It's hard to talk about because it undermines our core beliefs. I can't operate my day assuming that the comment you wrote was created by a Chinese citizen working in a content farm, specifically to make me think that way I'm currently thinking.
By the same token, you can't read my response and by default assume that I'm a russian using AI to talk to you. Humans aren't wired to be that skeptical for that much of their social interactions.
One example I can think of off the top of my head is how the AI can read the entire comment and post history of the person it's responding to and then tailor the answer to be more persuasive. It can instantly compare any situation to a local issue that specific person would be more familiar with or has commented on before. It can also use those comments to anticipate their rebuttals and prepare a counter before they even thought up the argument.
This is not something people can do for every single comment and small social interaction. It's a real problem.
Shitty Nigerian prince emails have worked for 25+ years; just imagine the scamming opportunities when the scammer's bots can actually speak decent English and scrape social media of the target to speak on specific details of them.
They're meant to be bad English because it weeds out the people smart enough to detect that it's a scam. It's also possibly a signature; those Facebook chain posts that say "copy to your timeline don't share" usually have a certain spelling mistake so people can search for that spelling mistake and find whoever copied the chain post for targeted scamming.
True, but if an AI is constantly scraping data then it already has your comments because it's taking down the info in basically real time, so they won't need to access your comment history. They're scanning all of Reddit right now all on their own.
The AI is logging this conversation as it happens, comment history doesn't matter. Maybe in the future I don't see speech patterns and other things that could link accounts together.
That's not my experience, my experience is AI fans actually DO realise a lot about bot farms and the dangers we are facing, and are generally very tech literate
It's not about being tech literate though. I think actually it's the tech literate people who are especially vulnerable to not understanding it.
You need to see first hand what happens to an ordinary non-tech literate person when they are presented with AI generated content, see them genuinely unable to see the difference or understand that it's not a real person behind it. That's when it really sinks in.
Uh? Why? Logically explain with cause and effect why the tech literate, aka: the people who read the actual documentation for this stuff, would be more vulnerable.
I feel like you read the first sentence and immediately hit reply without stopping to read the rest. If you still don't get it after reading it fully, and my other reply, ask a more specific question and I can elaborate.
It's not about being aware, it's about truly understanding. It's in the difference between someone doing a thought experiment about "people will think this is real" vs seeing the real life situation of an intelligent ordinary person that is not tech literate believing something, and even if they are told it is AI, do not fully understand what that is or what it means or what it implies about the content they just saw.
I think tech literate people are great at the statistical thought experiments but are often out of touch with exactly how big and real of a problem it is as they don't directly see the humans who are being affected.
I'd like to see a poll of tech literate people, i'm guessing the majority of people know someone (at least one, if not more) that gets bamboozled by AI content, i've got 2 friends that do, for example, and social media is rife with people that we see in comment sections all the time
This person is conflating ai with propaganda, deep fakes, bot farms, and the like. AI mostly just means LLMs. Now with llms you can create more convincing propaganda lines for your bots to leave comments or give upvotes and downvotes to the things you like and don’t like which improves the quality of your propaganda, which, if it is a deep fake, can massively reinforce how someone can come to believe something obviously fake to be real.
But calling that entire apparatus “AI” or “AI content” massively misses the early days of the 2010s where Steve Bannon and the billionaires behind Breitbart were doing it by hand, one blatantly racist article at a time.
Someone being personally aware of the harm something can cause doesn't mean on average that is how the tech is going to interact with society. The danger is how the tech interacts with society as a whole, not on an individual. If someone who's more tech literate assumes other people's experience are going to be remotely similar to theirs then they aren't actually understanding the implication of the tech.
This is a society's problem. It's a misinformation problem (among many others) on a unprecedent scale that is being caused by AI and would be impossible without AI. You're the equivalent of someone saying global warming isn't man-made, while entirely ignoring everything about the alarming rate it's happening, which is definitely man-made.
I think the honest answer is; I CAN afford to be like that, because you're just a reddit post to me.
The chances that you're a decent, reasonable, real person are unknown to me. All I do know is that there is a steady increase of ai-driven bot accounts, and paid bad acting online.
The real conversation people aren't ready for is; to improve our quality of life and the quality of our politics, people need to get offline where these manipulations can happen. They need to get involved in real, face-to-face, local politics. Get to know their neighbors again.
The internet is becoming an unusable wasteland, and the sooner we understand that, the sooner we can turn our attention elsewhere.
I don't think that will happen though, because the internet is also addictive. It's SUPER easy dopamine hits over and over again.
People hate when i say this, but I think we need to eliminate anonymity on the internet. Democracy literally can’t function because of the astroturfing and botted disinformation.
Really? I guess I grew up in a really low trust environment. I don’t believe anything unless there’s some serious backing for it. I’m just here to avoid boredom.
