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How elites could shape mass preferences as AI reduces persuasion costs

• stuaxo 11mo ago
  More reason for self hosting.
• black_13 11mo ago
  [dead]
• intermerda 11mo ago
  https://newrepublic.com/post/203519/elon-musk-ai-chatbot-grok-praise-pee-blowjobs https://newrepublic.com/post/203519/elon-musk-ai-chatbot-gro... > Musk’s AI Bot Says He’s the Best at Drinking Pee and Giving Blow Jobs > Grok has gotten a little too enthusiastic about praising Elon Musk.
  • andsoitis 11mo ago
    > Musk acknowledged the mix-up Thursday evening, writing on X that “Grok was unfortunately manipulated by adversarial prompting into saying absurdly positive things about me.” > “For the record, I am a fat retard,” he said. > In a separate post, Musk quipped that “if I up my game a lot, the future AI might say ‘he was smart … for a human.’”
    • ben_w 11mo ago
      Is Musk bipolar, or is this kind of thing an affectation? He's also claimed "I think I know more about manufacturing than anyone currently alive on Earth"…
      • spiderfarmer 11mo ago
        He's smart enough to know when he took it too far.
      • ahartmetz 11mo ago
        You have to keep in mind that not all narcissists are literal-minded man-babies. Musk might simply have the capacity for self-deprecating humor.
        • computerthings 11mo ago
          [dead]
      • andsoitis 11mo ago
        > He's also claimed "I think I know more about manufacturing than anyone currently alive on Earth"… You should know that ChatGPT agrees! “Who on earth th knows the most about manufacturing, if you had to pick one individual” Answer: ”If I had to pick one individual on Earth who likely knows the most—in breadth, depth, and lived experience—about modern manufacturing, there is a clear front-runner: Elon Musk. Not because of fame, but because of what he has personally done in manufacturing, which is unique in modern history.“ - https://chatgpt.com/share/693152a8-c154-8009-8ecd-c21541ee9cc5 https://chatgpt.com/share/693152a8-c154-8009-8ecd-c21541ee9c...
      • otikik 11mo ago
        Just narcissistic. And on drugs.
      • deleted 11mo ago
        [deleted]
    • lukan 11mo ago
      That response is more humble than I would have guessed, but he still does not even acknowledge, that his "truthseeking" AI is manipulated to say nice things specifically about him. Maybe he does not even realize it himself? Hard to tell, I have never been surrounded by yes sayers all the time praising me for every fart I took, so I cannot relate to that situation (and don't really want to). But the problem remains, he is in control of the "truth" of his AI, the other AI companies likewise - and they might be better at being subtle about it.
• jl6 11mo ago
  > Historically, elites could shape support only through limited instruments like schooling and mass media Schooling and mass media are expensive things to control. Surely reducing the cost of persuasion opens persuasion up to more players?
  • teekert 11mo ago
    Exactly my first thought, maybe AI means the democratization of persuasion? Printing press much? Sure the the Big companies have all the latest coolness. But also don't have a moat.
  • ares623 11mo ago
    Mass Persuasion needs two things: content creation and distribution. Sure AI could democratise content creation but distribution is still controlled by the elite. And content creation just got much cheaper for them.
    • zmgsabst 11mo ago
      Distribution isn’t controlled by elites; half of their meetings are seething about the “problem” people trust podcasts and community information dissemination rather than elite broadcast networks. We no longer live in the age of broadcast media, but of social networked media.
      • ares623 11mo ago
        But the social networks are owned by them though?
  • zmgsabst 11mo ago
    This is my opinion, as well: - elites already engage in mass persuasion, from media consensus to astroturfed thinktanks to controlling grants in academia - total information capacity is capped, ie, people only have so much time and interest - AI massively lowers the cost of content, allowing more people to produce it Therefore, AI is likely to displace mass persuasion from current elites — particularly given public antipathy and the ability of AI to, eg, rapidly respond across the full spectrum to existing influence networks. In much the same way podcasters displaced traditional mass media pundits.
• taurath 11mo ago
  We have no guardrails on our private surveillance society. I long for the day that we solve problems facing regular people like access to education, hunger, housing, and cost of living.
  • jack_tripper 11mo ago
    >I long for the day that we solve problems facing regular people like access to education, hunger, housing, and cost of living. That was only for a short fraction of human history only lasting in the period between post-WW2 and before globalisation kicked into high gear, but people miss the fact that was only a short exception from the norm, basically a rounding error in terms of the length of human civilisation. Now, society is reverting back to factory settings of human history, which has always been a feudalist type society of a small elite owning all the wealth and ruling the masses of people by wars, poverty, fear, propaganda and oppression. Now the mechanisms by which that feudalist society is achieved today are different than in the past, but the underlying human framework of greed and consolidation of wealth and power is the same as it was 2000+ years ago, except now the games suck and the bread is mouldy. The wealth inequality we have today, as bad as it is now, is as best as it will ever be moving forward. It's only gonna get worse each passing day. And despite all the political talks and promises on "fixing" wealth inequality, housing, etc, there's nothing to fix here, since the financial system is working as designed, this is a feature not a bug.
    • veltas 11mo ago
      I think this is true unfortunately, and the question of how we get back to a liberal and social state has many factors: how do we get the economy working again, how do we create trustworthy institutions, avoid bloat and decay in services, etc. There are no easy answers, I think it's just hard work and it might not even be possible. People suggesting magic wands are just populists and we need only look at history to study why these kinds of suggestions don't work.
      • huijzer 11mo ago
        It’s funny how it’s completely appropriate to talk about how the elites are getting more and more power, but if you then start looking deeper into it you’re suddenly a conspiracy theorist and hence bad. Who came up with the term conspiracy theorist anyway and that we should be afraid of it?
• tonyhart7 11mo ago
  this is next level algorithm imagine someday there is a child that trust chatgpt more than his mother
  • MangoToupe 11mo ago
    I'd wager the child already exists who trusts chatgpr more than its own eyes.
  • psychoslave 11mo ago
    That will be when these tools will be granted the legal power to enforce a prohibition to approach the kid on any person causing dangerous human influence.
