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Comment by ethbr1 | Hacker News Reader

> but what's harder to communicate, is just how effectively a superhuman AI (or a diverse ecology of agent swarms) might be able to manipulate human behavior

You don't even need superhuman AI for the most effective use --- hijacking democracy.

Imagine you have an AI tool capable of successfully persuading 5% of viewers with individually-targeted material.

Congrats: you've just won the election.

All it takes is hooking that AI tool up with existing likely voter lists (parties have) augmented by commercially available ad-targeting profiles (parties can get).

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Now taking Polymarket bets on when we'll first see an AI agent run for office. Voters have every right to be cynical at the moment; if the AI adopts a charismatic enough video persona, I could see some of the public going for it merely because it's some kind of shake-up to status quo.

Given that such a thing makes no sense legally (as of now), it would probably be done with the centaur model: a human meat proxy who pledges to follow the AI's governance advice.

This is already happening, and it's scary.

But this is about humans malevolently using AI as a tool, not about AI autonomously doing "its own thing" (ahem David S Pumpkins) against "humanity."

It is instead already existing anti-social elements within human civilization harnessing machinery to accomplish their own selfish and destructive aims, regardless of the broader cost. Which is nothing new -- it's the story of all the horrors of the 20th century, as well.

Ask yourself who benefits from ideological attempts to hide the human driving the process from the agent doing its work for them.

If we imbue these machines with apparent autonomy, this is nothing more than an attempt to hide the man behind the curtain.

> Imagine you have an AI tool capable of successfully persuading 5% of viewers with individually-targeted material.

I don't think this has to be imagined.

Or you could just hack the results.

Hypothetically.

But yes - superpersuasion is the real danger. We're very, very persuadable and easy to manipulate, and the voters with the lowest cognitive abilities are trivially easy prey, with a huge ROI for minimal investment.

The AI bot farms are already running. What we haven't seen yet, so far as we know, is spontaneous superpersuasion aimed at leaders.

Are leaders any less susceptible to it than everyone else? Especially if they're narcissistic and easily flattered?

At the leader level itself (in normal times) there are enough expert advisor bodies between leaders and a specific matter, so less worried about leaders being directly influenced by AI.

To me, the biggest threat to democracy is one-sided persuasion of the most susceptible voters, if there are enough of those voters to turn the election.

If it's equally employed by all sides, then it effectively cancels out and lets less susceptible voters decide the election. But we're in a transition period (similar to Trump's first election spend on targeted social media ads), so it's likely one side will leverage it first.

And the outcome of bad elections is democracy not electing leaders that reflect the actual will of their populations, which is very dangerous both to democracy itself and the world.

> there are enough expert advisor bodies between leaders and a specific matter

Are there? At least in the US we've had a rather large amount of rejection of the expert and we elect populist leaders willing to purge anyone that doesn't agree with them.

Remember the election promises of the US not starting new wars... yea, that didn't work out.

Now imagine the coordinated attacks being so large they individually target every lobbyist. They focus on every advisor manipulating what they see as often as they can. They manipulate these peoples friends.

The problem of "both sides" doing it each of them will separate to extremes rather than seeking a middle ground. Things are already insanely divided and will only become more so. Along with that your timelines start becoming incoherent. I'm already spending way too much of my time trying to figure out if what I'm viewing/reading is actually real or not. Now imagine almost everything is made up whole cloth.

We are not prepared for the scale this will happen at.

> spontaneous superpersuasion aimed at leaders.

https://techcrunch.com/2026/10/01/musks-ai-chatbot-grok-repo...

No reason to think leaders are less persuadable than the proles. Lots of people can’t be reliably persuaded to do basic safety or health things or that the earth is round. And we have seen so many leaders throw billions away on obviously impossible projects, persuasive details from their teams be dammed.

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