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Comment by joshstrange | Hacker News Reader

While there is potential for this to be a bad thing, I think on the whole it's positive. Most/many people don't interact with democracy at all or only "red vs blue" which means increasingly less the more local you get (IMHO). Instead, focusing on what they candidates say/have done and how that aligns with your own views is a far better system.

And maybe, just maybe, it will pull some of these dinosaurs out of the stone age and force them to put up a website with their views (crazy I'm saying this in 2026, it should have been table stakes decades ago). Local races are incredibly difficult to find information on. Your best bet is one of those "voter guides" that a local newspaper might put out and even those aren't great. Using an LLM to scour the internet to make a better-informed decision seems like a huge win over what most people do today.

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Ultimate tool for propaganda and manipulation tailored to each person's taste. Highly scalable and can focus on the things you (don't) care about when presenting "both sides".

The stakes are too high for it to not be weaponized, the only question is who will control it.

who do you think controls it? it's not a secret, they trade on the stock market

What's stopping someone from paying to influence AI results?

How is that a different question than search results and which voter guides or topic editorials get highlighted first?

You have to disclose if a site is part of a PAC or candidate's committee due to FEC laws. This is not the case for LLM slop that often intermingles the two.

So yes, it's very very different.

Maybe these LLM companies should also disclose in every chat window on what political spending they have already done:

https://influence.citationneeded.news/

While this is true, there is a gaping hole in how foreign agents can amplify influencers on youtube and twitter. Probably even facebook, at this point.

An excellent reason not to use those sites, and certainly not for political decision making...

I guess FEC laws don't protect you from the pravda network. However, LLM might be not so good at ranking false information, if it is already massively embedded in their training data (LLM grooming).

Still it seems that this is currently not the case [0] (yet).

I guess the risk atm is rather some crazy billionaires embedding their believes in post training and system prompts. But honestly I rather fear tiktok in this regard.

[0] https://misinforeview.hks.harvard.edu/article/llms-grooming-...

What’s stopping people from putting out biased voting guides that have nothing to do with AI?

Distribution.

Distribution is a solved problem. Social media, email/SMS campaigns, internet advertising, there are hundreds of ways to scale content distribution globally with zero AI.

Uncle Donald does. If you pay to influence against him, you are toast.

While we can throw around hypotheticals and conspiracy theories about influencing AI results, we know for a fact that search engines and social media are heavily influenced, because there are giant industries around SEO and viral marketing -- plus the huge amount of ads and promoted content, which are literally paying to influence results.

Nothing. And it will happen big time once the AI companies become enshittified. Anthropic and OpenAI won't be able to produce the results that would justify a trillion dollar IPO without doing shady stuff.

The employees of the AI labs. They're a pretty vocal bunch, and would be very likely to quit, whistleblow, or both.

(xAI may be the exception here.)

Some have been vocal, a few have quit.

How has that changed how anyone interacts with AI?

Oh sure. The only whistleblower, Suchir Balaji. was murdered and the other employees just want to get rich (Brockman even is on record saying so).

A "vocal bunch"? They never depart from the party line.

1) People at large seem to prefer large stacks of cash to base morality

2) Employees will be tasked with writing a generic system that affects results, but only a handful of suits will know what it's actually going to be used for

Multiple high profile employees have quit... 99.99% have not. What has changed as a result?

We heard their concerns. My argument here is that any attempts within an AI lab to bias political answer would come to light.

Based on what? How could you possibly be sure?

Musk for example, has claimed in the open to push for fine-tuning to Grok that benefits him personally.

That's why I said "xAI may be the exception here."

> focusing on what they candidates say/have done

who's going to cross check it? and even if everyone did, who's going to ensure that everything everything is mentioned, things can fact check just fine with some strategic omissions.

Cross checks will be useless because enough GEO/SEO will be pumped out using generative AI that even what the candidate said will be distorted or "interpreted" in ways that fit the agenda of the organization doing the SEO. "If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him." -- Cardinal Richelieu.