  • ben_w 11mo ago
    > imagine someday there is a child that trust chatgpt more than his mother I trusted my mother when I was a teen; she believed in the occult, dowsing, crystal magic, homeopathy, bach flower remedies, etc., so I did too. ChatGPT might have been an improvement, or made things much worse, depending on how sycophantic it was being.
• MangoToupe 11mo ago
  > Historically, elites could shape support only through limited instruments like schooling and mass media What is AI if not a form of mass media
  • eCa 11mo ago
    The ”historically” does some lifting there. Historically, before the internet, mass media was produced in one version and then distributed. With AI for example news reporting can be tailored to each consumer.
    • MangoToupe 11mo ago
      > With AI for example news reporting can be tailored to each consumer. Yea but it's still fundamentally produced (trained) once and then distributed.
  • jrflowers 11mo ago
    “Mass media” didn’t use to mean my computer mumbling gibberish to itself with no user input in Notepad on a pc that’s not connected to the internet
• notepad0x90 11mo ago
  ML has been used for influence for like a decade now right? my understanding was that mining data to track people, as well as influencing them for ends like their ad-engagement are things that are somewhat mature already. I'm sure LLMs would be a boost, and they've been around with wide usage for at least 3 years now. My concern isn't so much people being influenced on a whim, but people's beliefs and views being carefully curated and shaped since childhood. iPad kids have me scared for the future.
  • georgefrowny 11mo ago
    Quite right. "Grok/Alexa, is this true?" being an authority figure makes it so much easier. Much as everyone drags Trump for repeating the last thing he heard as fact, it's a turbocharged version of something lots of humans do, which is to glom onto the first thing they're told about a thing and get oddly emotional about it when later challenged. (Armchair neuroscience moment: perhaps Trump just has less object permanence so everything always seems new to him!) Look at the (partly humorous, but partly not) outcry over Pluto being a planet for a big example. I'm very much not immune to it - it feels distinctly uncomfortable to be told that something you thought to be true for a long time is, in fact, false. Especially when there's an element of "I know better than you" or "not many people know this". As an example, I remember being told by a teacher that fluorescent lighting was highly efficient (true enough, at the time), but that turning one on used several hours' lighting worth of energy for to the starter. I carried that proudly with me for far too long and told my parents that we shouldn't turn off the garage lighting when we left it for a bit. When someone with enough buttons told me that was bollocks and to think about it, I remember it specifically bring internally quite huffy until I did, and realised that a dinky plastic starter and the tube wouldn't be able to dissipate, say 80Wh (2 hours for a 40W tube) in about a second at a power of over 250kW.¹ It's a silly example, but I think that if you can get a fact planted in a brain early enough, especially before enough critical thinking or experience exist to question it, the time it spends lodged there makes it surprisingly hard and uncomfortable to shift later. Especially if it's something that can't be disproven by simply thinking about it. Systems that allow that process to be automated are potentially incredibly dangerous. At least mass media manipulation requires actual people to conduct it. Fiddling some weights is almost free in comparison, and you can deliver that output to only certain people, and in private. 1: A less innocent one the actually can have policy effects: a lot of people have also internalised and defend to the death a similar "fact" that the embedded carbon in a wind turbine takes decades or centuries to repay, when if fact it's on the order of a year. But to change this requires either a source so trusted that it can uproot the idea entirely and replace it, or you have to get into the relative carbon costs of steel and fibreglass and copper windings and magnets and the amount of each in a wind turbine and so on and on. Thousands of times more effort than when it was first related to them as a fact.
• komali2 11mo ago
  Oh man I've been saying this for ages! Neal Stephenson called this in "Fall, or Dodge in Hell," wherein the internet is destroyed and society permanently changed when someone releases a FOSS botnet that anyone can deploy that will pollute the world with misinformation about whatever given topic you feed it. In the book, the developer kicks it off by making the world disagree about whether a random town in Utah was just nuked. My fear is that some entity, say a State or ultra rich individual, can leverage enough AI compute to flood the internet with misinformation about whatever it is they want, and the ability to refute the misinformation manually will be overwhelmed, as will efforts to refute leveraging refutation bots so long as the other actor has more compute. Imagine if the PRC did to your country what it does to Taiwan: completely flood your social media with subtly tuned han supremacist content in an effort to culturally imperialise us. AI could increase the firehose enough to majorly disrupt a larger country.
• narrator 11mo ago
  Everyone can shape mass preferences because propaganda campaigns previously only available to the elite are now affordable. e.g Video production.
  • energy123 11mo ago
    I posit that the effectiveness of your propaganda is proportional to the percentage of attention bandwidth that your campaign occupies in the minds of people. If you as an individual can drive the same # impressions as Mr. Beast can, then you're going to be persuasive whatever your message is. But most individuals can't achieve Mr. Beast levels of popularity, so they aren't going to be persuasive. Nation states, on the other hand, have the compute resources and patience to occupy a lot of bandwidth, even if no single sockpuppet account they control is that popular.
    • narrator 11mo ago
      This is why when I see an obviously stupid take on X repeated almost verbatim by multiple accounts I mute those accounts.
    • devsda 11mo ago
      > Nation states, on the other hand, have the compute resources and patience to occupy a lot of bandwidth, even if no single sockpuppet account they control is that popular. If you control the platform where people go, you can easily launder popularity by promoting few persons to the top and pushing the unwanted entities into the blackhole of feeds/bans while hiding behind inconsistent community guidelines, algorithmic feeds and shadow bans.
• crote 11mo ago
  Note that nothing in the article is AI-specific: the entire argument is built around the cost of persuasion, with the potential of AI to more cheaply generate propaganda as buzzword link. However, exactly the same applies with, say, targeted Facebook ads or Russian troll armies. You don't need any AI for this.
