skill, with everyone who believes stories without citation getting scammed until they know better and everyone who doesn’t cite sources being disbelieved. And that, as such, people will organically build up transparent citation networks that they rely on for information, meaning they can more effectively filter out advertisement, propaganda, memes, and lies.
if it’s like everything else LLM, the quality of propaganda will noticeably drop to the point where maybe the normies will catch on.
arguably legacy media has been falling there for awhile, as evidenced by their cratering revenue streams, maybe this will just accelerate things even further
It’s already happening. Aren’t spam bots somewhat like AI agents?
Excited to see smear campaigns that become increasingly surreal and disturbing
While also making genuine bad press easier to dismiss.
eg: “fake news” says the worlds ugliest person.At least 30% of the population will never notice
well shit, first writing hit pieces, now this.
first writing hit pieces, then hitting targets with drones