I mean I’ve seen it with my own eyes, dozens of accounts made only made a few months ago who have no posts and only exist to argue on political subreddits, almost always trying to push far right drivel.
Yeah it's so obvious but when I call them out when no one else seems to believe it or back me. So I just get some snide replies and down votes.
The other day no one else thought it was weird that two brand new accounts are making up 40% of the comments on a labour subreddit and posting only reform talking points and agreeing with each other.
Previously they had stuck to Karina farming on just one or two subreddits before switching into propaganda mode.
Reform only started when a flood of bots started spamming YouTube and a few other platform ms comment sections with their drivel. It's "grassroots" is entirely artificial AstroTurf™.
It’s so frustrating, it could be so easily solved by implementing a basic comment karma filter, half of these accounts don’t even have any positive form of karma but they keep posting none the less.
That would be a start, but a lot of these accounts will spend some time building up a "legit" looking account history for a month or two before switching into propaganda mode.
I've seen it called out a bunch of times on reposted content. One bot account will repost something that did really well on a subreddit exactly a year ago, then a bunch of accounts will repost the top performing comments from that previous post. It's all automated and synchronised. I assume they also upvote each others comments and posts to get them rising. Then real users will see what were originally good content and continue upvoting. It's dead internet theory in action.
Once there's enough karma and realistic looking history they'll switch over to pushing divisive propaganda. I can't think of any realistic way of stopping that kind of behaviour that doesn't break how the site works for normal users or violates privacy concerns.
Even if all "real" users became vastly more competent at spotting fakes and some kind of robust reporting and banning process were implemented it's such a firehose of data to sift through that it's unrealistic to expect it to work. Plus the arms race would just mean the bot makers tweak their programs to obfuscate things further.
Without linking accounts to government issued IDs and banning those IDs across platforms when caught botting I don't think it's possible to prevent bots, and no one in their right mind would encourage that kind of social credit system.
It’s not anything new. All this stuff was happening in 2015/16. This site was even gamed so bad by Bernie super pac it never switched off from over a decade ago. You would even see the same comments posting the exact same stuff from2016/15 in 2024.Next time you see people really wan tell you just how democratic and good they are but also have a seething rage for anyone who isn’t them just like trump wonks. Sites so bad with the “progressive” trump propaganda. I feel bad for the folks who go wrecked by Bernie.
Precisely! They use the media to scaremonger and enrage people, and then they offer the "solution" in exchange for giving up your rights.
In the U.k., the Reform party are offering to get rid of all the immigrants and all it will cost is us leaving the ECHR (which protects our human rights), giving up our free healthcare (the NHS), and allowing them to deregulate our economy to "stimulate growth" (but this will mean handing control of employee protections [wages, hiring and firing laws, guaranteed holidays/sickness days] to the mega corporations). Obviously, this is unacceptable if you have even half a brain in your head, but some naive idiots think it's a good offer!?
Because Reform doesn't have any solutions. Their only goal is to use the Immigration issue to get elected. Then, once they're in power, they will sell us out to the American billionaire owned mega corporations who have been desperate to buy and privatise our country's assets for decades.
Also, Immigration is being reduced, and new laws are being put in place to make future Immigration more difficult. Progress is being made, but you can't just end Immigration overnight without causing a national skilled labour shortage, but Reform can't explain how their policies would actually work without destroying our economy. They are basically a meme party that has been sane-washed by certain news outlets, and now people are seeing them as viable candidates to run the country.
When people writes about anti immigration propaganda, I simply invert it and then I see pro emigration propaganda coming from our own pockets... I do not believe : 'Immigration is good' is well sold to people especially working class denizens of UK. They are hit the hardest, not libs that lives in gated communities.
Add to that illegal ones (which being generous let's say it's 500k) plus foreigners with Portuguese citizenship, either before arriving (of which there are a ton in Brazil) or since (which removes them from this number) and most likely 1/4 of the current population of Portugal is not Portuguese.
invested a lot of money into anti immigration propoganda in Europe and UK
How much money has been pumped into pro immigration propaganda though?
It's been decades of "it's all sunshine and rainbows" and it's taken truly awful things happening over a prolonged period of time to even allow a different conversation to happen.
Because I’ve only ever seen anti-immigrant propaganda. It’s always one horrific crime or another held up as a general immigration problem, while the equally horrific crime by a non-immigrant is ignored.
Then you look at the numbers and realise that immigrants are underrepresented in the crime statistics, crime levels have been falling year on year even as immigration has risen, and immigrants also contribute more financially per capita than the local population. Then you realise how pervasive and widespread the anti-immigration propaganda is, and how utterly without merit it is.
It’s just xenophobia, combined with an easy scapegoat for the very real issues people are facing, all exacerbated by foreign interests funding and amplifying the narrative.
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u/Possible_Trouble_216 May 14 '25 edited May 14 '25
The likes of Elon cunt have also invested a lot of money into anti immigration propoganda in Europe and UK