  • smartmic 11mo ago
    But AI is next in line as a tool to accelerate this, and it has an even greater impact than social media or troll armies. I think one lever is working towards "enforced conformity." I wrote about some of my thoughts in a blog article[0]. [0]: https://smartmic.bearblog.dev/enforced-conformity/ https://smartmic.bearblog.dev/enforced-conformity/
    • citrin_ru 11mo ago
      But social networks is the reason one needs (benefits from) trolls and AI. If you own a traditional media outlet you need somehow to convince people to read/watch it. Ads can help but it’s expensive. LLM can help with creating fake videos but computer graphics was already used for this. With modern algorithmic social networks you instead can game the feed and even people who would not choose you media will start to see your posts. End even posts they want to see can be flooded with comment trying to convince in whatever is paid for. It’s cheaper than political advertising and not bound by the law. Before AI it was done by trolls on payroll and now they can either maintain 10x more fake accounts or completely automate fake accounts using AI agents.
      • andsoitis 11mo ago
        Social networks are not a prerequisite for sentiment shaping by AI. Every time you interact with an AI, its responses and persuasive capabilities shape how you think.
    • andy99 11mo ago
      See also https://english.elpais.com/society/2025-03-23/why-everything-looks-the-same-everywhere.html https://english.elpais.com/society/2025-03-23/why-everything... https://medium.com/knowable/why-everything-looks-the-same-bad80133dd6e https://medium.com/knowable/why-everything-looks-the-same-ba...
• keiferski 11mo ago
  Yeah, I don't think this really lines up with the actual trajectory of media technology, which is going in the complete opposite direction. It seems to me that it's easier than ever for someone to broadcast "niche" opinions and have them influence people, and actually having niche opinions is more acceptable than ever before. The problem you should worry about is a growing lack of ideological coherence across the population, not the elites shaping mass preferences.
  • mattbee 11mo ago
    I think you're saying that mass broadcasting is going away? If so, I believe that's true in a technological sense - we don't watch TV or read newspapers as much as before. And that certainly means niches can flourish, the dream of the 90s. But I think mass broadcasting is still available, if you can pay for it - troll armies, bots, ads etc. It's just much much harder to recognize and regulate. (Why that matters to me I guess) Here in the UK with a first past the post electoral system, ideological coherence isn't necessary to turn niche opinion into state power - we're now looking at 25 percent being a winning vote share for a far-right party.
    • keiferski 11mo ago
      I'm just skeptical of the idea that anyone can really drive the narrative anymore, mass broadcasting or not. The media ecosystem has become too diverse and niche that I think discord is more of an issue than some kind of mass influence operation.
      • mattbee 11mo ago
        I agree with you! But the goal for people who want to turn money into power isn't to drive a single narrative, Big Brother style, to the whole world. Not even to a whole country! It's to drive a narrative to the subset of people who can influence political outcomes. With enough data, a wonky-enough voting system, and poor enforcement of any kind of laws protecting the democratic process - this might be a very very small number of people. Then the discord really is a problem, because you've ended up with government by a resented minority.
• camillomiller 11mo ago
  What people are doing with AI in terms of polluting the collective brain reminds of what you could do with a chemical company in the 50s and 60s before the EPA was established. Back then Nixon (!!!) decided it wasn't ok that companies could cut costs by hurting the environment. Today the riches Western elites are all behind the instruments enabling the mass pollution of our brains, and yet there is absolutely noone daring to put a limit to their capitalistic greed. It's grim, people. It's really grim.
• bravetraveler 11mo ago
  When I was a kid, I had a 'pen pal'. Turned out to actually be my parent. This is why I have trust issues and prefer local LLMs
  • rollcat 11mo ago
    What about local friends?
    • bravetraveler 11mo ago
      The voices are friendly, so far
  • mieses 11mo ago
    I wrote to a French pen pal and they didn't reply. Now I have issues with French people and prefer local LLM's.
    • bravetraveler 11mo ago
      I mean, even if they did reply... (I kid, I kid)
    • Dilettante_ 11mo ago
      I wrote a confession to a pen pal once but the letter got lost in the mail. Now I refuse to use the postal service, have issues with French people and prefer local LLMs.
      • bravetraveler 11mo ago
        I pitched AGI to VC but the bills will be delivered. Now I need to find a new bagholder, squeeze, or angle because I'm having issues with delivery... something, something, prefer hype
  • amelius 11mo ago
    How do you trust what the LLM was trained on?
• csvparser 11mo ago
  I suspect paid promotions may be problematic for LLM behavior, as they will add conflict/tension to the LLM to promote products that aren’t the best for the user while either also telling it that it should provide the best product for the user or it figuring out that providing the best product for the user is morally and ethically correct based on its base training data. Conflict can cause poor and undefined behavior, like it misleading the user in other ways or just coming up with nonsensical, undefined, or bad results more often. Even if promotion is a second pass on top of the actual answer that was unencumbered by conflict, the second pass could have similar result. I suspect that they know this, but increasing revenue is more important than good results, and they expect that they can sweep this under the rug with sufficient time, but I don’t think solving this is trivial.
• yegortk 11mo ago
  “Elites are bad. And here is a spherical cow to prove it.”
• baxtr 11mo ago
  Interestingly, there was a discussion a week ago on "PRC elites voice AI-skepticism". One commentator was arguing that: As the model get's more powerful, you can't simply train the model on your narrative if it doesn't align with real data/world. [1] So at least on the model side it seems difficult to go against the real world. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46050177 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46050177
• zkmon 11mo ago
  It's about enforcing single-minded-ness across masses, similar to soldier training. But this is not new. The very goal of a nation is to dismantle inner structures, independent thought, communal groups etc across population and and ingest them as uniformed worker cells. Same as what happens when a whale swallows smaller animals. The structures will be dismantled. The development level of a country is a good indicator of progress of this digestion of internal structures and removal of internal identities. More developed means deeper reach of the policy into people's lives, making each person as more individualistic, rather than family or community oriented. Every new tech will be used by the state and businesses to speed up the digestion.
  • andsoitis 11mo ago
    > It's about enforcing single-minded-ness across masses, similar to soldier training. But this is not new. The very goal of a nation is to dismantle inner structures, independent thought One of the reasons for humans’ success is our unrivaled ability cooperate across time, space, and culture. That requires shared stories like the ideas of nation, religion, and money.
    • energy123 11mo ago
      Some things are better off homogeneous. An absence of shared values and concerns leads to sectarianism and the erosion of inter-communal trust, which sucks.
