This issue is independent of topic or side. Astroturfing is real. For instance you obviously don't just take Amazon reviews at face value. In the past doing such things in social media, including forums like this, was much more difficult because you need to generate an entire persona around an account to make it not an immediately obvious inorganic account.

And so the cost:reward there was relatively poor leaving it to things like militaries and governments to carry it out for influence campaigns and what not. But LLMs have now completely changed the game. You can easily create an arbitrarily large number of passably believable personas and backstories, autonomously, with no real limitations on scale.

This is obviously going to be abused when the stakes are sufficiently high. And in this case we're talking about a market that these companies likely believe to be worth trillions of dollars. And they can likely even convince themselves that what they're doing isn't immoral pretty easily, in the same way they convinced themselves that letting their software be used to kill people by the all-so-ethical US military is perfectly cool. So why in the world wouldn't they 'inform people of the strengths of their product' on a wide scale?

hehe :)

What's a good way to think about this? Because it does cross my mind about the billions of dollars at play - at the same time, I'm not a pessimist. I think my middle ground is kind of just the usual, taking things with a grain of salt. I mean, I chose to reply to this comment in good faith it's human to human, commenter to unpaid/unaffiliated commenter.

I hope I keep that faith. I hope our billions of neighbors on the web enable me to keep that faith over the coming years. Definitely uncertain about the future of the web but want to love it like I've loved it 1990s-today. (Guess I should volunteer w/the EFF while job hunting, try for for-purpose jobs...)

I don’t know why you dismiss it. There is plenty of astroturfing here, bots and otherwise.

I believe the rule around here is to not assume everyone who disagrees with you or has opinions you don’t understand is a shill. Perhaps there’s a bit of that in the post you replied to, but to me seems mostly about mourning the loss of quality conversations online.

Gotta say, I agree. Not that things were ever great, but it’s really in the crapper now.