If you apply 2nd order thinking to this story it's easy to see how dangerous AI in combination with social media is. It's worrying that so few care about this issue. How is it possible to have reliable elections or a functioning democracy if people are this easily manipulated and fooled. It was always easy to fool some people but social med powered by AI makes it ridiculously easy and cheap to do mass social engineering. One single person can affect so many potential voters.
It is legal to produce beer. It is legal to operate a bar. And we have a concept of a nuisance business that can result in fines or shutdown if your business constantly attracts egregiously bad behavior.
No, the problem is that AI takes an existing problem and makes it massively worse. Because there is basically no limit to the amount of plausible-sounding drivel that AIs can spew, they can drown out all other voices in a way that regular shills and propagandists couldn't. Even organized rings couldn't produce the same volume that AIs can.
Sure, the internet had, say 20% noise back before spam, shills, and propaganda took over. Now it has 50% noise, maybe even 80%. It's still (barely) usable. But what happens when the noise is 99% of the content? 99.9? That's not "making it slightly worse", that's a phase change that makes it completely unusable.
AI detection probably needs to be added to computer literacy curricula (maybe it is, and it is just too late for adults). Of course, it is a political strategy of Republicans (probably conservatives in general) to suppress access to education, as the Republicans enjoy a growing advantage with white non-college grads.
I was just thinking the other day how ai will be way worse than social media in terms of influencing people. Before though I was thinking of times people have been convinced by chat bots they were god or a genius.
Social media was so powerful because it convinced people their world view was popular and correct even if it definitely wasn’t, but at least then it was actually happening somewhere. This is just completely made up, to feed into people’s world view, and they don’t even have to find the perfect figure they can make one up.
We’re definitely going to suffer a lot before it gets better. Interesting times we’re living in.
Political campaigns can now afford to target social media users on a 1:1 basis. A bot with 10k followers per month is an old-world threat, detectable with old-world methods. A solitary bot churning out content to the adoration of its fans, of which you are the only human, is the new threat.
Full title: "Top MAGA influencer revealed to be AI — created by a guy in India who made a mint off lonely men online".
Despite MAGA fans making him rich, he still looks down on them, calling them “super-dumb.”
He said he also attempted to make a liberal counterpart for Hart on Instagram, but “Democrats know that it’s AI slop, so they don’t engage as much,” he said.
“The MAGA crowd is made up of dumb people — like, super-dumb people. And they fall for it,” Sam said.
> He said he also attempted to make a liberal counterpart for Hart on Instagram, but “Democrats know that it’s AI slop, so they don’t engage as much,” he said.
> “The MAGA crowd is made up of dumb people — like, super-dumb people. And they fall for it,” Sam said.
What exactly is the liberal counterpart to this? Because liberals and conservatives are different, and I don't think a politics-swapped clone of this [1] would be good fit for progressives' unfulfilled fantasies. They may respond similarly to a different fantasy influencer though.
[1] Say a "model" in a trans-flag bikini spewing progressive talking points.
Like the Nigerian Prince emails, by selecting MAGA he's pre-selecting people who want to be lied to and have an easily-pressable set of ideological buttons.
(before someone asks what the left equivalent is, bluesky has a plague of accounts claiming to be Palestinian refugees and asking for money)
No, the same pattern showed up during the 2016 election when direct monetization wasn't the goal. The Russians were throwing bipartisan spaghetti at the wall, their biggest hit in MAGA land was "Pope Endorses Donald Trump," which went mega-viral, while their biggest hit with the Dems was "Elizabeth Warren Endorses Bernie Sanders," which was a comparative flop.
I'd go on to say, that when we are looking at a large group of people, "dumb" and "rich" not just usually coincide, but are the same thing. If someone is smart enough you won't make money off them, if someone is poor enough you won't, either. So if we look at people as sources of money, dumb and rich are interchangeable and in large groups, difficult to distinguish.
Also, because different groups of people are different by net worth and IQ, we will start (unknowingly) selecting them for either dumb, rich, or both.
Hence the myth that "Americans are dumb" - they of course aren't, it's just that in almost every other country people rich enough to make enough money off them are the elite and thus too smart to profit off them, and only in America, because the country is rich, even dumb people frequently have cash worth bothering. Germans may not be any smarter than Americans, but poorer - thus appear smarter as a group.
yes, that is pretty much what he disclosed in the article
> He turned to Google’s Gemini AI for advice and decided to create a “hot girl” crafted specifically for the “MAGA/conservative niche,” after the software told him that “the conservative audience (especially older men in the US) often has higher disposable income and is more loyal,” according to Wired.
> It doesn’t explain why so many more fall for it.