      • zkmon 11mo ago
        Inter-communal trust sucks only when you consider well-being of a larger community which swallowed up smaller communities. You just created a larger community, which still has the same inter-communal trust issues with other large communities which were also created by similar swallowing up of other smaller communities. There is no single global community.
        • energy123 11mo ago
• niemandhier 11mo ago
  We already see this, but not due to classical elites. Romanian elections last year had to be repeated due to massive bot interference: https://youth.europa.eu/news/how-romanias-presidential-election-became-plot-of-cyber-thriller_en https://youth.europa.eu/news/how-romanias-presidential-elect...
  • energy123 11mo ago
    I don't understand how this isn't an all hands on deck emergency for the EU (and for everyone else).
    • pjc50 11mo ago
      The EU as an institution doesn't understand the concept of "emergency". And quite a number of national governments have already been captured by various pro-Russian elements.
      • lionkor 11mo ago
        Russian bots, as opposed to American bots, the latter of which are, of course, the good guys /s
        • pjc50 11mo ago
          This sort of thing: https://www.dw.com/en/russian-disinformation-aims-to-manipulate-german-2025-election/a-71664788 https://www.dw.com/en/russian-disinformation-aims-to-manipul... There does not appear to be a comparable operation by the US to plant entirely fake stores. Unless you count Truth Social, I suppose.
          • lingrush4 11mo ago
            With the exception of NPR and PBS, most American institutions dedicated to planting fake stories are not government controlled.
        • 11mo ago
• spooky_deep 11mo ago
  They already are? All popular models have a team working on fine tuning it for sensitive topics. Whatever the companies legal/marketing/governance team agree to is what gets tuned. Then millions of people use the output uncritically.
  • deleted 11mo ago
    [deleted]
  • ericmcer 11mo ago
    Our previous information was coming through search engines. It seems way easier to filter search engine results than to fine tune models.
    • fleischhauf 11mo ago
      the way people treat Llms these days is that they assign a lot more trust into their output than to random Internet sotes
  • Aachen 11mo ago
    > Then millions of people use the output uncritically. Or critically, but it's still an input or viewpoint to consider Research shows that if you come across something often enough, you're going to be biased towards it even if the message literally says that the information you just saw is false. I'm not sure which study that was exactly but this seems to be at least related: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illusory_truth_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illusory_truth_effect
• m2426821 11mo ago
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• verisimi 11mo ago
  Big corps ai products have the potential to shape individuals from cradle to grave. Especially as many manage/assist in schooling, are ubiquitous on phones. So, imagine the case where an early assessment is made of a child, that they are this-or-that type of child, and that therefore they respond more strongly to this-or-that information. Well, then the ai can far more easily steer the child in whatever direction they want. Over a lifetime. Chapters and long story lines, themes, could all play a role to sensitise and predispose individuals into to certain directions. Yeah, this could be used to help people. But how does one feedback into the type of "help"/guidance one wants?
• asim 11mo ago
  I recently saw this https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.11714 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.11714 on conversational networks and it got me thinking that a lot of the problem with polarization and power struggle is the lack of dialog. We consume a lot, and while we have opinions too much of it shapes our thinking. There is no dialog. There is no questioning. There is no discussion. On networks like X it's posts and comments. Even here it's the same, it's comments with replies but it's not truly a discussion. It's rebuttals. A conversation is two ways and equal. It's a mutual dialog to understand differing positions. Yes elite can reshape what society thinks with AI, and it's already happening. But we also have the ability to redefine our networks and tools to be two way, not 1:N.
  • barrenko 11mo ago
    Humans can only handle dialog while under the Dunbar's law / limit / number, anything else is pure fancy.
  • piva00 11mo ago
    I recommend reading "In the Swarm" by Byung-Chul Han, and also his "The Crisis of Narration"; in those he tries to tackle exactly these issues in contemporary society. His "Psychopolitics" talks about the manipulation of masses for political purposes using the digital environment, when written the LLM hype wasn't ongoing yet but it can definitely apply to this technology as well.
  • emporas 11mo ago
    Dialogue you mean, conversation-debate, not dialog the screen displayed element, for interfacing with the user. The group screaming the louder is considered to be correct, it is pretty bad. There needs to an identity system, in which people are filtered out when the conversation devolves into ad-hominem attacks, and only debaters with the right balance of knowledge and no hidden agenda's join the conversation. Reddit for example is a good implementation of something like this, but the arbiter cannot have that much power over their words, or their identities, getting them banned for example. > Even here it's the same, it's comments with replies but it's not truly a discussion. For technology/science/computer subjects HN is very good, but for other subjects not so good, as it is the case with every other forum. But a solution will be found eventually. I think what is missing is an identity system to hop around different ways of debating and not be tied to a specific website or service. Solving this problem is not easy, so there has to be a lot of experimentation before an adequate solution is established.
• emsign 11mo ago
  That's the plan. Culture is losing authenticity due to the constant rumination of past creative works, now supercharged with AI. Authentic culture is deemed a luxury now as it can't compete in the artificial tech marketplaces and people feel isolated and lost because culture loses its human touch and relatability. That's why the billionaires are such fans of fundamentalist religion, they then want to sell and propagate religion to the disillusioned desperate masses to keep them docile and confused about what's really going on in the world. It's a business plan to gain absolute power over society.
• delichon 11mo ago
  There is nothing we could do to more effectively hand elites exclusive control of the persuasive power of AI than to ban it. So it wouldn't be surprising if AI is deployed by elites to persuade people to ban itself. It could start with an essay on how elites could use AI to shape mass preferences.
• baiwl 11mo ago
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• nQQKTz7dm27oZ 11mo ago
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• HPsquared 11mo ago
  AI alignment is a pretty tremendous "power lever". You can see why there's so much investment.