The best part is that the AI companies get paid for both causing immense societal problems and combating the problems their tools are causing. It's perfectly Kafkaesque and the best part it is going unremarked right out in the open.

you can have multiple agents run reviews and gut checks. open source models, etc. there are ways to go back and forth to get to some relative truth. regardless of complexity of said task, i would trust it a lot more than social media or search engines which are entirely corrupted by ad spend budgets.

Literally no one is or will be doing this (agents, open source models etc). People who do are rounding errors population scale

Also are you saying LLMs are and will be immune to ads?

> Local races are incredibly difficult to find information on

Big time. At best in more rural areas, you will find a facebook page for the candidate. Sometimes, there is nothing they put out and just maybe one of those "we interviewed the candidate and this is what they said" type sites. Sometimes, nothing at all and it is a real shame. It would solve a lot of problems if we knew more about our local school administrations, mayors, sheriffs, etc.

AI can't really help if the problem is that a race is small and local enough that there's no available information about the candidates. In fact, that sounds almost like a perfect example of when you would expect a high risk of an AI being confidently wrong.

> focusing on what they candidates say/have done and how that aligns with your own views is a far better system.

How often have you looked into two candidates at any level above city council and decided that the "red vs blue" assumptions differ from who you would normally vote for? Add in a few specifying sub-labels (MAGA, DSA) and that number probably drops to insignificant.

> How often have you looked into two candidates at any level above city council and decided that the "red vs blue" assumptions differ from who you would normally vote for?

Above city council (or a few levels, at least up to state Rep) are the people I have less issue picking between because more information is available. It's the lower races or things like county coroner that I have much less info about. Some of those roles still have (R)/(D) suffixes on the candidates but I don't feel like that means as much as state senate/reps with a letter after their name.

We have a local far-left newspaper I've gotten good info from by asking AI to review their endorsement to see what I should know before voting.

Turns out "my guy" was a domestic violence abuser, so the left-wing wacko got my vote.

Homogenizing opinion though a small number of private companies with their own incentives is a pretty terrible idea, actually.

The current system isn't perfect by any means, but at least there's a wide variety of source and experience. Diversity can provide a buffer against viral problems, be it literal living viruses or information.

Funneling information through a handful of sources is akin to Sinclair Broadcast Group buying up rural news stations. Awful for democracy and diversity. Can put us a single virus away from destruction.

I don't think it's a good thing. The good thing would be to have a good education, and local groups with whom to discuss.

Blindly trusting a model that's easy to manipulate is not a good thing

Yea but that’s not happening. The question is how this compares to the status quo. It could easily be much worse, could easily be a fair bit better too imo. Most people don’t know a thing about who they vote for

No problem with two companies owned by sociopaths who largely have the same political ideas, and are deeply tied to the current administration, controlling the tool used by the mass to decide who to vote for? Said tool being trained on reddit, twitter and other trash tier platforms where minorities of radicalised people on both side of the spectrum "discuss" political topics 90% of people do not care about.

Yeah, we're cooked chat, as they say

not just two companies, by the way. remember grok and its views?

to me it's more alarming not just the cesspool that these are trained on, but subtle bias that can be added by people in charge or their friends... how naive to expect this won't happen

Grok is a good example of how bad the labs still are at any sort of intentional, subtle bias. I'm sure they'll get there eventually, but the best attempts today remain pretty hamfisted.

1) believe or not even if it's obvious to you it is enough to mislead plenty of people. you know how many people fall for obviously scammy ads? Yeah, good news, those people vote

2) it's an example of how biased models are. how bad or good they are now is irrelevant because it'll be different in a year or month. remember if you don't see bias it doesn't mean it's not there.

3) have you checked how much money is going into this, do you think they don't have resources to get extremely good at it. just follow the money.

>> Using an LLM to scour the internet to make a better-informed decision seems like a huge win over what most people do today.

A spin on that I used for my local elections last year: My prompt stated the issues that were important to me and why. I then copied in any election guide I could find from newspapers, blogs, newsletters, endorsements, etc.

Then I asked for 1) which best fits my priorities, and 2) risks for each (eg "says they will support homelessness programs, has no direct experience in an elected position")

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