It's pretty easy: he started out trying to create a "hot girl" influencer, then refined that. It could be his starting point was biased towards filling a certain type of conservative fantasy, but wasn't as easily adaptable to progressives. For instance: it could be that lonely straight progressive men are more neurotic about their sexuality, and thus less-likely to respond positively to a bikini model picture, even if the "model" is flattering their political ideology.
Also there's been a demographic divergence, and young women are much more liberal than men, which means there's less of a supply of "hot girl" conservatives and more unfulfilled demand for them.
I suspect the progressive version of this is something a lot less discoverable by a random slop-making foreign man.
It is kind of crazy that growing up I recall hearing a lot of “be careful don’t trust the internet” and then now that same generation of people is falling for all manner of scams and fake news peddlers online.
Apologies if it seems I'm just stoking a stereotype, but this comes from personal experience with family. For a demographic who generally are proud to be "old school", "not computer people", skeptical, distrustful of technology, self-reliant, and at least paid lip service to those ideals when raising their children, they sure do love being lied to and manipulated by the very enemies they claimed to be resistant to.
I also recall hearing, "do as I say, not as I do" a lot as well.
If these folks really did change to be more susceptible to scams though, I hope for my own sake that this is less a function of aging and more a function of being fed a steady diet of conservative propaganda. I can avoid the latter...
That explains the strategy used by the current US administration. They ask ChatGPT what to do. And this then happen.
The output is stupid chaos.
Can we sue the responsible administration? I mean globally - they need to pay for the damage here. Inflation already went up significantly in the EU. Why do Europeans have to suffer due to the orange AI king?
As the American Justice system is fundamentally broken now, if Interpol decides to "disappear" Trump to the Hague next time he's in Europe it would be greatly appreciated.
Our current president himself seems to be AI sometimes. Constantly improvising, strategizing by the moment, posting memes of him as messiah and what not. What a wild time to live in!
If you apply 2nd order thinking to this story it's easy to see how dangerous AI in combination with social media is. It's worrying that so few care about this issue. How is it possible to have reliable elections or a functioning democracy if people are this easily manipulated and fooled. It was always easy to fool some people but social med powered by AI makes it ridiculously easy and cheap to do mass social engineering. One single person can affect so many potential voters.
Instead of prosecuting the real abusers, you suggest prosecuting the tools they use? AI is a tool, social media is a medium.
The mass social engineering is nothing new. The whole hierarchies of human relations are based on deception.
It is legal to produce beer. It is legal to operate a bar. And we have a concept of a nuisance business that can result in fines or shutdown if your business constantly attracts egregiously bad behavior.
Meh. The Internet has always had a high noise floor, AI here just takes an existing problem and makes it slightly worse.
No, the problem is that AI takes an existing problem and makes it massively worse. Because there is basically no limit to the amount of plausible-sounding drivel that AIs can spew, they can drown out all other voices in a way that regular shills and propagandists couldn't. Even organized rings couldn't produce the same volume that AIs can.
Sure, the internet had, say 20% noise back before spam, shills, and propaganda took over. Now it has 50% noise, maybe even 80%. It's still (barely) usable. But what happens when the noise is 99% of the content? 99.9? That's not "making it slightly worse", that's a phase change that makes it completely unusable.
if people are this easily manipulated and fooled
AI detection probably needs to be added to computer literacy curricula (maybe it is, and it is just too late for adults). Of course, it is a political strategy of Republicans (probably conservatives in general) to suppress access to education, as the Republicans enjoy a growing advantage with white non-college grads.
https://news.gallup.com/poll/248525/non-college-whites-affin...
I was just thinking the other day how ai will be way worse than social media in terms of influencing people. Before though I was thinking of times people have been convinced by chat bots they were god or a genius.
Social media was so powerful because it convinced people their world view was popular and correct even if it definitely wasn’t, but at least then it was actually happening somewhere. This is just completely made up, to feed into people’s world view, and they don’t even have to find the perfect figure they can make one up.
We’re definitely going to suffer a lot before it gets better. Interesting times we’re living in.
some of these images are hilarious ngl
that Indian guy understood the assignment
Is 10k followers a lot?
Political campaigns can now afford to target social media users on a 1:1 basis. A bot with 10k followers per month is an old-world threat, detectable with old-world methods. A solitary bot churning out content to the adoration of its fans, of which you are the only human, is the new threat.
Stop using llms to post
10,000 followers within a month
Low grade “influencers” all parroting similar talking points can have a powerful cumulative effect.
QAnon didn’t go mainstream overnight. It bubbled up.
[dupe] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47849494
Half of what we are reading is AI made, not much differences with pictures anyway.
again?
Full title: "Top MAGA influencer revealed to be AI — created by a guy in India who made a mint off lonely men online".
> He said he also attempted to make a liberal counterpart for Hart on Instagram, but “Democrats know that it’s AI slop, so they don’t engage as much,” he said.