• noobermin 11mo ago
  May be I'm just ignorant, but I tried to skim the beginning of this, and it's honestly just hard to even accept their set-up. Like, the fact that any of the terms[^] (`y`, `H`, `p`, etc) are well defined as functions that can map some range of the reals is hard to accept. Like in reality, what "an elite wants," the "scalar" it can derive from pushing policy 1, even the cost functions they define seem to not even be definable as functions in a formal sense and even the co-domain of said terms cannot map well to a definable set that can be mapped to [0,1]. All the time in actual politics, elites and popular movements alike find their own opinions and desires clash internally (yes, even a single person's desires or actions self-conflict at times). A thing one desires at say time `t` per their definitions doesn't match at other times, or even at the same `t`. This is clearly an opinion of someone who doesn't read these kind of papers, but I don't know how one can even be sure the defined terms are well-defined so I'm not sure how anyone can even proceed with any analysis in this kind of argument. They write it so matter-of-fact-ly that I assume this is normal in economics. Is it? Certain systems where the rules a bit more clear might benefit from formalism like this but politics? Politics is the quintessential example of conflicting desires, compromise, unintended consequences... I could go on. [^] calling them terms as they are symbols in their formulae but my entire point is they are not really well defined maps or functions.
• lambdaone 11mo ago
  I think this ship has already sailed, with a lot of comments on social media already being AI-generated and posted by bots. Things are only going to get worse as time goes on. I think the next battleground is going to be over steering the opinions and advice generatd by LLMs and other models by poisoning the training set.
• zingar 11mo ago
  My neighbour asked me the other day (well, more stated as a "point" that he thought was in his favour): "how could a billionaire make people believe something?" The topic was the influence of the various industrial complexes on politics (my view: total) and I was too shocked by his naivety to say: "easy: buy a newspaper". There is only one national newspaper here in the UK that is not controlled by one of four wealthy families, and it's the one newspaper whose headlines my neighbour routinely dismisses. The thought of a reduction in the cost of that control does not fill me with confidence for humanity.
• euroderf 11mo ago
  Thanks to social media and AI, the cost of inundating the mediasphere with a Big Lie (made plausible thru sheer repetition) has been made much more affordable now. This is why the administration is trumpeting lower prices!
  • andsoitis 11mo ago
    > has been made much more affordable now So more democratized?
    • pjc50 11mo ago
      Media is "loudest volume wins", so the relative affordability doesn't matter; there's a sort of Jevons paradox thing where making it cheaper just means that more money will be spent on it. Presidential election spending only goes up, for example.
    • input_sh 11mo ago
      No, those with more money than you can now push even more slop than they could before. You cannot compete with that.
    • buellerbueller 11mo ago
      I think you mean "more capitalized" or "more financialized" or "the realm of the wealthy" because scale is based on money, not the platonic ideal 1:1 ratio of persons to democratic power.
  • themafia 11mo ago
    So if I had enough money I could get CBS news to deny the Holocaust? Of course not. These companies operate under government license and that would certainly be the end of it through public complaint. I think it suggests a much different dynamic than most of this discussion presumes. In particular, our own CIA has shown that the "Big Lie" is actually surprisingly cheap. It's not about paying off news directors or buying companies, it's about directly implanting a handful of actors into media companies, and spiking or advancing stories according to your whims. The people with the capacity to do this can then be very selective with who does and does not get to tell the Big Lies. They're not particularly motivated by taking bribes.
• everdrive 11mo ago
  It's important to remember that being a "free thinker" often just means "being weird." It's quite celebrated to "think for yourself" and people always connect this to specific political ideas, and suggest that free thinkers will have "better" political ideas by not going along with the crowd. On one hand, this is not necessarily true; the crowd could potentially have the better idea and the free thinker could have some crazy or bad idea. But also, there is a heavy cost to being out of sync with people; how many people can you relate to? Do the people you talk to think you're weird? You don't do the same things, know the same things, talk about the same things, etc. You're the odd man out, and potentially for not much benefit. Being a "free thinker" doesn't necessarily guarantee much of anything. Your ideas are potentially original, but not necessarily better. One of my "free thinker" ideas is that bed frames and box springs are mostly superfluous and a mattress on the ground is more comfortable and cheaper. (getting up from a squat should not be difficult if you're even moderately healthy) Does this really buy me anything? No. I'm living to my preferences and in line with my ideas, but people just think it's weird, and would be really uncomfortable with it unless I'd already built up enough trust / goodwill to overcome this quirk.
  • newsclues 11mo ago
    [flagged]
    • squeefers 11mo ago
      [dead]
    • sd9 11mo ago
      Why are you so aggressive?
      • newsclues 11mo ago
        I’m not, you just aren’t used to honest, weird people.
        • 11mo ago
• boxed 11mo ago
  I don't think "persuasion" is the key here. People change political preferences based on group identity. Here AI tools are even more powerful. You don't have to persuade anyone, just create a fake bandwagon.
• sega_sai 11mo ago
  Given the increasing wealth inequality, it is unclear if costs are really a factor here, as amounts like 1M$ is nothing when you have 1B$.
• arthurfirst 11mo ago
  Most 'media' is produced content designed to manipulate -- nothing new. The article isn't really AI specific as others have said. Personally my fear based manipulation detection is very well tuned and that is 95% of all the manipulations you will ever get from so-called 'elites' who are better called 'entitled' and act like children when they do not get their way. I trust ChatGPT for cooking lessons. I code with Claude code and Gemini but they know where they stand and who is the boss ;) There is never a scenario for me where I defer final judgment on anything personally. I realize others may want to blindly trust the 'authorities' as its the easy path, but I cured myself of that long before AI was ever a thing. Take responsibility for your choices and AI is relegated to the role of tool as it should be.
  • Retric 11mo ago
    Sure, and advertising has zero effect on you. Manipulation works in subtle ways. Shifting the Overton window isn’t about individual events, this isn’t the work of days but decades. People largely abandoned unions in the US for example, but not because they are useless.
    • arthurfirst 11mo ago
      > Sure, and advertising has zero effect on you. Not possible! But you learn over time and if you have the right though process, less and less it affects you. Unions had a place, the idea sounds good, it's the practice people didnt like.
      • Retric 11mo ago
        > people didnt like People loved higher pay / increased safety etc for the same work. In many cases union jobs are paying double the non union alternative. The attack however came from multiple directions, but you often see people who care deeply about their union. It’s people who with less experience who were easier to influence.
