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Comment by splatzone | Hacker News Reader

After reading the propaganda campaign it wrote to encourage skepticism about vaccines, I’m much more worried about how this technology will be applied by powerful people, especially when combined with targeted advertising

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None of the things it suggests are in any way novel or non-obvious though. People use these sorts of tricks both consciously and unconsciously when making arguments all the time, no AI needed.

AIs are small enough that it won't be long before everyone can run one at home.

It might make Social Media worthlessly untrustworthy - but isn't that already the case?

Just use ChatGPT to refute their bullshit, it is no longer harder to refute bullshit than to create it, problem solved, there are now less problems than before.

Sure, but I doubt most of the population will filter everything they read through ChatGPT to look for counter arguments. Or try to think critically at all.

The potential for mass brainwashing here is immense. Imagine a world where political ads are tailored to your personality, your individual fears and personal history. It will become economical to manipulate individuals on a massive scale

It already is underway, just look how easy people are manipulated by media. Remember Japan bashing in 80s when they were about to surpass us economically? People got manipulated so hard to hate Japan and Japanese that they went out and killed innocent asians on the street. American propaganda is first class.

Apparently, the "Japan bashing" was really a thing. That's interesting, I didn't know. I might have to read more about US propaganda and especially the effects of it, from the historic perspective. Any good books on that? Or should I finally sit down and read "Manufacturing Consent"?

It’s a lot harder to refute a falsehood than to publish it.

As (GNU) Sir Terry Pratchett wrote “A lie can run round the world before the truth has got its boot on”.

The rich and powerful can and do hire actual people to write propaganda.

In a resouece-constrained way. For every word of propaganda they were able to afford earlier, they can now afford hundreds of thousands of times as many.

It's not particularly constrained - human labor is cheap outside of the developed world. And propaganda is not something that you can scale up and keep reaping the benefits proportional to the investment - there is a saturation point, and one can reasonably argue that we have already reached it. So I don't think we're heading towards some kind of "fake news apocalypse" or something. Just a bunch of people who currently write this kind of content for a living will be out of their jobs.

I’m curious why you think we’ve already reached a saturation point for propaganda?

There are still plenty of spaces online, in blogs, YouTube videos, and this comment section for example, where I expect to be dealing with real people with real opinions - rather than paid puppets of the rich and powerful. I think there’s room for things to get much worse

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