> “The MAGA crowd is made up of dumb people — like, super-dumb people. And they fall for it,” Sam said.
What exactly is the liberal counterpart to this? Because liberals and conservatives are different, and I don't think a politics-swapped clone of this [1] would be good fit for progressives' unfulfilled fantasies. They may respond similarly to a different fantasy influencer though.
[1] Say a "model" in a trans-flag bikini spewing progressive talking points.
Perhaps the easier explanation is not "dumb" but that MAGA crowd is just older and thus richer so better monetizable by definition.
They're more male, but I would also file that under "easier to dupe" with this sort of content.
Like the Nigerian Prince emails, by selecting MAGA he's pre-selecting people who want to be lied to and have an easily-pressable set of ideological buttons.
(before someone asks what the left equivalent is, bluesky has a plague of accounts claiming to be Palestinian refugees and asking for money)
No, the same pattern showed up during the 2016 election when direct monetization wasn't the goal. The Russians were throwing bipartisan spaghetti at the wall, their biggest hit in MAGA land was "Pope Endorses Donald Trump," which went mega-viral, while their biggest hit with the Dems was "Elizabeth Warren Endorses Bernie Sanders," which was a comparative flop.
I think both can be true.
I'd go on to say, that when we are looking at a large group of people, "dumb" and "rich" not just usually coincide, but are the same thing. If someone is smart enough you won't make money off them, if someone is poor enough you won't, either. So if we look at people as sources of money, dumb and rich are interchangeable and in large groups, difficult to distinguish.
Also, because different groups of people are different by net worth and IQ, we will start (unknowingly) selecting them for either dumb, rich, or both.
Hence the myth that "Americans are dumb" - they of course aren't, it's just that in almost every other country people rich enough to make enough money off them are the elite and thus too smart to profit off them, and only in America, because the country is rich, even dumb people frequently have cash worth bothering. Germans may not be any smarter than Americans, but poorer - thus appear smarter as a group.
Who are you trying to convince? /r/conservative?
yes, that is pretty much what he disclosed in the article
> He turned to Google’s Gemini AI for advice and decided to create a “hot girl” crafted specifically for the “MAGA/conservative niche,” after the software told him that “the conservative audience (especially older men in the US) often has higher disposable income and is more loyal,” according to Wired.
That only says those that fall for it might pay more.
It doesn’t explain why so many more fall for it.
> It doesn’t explain why so many more fall for it.
It's pretty easy: he started out trying to create a "hot girl" influencer, then refined that. It could be his starting point was biased towards filling a certain type of conservative fantasy, but wasn't as easily adaptable to progressives. For instance: it could be that lonely straight progressive men are more neurotic about their sexuality, and thus less-likely to respond positively to a bikini model picture, even if the "model" is flattering their political ideology.
Also there's been a demographic divergence, and young women are much more liberal than men, which means there's less of a supply of "hot girl" conservatives and more unfulfilled demand for them.
I suspect the progressive version of this is something a lot less discoverable by a random slop-making foreign man.
"Progressive fantasy" would be AOC and Bernie, and we already have that in real life.
It is kind of crazy that growing up I recall hearing a lot of “be careful don’t trust the internet” and then now that same generation of people is falling for all manner of scams and fake news peddlers online.
"Just because newspapers print something, it doesn't mean it's true!"
<proceeds to believe everything 'printed' on the internet>
Apologies if it seems I'm just stoking a stereotype, but this comes from personal experience with family. For a demographic who generally are proud to be "old school", "not computer people", skeptical, distrustful of technology, self-reliant, and at least paid lip service to those ideals when raising their children, they sure do love being lied to and manipulated by the very enemies they claimed to be resistant to.
I also recall hearing, "do as I say, not as I do" a lot as well.
If these folks really did change to be more susceptible to scams though, I hope for my own sake that this is less a function of aging and more a function of being fed a steady diet of conservative propaganda. I can avoid the latter...
> trying to save up enough to emigrate to the US after graduation.
Come on over you'll fit right in!
That explains the strategy used by the current US administration. They ask ChatGPT what to do. And this then happen.
The output is stupid chaos.
Can we sue the responsible administration? I mean globally - they need to pay for the damage here. Inflation already went up significantly in the EU. Why do Europeans have to suffer due to the orange AI king?
I really don’t think AI has anything to do with the current US administration behavior. If not with AI, they would do the same
Really, you think Musk and Bezos and Zuckerberg bought a president and don't have instructions for him regarding their investments in AI?
[flagged]
As the American Justice system is fundamentally broken now, if Interpol decides to "disappear" Trump to the Hague next time he's in Europe it would be greatly appreciated.
Our current president himself seems to be AI sometimes. Constantly improvising, strategizing by the moment, posting memes of him as messiah and what not. What a wild time to live in!