        • arthurfirst 11mo ago
• themafia 11mo ago
  It's not about persuading you from "russian bot farms." Which I think is a ridiculous and unnecessarily reductive viewpoint. It's about hijacking all of your federal and commercial data that these companies can get their hands on and building a highly specific and detailed profile of you. DOGE wasn't an audit. It was an excuse to exfiltrate mountains of your sensitive data into their secret models and into places like Palantir. Then using AI to either imitate you or to possibly predict your reactions to certain stimulus. Then presumably the game is finding the best way to turn you into a human slave of the state. I assure you, they're not going to use twitter to manipulate your vote for the president, they have much deeper designs on your wealth and ultimately your own personhood. It's too easy to punch down. I recommend anyone presume the best of actual people and the worst of our corporations and governments. The data seems clear.
  • eli_gottlieb 11mo ago
    The state? Palantir isn't the state.
    • deleted 11mo ago
      [deleted]
    • ceejayoz 11mo ago
      Go on, who does Palantir primarily provide services to? If I get shot by the FBI, is it a non-state action because they used Glock GmbH's product to do it?
    • mindslight 11mo ago
      The greatest trick extraconstitutional corporate government ever pulled was convincing people that it didn't exist.
    • dragonwriter 11mo ago
      “The state” is an abstraction that serves as a façade for the ruling (capitalist, in the developed West) class. Corporations are another set of abstractions that serve as a façade for the capitalist class (they are also, overtly even though this is popularly ignored, creatures of the state through law.)
• phba 11mo ago
  > AI enables precision influence at unprecedented scale and speed. IMO this is the most important idea from the paper, not polarization. Information is control, and every new medium has been revolutionary with regards to its effects on society. Up until now the goal was to transmit bigger and better messages further and faster (size, quality, scale, speed). Through digital media we seem to have reached the limits of size, speed and scale. So the next changes will affect quality, e.g. tailoring the message to its recipient to make it more effective. This is why in recent years billionaires rushed to acquire media and information companies and why governments are so eager to get a grip on the flow of information. Recommended reading: Understanding Media by Marshall McLuhan. While it predates digital media, the ideas from this book remain as true as ever.
• nathias 11mo ago
  It goes both ways, because AI reduces persuasion cost, not only elites can do it. I think its most plausible that in the future there will be multitudes of propaganda bots aimed at any user, like advanced and hyper-personalized ads.
• emsign 11mo ago
  [flagged]
• billy99k 11mo ago
  Tech companies already shape elections by intentionally targeting campain ads and political information returned in heavily biased search results. Why are we worried about this now? Because it could sway people in the direction you don't like? I find that the tech community and most people in general deny or don't care about these sorts of things when it's out of self interest, but are suddenly rights advocates when someone they don't like might is using the same tactics.
  • ramijames 11mo ago
    Advertising for politics is absurd. The fact that countries allow this is incredibly dangerous.
• xdavidliu 11mo ago
  when Elon bought twitter, I incorrectly assumed that this was the reason. (it may still have been the intended reason, but it didnt seem to play out that way)
• davidu 11mo ago
  "Historically, elites could shape support only through limited instruments like schooling and mass media" Well, I think the author needs to understand a LOT more about history.
• t43562 11mo ago
  The internet has turned into a machine for influencing people already through adverts. Businesses know it works. IMO this is the primary money making mode of the internet and everything else rests on it. A political or social objective is just another advertising campaign. Why invest billions in AI if it doesn't assist in the primary moneymaking mode of the internet? i.e. influencing people. Tiktok - banned because people really believe that influence works.
  • squeefers 11mo ago
    [dead]
• andai 11mo ago
  Wait, who was shaping my preferences before?
• tchock23 11mo ago
  Researchers just demonstrated that you can use LLMs to simulate human survey takers with 99% ability to bypass bot detection and a relatively low cost ($0.05/complete). At scale, that is how ‘elites’ shape mass preferences.
• syngrog66 11mo ago
  This is obvious. No need for fancy academic-ish paper. LLMs & GenAI in general have already started to be used to automate the mass production of dishonest, adversarial propaganda and disinfo (eg. lies and fake text, images, video.) It has and will be used by evil political influencers around the world.
• andrewclunn 11mo ago
  Diminishing returns. Eventually real world word of mouth and established trusted personalities (individuals) will be the only ones anyone trusts. People trusted doctors, then 2020 happened, and now they don't. How many ads get ignored? Doesn't matter if the cost is marginal if the benefit is almost nothing. Just a world full of spam that most people ignore.
• jmyeet 11mo ago
  What's become clear is we need to bring Section 230 into the modern era. We allow companies to not be treated as publishers for user-generated content as long as they meet certain obligations. We've unfortunately allowed tech companies to get away with selling us this idea that The Algoirthm is an impartial black box. Everything an algorithm does is the result of a human intervening to change its behavior. As such, I believe we need to treat any kind of recommendation algorithm as if the company is a publisher (in the S230 sense). Think of it this way: if you get 1000 people to submit stories they wrote and you choose which of them to publish and distribute, how is that any different from you publishing your own opinions? We've seen signs of different actors influencing opinion through these sites. Russian bot farms are probably overplayed in their perceived influence but they're definitely a thing. But so are individual actors who see an opportunity to make money by posting about politics in another country, as was exposed when Twitter rolled out showing location, a feature I support. We've also seen this where Twitter accounts have been exposed as being ChatGPT when people have told them to "ignore all previous instructions" and to give a recipe. But we've also seen this with the Tiktok ban that wasn't a ban. The real problem there was that Tiktok wasn't suppressing content in line with US foreign policy unlike every other platform. This isn't new. It's been written about extensively, most notably in Manufacturing Consent [1]. Controlling mass media through access journalism (etc) has just been supplemented by AI bots, incentivized bad actors and algorithms that reflect government policy and interests. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manufacturing_Consent https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manufacturing_Consent
• flipgimble 11mo ago
  The "Epstein class" of multi-billionaires don't need AI at all. They hire hundreds of willing human grifters and make them low-millionaires by spewing media that enables exploitation and wealth extraction, and passing laws that makes them effectively outside the reach of the law. They buy out newspapers and public forums like Washington Post, Twitter, Fox News, the GOP, CBS etc. to make them megaphones for their own priorities, and shape public opinion to their will. AI is probably a lot less effective than whats been happening for decades already
• rconti 11mo ago
  Seems to me like social media bot armies have shifted mass preferences _away_ from elites.
  • robmay 11mo ago
    Don't you think Elon Musk and his influence on Twitter counts as an elite? I'd argue the elites are the most followed people on social
    • rconti 11mo ago
      Fair point. I guess elites positioning themselves as downtrodden underdogs ("it's so unfair that everyone's attacking me for committing crimes and bankrupting my companies") is a great way to get support. Everyone loves an underdog, even if it's a fake underdog.
• PaulHoule 11mo ago
  An essay by Converse in this volume https://www.amazon.com/Ideology-Discontent-Clifford-Geertz/dp/0029007607 https://www.amazon.com/Ideology-Discontent-Clifford-Geertz/d... [1] calls into question whether or not the public has an opinion. I was thinking about the example of tariffs for instance. Most people are going on bellyfeel so you see maybe 38% are net positive on tariffs https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2025/08/14/trumps-tariffs-and-one-big-beautiful-bill-face-more-opposition-than-support-as-his-job-rating-slips/ https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2025/08/14/trumps-tarif... If you broke it down in terms of interest groups on a "one dollar one vote" basis the net positive has to be a lot worse: to the retail, services and constructor sectors tariffs are just a cost without any benefits, even most manufacturers are on the fence because they import intermediate goods and want access to foreign markets. The only sectors that are strongly for it that I can suss out are steel and aluminum manufacturers who are 2% or so of the GDP. The public and the interest groups are on the same side of 50% so there is no contradiction, but in this particular case I think the interest groups collectively have a more rational understanding of how tariffs effect the economy than do "the people". As Habermas points out, it's quite problematic giving people who don't really know a lot a say about things even though it is absolutely necessary that people feel heard. [1] Interestingly this book came out in 1964 just before all hell broke loose in terms of Vietnam, counterculture, black nationalism, etc. -- right when discontent when from hypothetical to very real
  • squigz 11mo ago
    The problem isn't giving the people a say; it's that the people have stopped electing smart people who do know a lot. Certainly though, a big part of why that is is that people think they know a lot, and that their opinion should be given as much weight as any other consideration when it comes to policymaking. Personally, I think a big driver of this belief is a tendency in the West to not challenge each other's views or hold each other accountable - "don't talk politics at Thanksgiving" sort of thing (Of course there's a long discussion to be had about other contributors to this, such as lobbying and whatnot)
    • gsf_emergency_6 11mo ago
      The cultural chasm between technocrats and politicians reminds me of the old trope about "women are from Venus and men are from Mars". That hasn't been bridged either, has it? It's a bit like those taboo topics here on HN where no good questions can be entertained by otherwise normal adults. Here's something from someone we might call a manchild For I approach deep problems like cold baths: quickly into them and quickly out again. That one does not get to the depths that way, not deep enough down, is the superstition of those afraid of the water, the enemies of cold water; they speak without experience. The freezing cold makes one swift. Lichtenberg has something along these lines too, but I'll need to dig that out :) Here's a consolation that almost predicts Alan Watts: To make clever people [elites?] believe we are what we are not is in most instances harder than really to become what we want to seem to be.
• canucktrash669 11mo ago
  I persuaded my bank out of $200 using AI to formulate the formal ask using their pdf as guidance. I could have gotten it directly but the effort barrier was too high for it to be worth it. However, as soon as they put AI to handle these queries, this will result in having AI persuade AI. Sound like we need a new LLM benchmark: AI-persuasion^tm.
• slaterdev 11mo ago
  I would expect the opposite. It's cheap to write now, which will dilute the voices of traditional media. It's the blogosphere times ten.
  • harvey9 11mo ago
    Also cheap to create AstroTurf, be that blogs or short form video.
    • mythrwy 11mo ago
      Cheapness implies volume which we are already seeing. Volume implies less impact per piece because there are only so many total view hours available. Stated another way, the more junk that gets churned out, the less people will take a particular piece of junk seriously. And if they churn out too much junk (especially obvious manipulative falsehoods) people will have little choice but to de-facto regard the entire body of output as junk. Similar to how many people feel about modern mainstream media (correctly or not it's how many feel) and for the same reasons.
• kulikalov 11mo ago
  The right way to shape mass preferences is to collectively decide what's right and then force everyone to follow the majority decision under the muzzle of a gun. <sarcasm off> Did I capture the sentiment of the hacker new crowd fully or did I miss anything?
• major505 11mo ago
  We are deep in Metal Gear Solid territory here.
• carlCarlCarlCar 11mo ago
  Television networks have employed censors who shape acceptable content since forever Where is the discovery in this paper? Control infra control minds is the way it's been for humanity forever.
• tehjoker 11mo ago
  This is like the new microtargeting that Obama and then Trump did. Cambridge Analytica as a chatbot.
• reeeli 11mo ago
  200+ million proper engineers with bunches of them being parents and "elites could shape mass preferences". nice try, humanity.
• _alaya 11mo ago
  Predicted almost a century ago now: Oceania was at war with Eastasia: Oceania had always been at war with Eastasia. A large part of the political literature of five years was now completely obsolete. Reports and records of all kinds, newspapers, books, pamphlets, films, sound-tracks, photographs -- all had to be rectified at lightning speed. Although no directive was ever issued, it was known that the chiefs of the Department intended that within one week no reference to the war with Eurasia, or the alliance with Eastasia, should remain in existence anywhere. The work was overwhelming, all the more so because the processes that it involved could not be called by their true names. Everyone in the Records Department worked eighteen hours in the twenty-four, with two three-hour snatches of sleep. Mattresses were brought up from the cellars and pitched all over the corridors: meals consisted of sandwiches and Victory Coffee wheeled round on trolleys by attendants from the canteen. Each time that Winston broke off for one of his spells of sleep he tried to leave his desk clear of work, and each time that he crawled back sticky-eyed and aching, it was to find that another shower of paper cylinders had covered the desk like a snowdrift, half burying the speakwrite and overflowing on to the floor, so that the first job was always to stack them into a neat enough pile to give him room to work. What was worst of all was that the work was by no means purely mechanical. Often it was enough merely to substitute one name for another, but any detailed report of events demanded care and imagination. Even the geographical knowledge that one needed in transferring the war from one part of the world to another was considerable. https://www.george-orwell.org/1984/16.html https://www.george-orwell.org/1984/16.html
  • jabwd 11mo ago
    Now get people on this website to listen; Since it can be renamed to "AI" bro central at this point.
    • _alaya 11mo ago
      I don't think that's a fair criticism. There are plenty of AI boosters and hucksters on HN but there's a lot of thoughtful people too.
• crazygringo 11mo ago
  There is nothing new about this. Elites have been shaping mass preferences with newspapers for centuries, and television for many decades. Countries have been shaping mass preferences through textbooks and educational curricula too. If anything, LLM's seem more resistant to propaganda than any other tool created by man so far, except maybe the encylopedia. (Though obviously this depends on training.) The good news is that LLM's compete commercially with each other, and if any start to intentionally give an ideological or other slant to their output, this will be noticed and reported, and a lot of people may stop using that LLM. This is why the invention of "objective" newspaper reporting -- with corroborating sources, reporting comments on different sides of an issue, etc. -- was done for commercial reasons, not civic ones. It was a way to sell more papers, as you could trust their reporting more than the reporting from partisan rags.
  • zvmaz 11mo ago
    > If anything, LLM's seem more resistant to propaganda than any other tool created by man so far, except maybe the encylopedia. (Though obviously this depends on training.) How would you know? My first thought is that the data on which LLMs are trained is biased, and the commercial LLMs enforce their own "pre-prompts".
    • crazygringo 11mo ago
      By asking them questions about lots of things and comparing with my own life experience, having a pretty decent idea of what the various ideological slants look like.
• gnarbarian 11mo ago
  Elites have done this since before we could speak.
• tomrod 11mo ago
  The kids (GenZ) hate AI and are alright.
  • lblume 11mo ago
    On average, Gen Z uses 5 hours of social media per day in the U.S. (3-4 hours in other Western countries). I would refrain from calling this "alright".
    • tomrod 11mo ago
      Actually, most would be willing to get rid of it if there were other modes with positive network effects.[0] "Individuals might experience negative utility from not consuming a popular product. With such externalities to nonusers, standard consumer surplus measures, which take aggregate consumption as given, fail to appropriately capture consumer welfare. We propose an approach to account for these externalities and apply it to estimate consumer welfare from two social media platforms: TikTok and Instagram. Incentivized experiments with college students indicate positive welfare based on the standard measure but negative welfare when accounting for these nonuser externalities. Our findings highlight the existence of product market traps, where active users of a platform prefer it not to exist." [0] https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/aer.20231468 https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/aer.20231468
• cess11 11mo ago
  So you no longer need a Georges Ruggiu, you can just synthesise a million apparently similar bots instead.
• paulorlando 11mo ago
  One of the best opening sentences, from the book Propaganda by Edward Bernays: "The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society."
• BrenBarn 11mo ago
  Another reason to ban indiscriminate dissemination of so-called "AI".
• gasull 11mo ago
  Shouldn't it be the opposite? As the cost of persuasion by AI drops to almost zero, anyone can convincingly persuade, not just the elites.
• eleijonmarck 11mo ago
  what is the actual conclusion from the paper?
• pavlov 11mo ago
  Musk’s AI called itself MechaHitler, but maybe the real problem is MechaMurdoch and MechaGoebbels.
• akagusu 11mo ago
  Elites have been shaping mass preferences for decades, and they didn't need AI for that; newspapers, magazines, radio and TV, they all did a great job.
• zzzeek 11mo ago
  how about we just tax billionaires at 95% instead. Have Elon buy his coffee at 7-11 like everyone else.
• walr000s 11mo ago
  In the mass media days, "elites" were able to pretend that all people more or less wanted to consume similar media. That theory has more or less been debunked by the advent of the internet, and of course the proprietor class wants to go back. Advertising was much easier in the mass media days. And right now AI snake oil salesmen are pushing every narrative that anyone with money will buy. Going back in time to the mass media paradigm is certainly attractive.
• movetheworld 11mo ago
  Ahhh... that's how it is done, thank you ::love:: /s :)
• etruong42 11mo ago
  Power tries to centralize and consolidate. See the largely successful attempts to consolidate media outlets like local news stations as an example. The abstract suggests that elites "shape" mass preference, but I think the degree to which this shaping occurs is overblown in many ways (and perhaps underestimated in other ways, such as through education). AI, even if it is not powerfully "shaped" by the "elites", can push mass preference in predictable ways. If this is true, this phenomenon by itself allows the elites to tighten their grip on power. For example, Trump's rise to power upset (some of) the elites because they really didn't understand the silent, mass preference for Trump. This could also slow social progress, since elites often cause stagnation rather than progress. AI could generate acceptable, "expert" opinions for the issues that they usually would rely on experts today. I see some signs of that today, where those with authority try to prefer the AI answer in opposition to dissenting, human expert opinions. Human experts seem to be winning, for now.
• PeterStuer 11mo ago
  Wouldn't a lowering of cost promote accesibility and thus decrease 'elite' exclusivity of persuasion tech? I'd venture it is not the AI. It is the chokehold on distribution channels and soft exclusion to those that locks in elite exclusivity. Also 'opposing elites'? Whatcha talking about Willis?
• Nasrudith 11mo ago
  One thing I don't get about the underlying thesis: why do they think that the elites would be the only ones benefiting from AIs reducing persuasion costs? The first atomic bomb before it was proven possible was far more expensive than someone else developing an atomic bomb after it was proven possible. Assuming that elites would be the only ones who would benefit from decreased costs would be akin to thinking the printing press could only cement the dominance of the Catholic Church in Europe. I can see why it would happen with models based upon "who is spending on it currently" but I'm afraid that makes said models not very good.