78 pointsby java-man7 hours ago13 comments
  • khasan2227 hours ago
    I was just thinking the other day how ai will be way worse than social media in terms of influencing people. Before though I was thinking of times people have been convinced by chat bots they were god or a genius.

    Social media was so powerful because it convinced people their world view was popular and correct even if it definitely wasn’t, but at least then it was actually happening somewhere. This is just completely made up, to feed into people’s world view, and they don’t even have to find the perfect figure they can make one up.

    We’re definitely going to suffer a lot before it gets better. Interesting times we’re living in.

    • HWR_145 hours ago
      It was definitely often made up before as well, just by rooms with 100s of humans working full time.
  • muyuu7 hours ago
    some of these images are hilarious ngl

    that Indian guy understood the assignment

  • perarneng7 hours ago
    If you apply 2nd order thinking to this story it's easy to see how dangerous AI in combination with social media is. It's worrying that so few care about this issue. How is it possible to have reliable elections or a functioning democracy if people are this easily manipulated and fooled. It was always easy to fool some people but social med powered by AI makes it ridiculously easy and cheap to do mass social engineering. One single person can affect so many potential voters.
    • garganzol7 hours ago
      Instead of prosecuting the real abusers, you suggest prosecuting the tools they use? AI is a tool, social media is a medium.

      The mass social engineering is nothing new. The whole hierarchies of human relations are based on deception.

      • coffeefirst7 hours ago
        It is legal to produce beer. It is legal to operate a bar. And we have a concept of a nuisance business that can result in fines or shutdown if your business constantly attracts egregiously bad behavior.
    • tbrownaw7 hours ago
      Meh. The Internet has always had a high noise floor, AI here just takes an existing problem and makes it slightly worse.
      • AnimalMuppet6 hours ago
        No, the problem is that AI takes an existing problem and makes it massively worse. Because there is basically no limit to the amount of plausible-sounding drivel that AIs can spew, they can drown out all other voices in a way that regular shills and propagandists couldn't. Even organized rings couldn't produce the same volume that AIs can.

        Sure, the internet had, say 20% noise back before spam, shills, and propaganda took over. Now it has 50% noise, maybe even 80%. It's still (barely) usable. But what happens when the noise is 99% of the content? 99.9? That's not "making it slightly worse", that's a phase change that makes it completely unusable.

        • tstrimple5 hours ago
          It never had to sound plausible. AI didn't cause MAGA to believe Haitian's were eating people's pets. AI didn't cause them to believe that schools were buying kitty litter for furries. It's a population who has been conditioned over decades to believe the most wild shit as long as it comes from one of their "trusted sources" and anything that is counter to that is the "liberal media". Fox News et al are far more damaging to our society than generative AI is.
          • datsci_est_201540 minutes ago
            I think their use of the word “plausible” was in reference to a comparison to content generation in the pre-LLM era, which was limited to GANs and Markov chains.
    • dfxm127 hours ago
      if people are this easily manipulated and fooled

      AI detection probably needs to be added to computer literacy curricula (maybe it is, and it is just too late for adults). Of course, it is a political strategy of Republicans (probably conservatives in general) to suppress access to education, as the Republicans enjoy a growing advantage with white non-college grads.

      https://news.gallup.com/poll/248525/non-college-whites-affin...

  • tbrownaw7 hours ago
    Is 10k followers a lot?
    • boothby7 hours ago
      Political campaigns can now afford to target social media users on a 1:1 basis. A bot with 10k followers per month is an old-world threat, detectable with old-world methods. A solitary bot churning out content to the adoration of its fans, of which you are the only human, is the new threat.
    • chucksta7 hours ago
      10,000 followers within a month
    • Forgeties797 hours ago
      Low grade “influencers” all parroting similar talking points can have a powerful cumulative effect.

      QAnon didn’t go mainstream overnight. It bubbled up.

  • pixel_popping7 hours ago
    Half of what we are reading is AI made, not much differences with pictures anyway.
  • java-man7 hours ago
    Full title: "Top MAGA influencer revealed to be AI — created by a guy in India who made a mint off lonely men online".

      Despite MAGA fans making him rich, he still looks down on them, calling them “super-dumb.”
    
      He said he also attempted to make a liberal counterpart for Hart on Instagram, but “Democrats know that it’s AI slop, so they don’t engage as much,” he said.
    
      “The MAGA crowd is made up of dumb people — like, super-dumb people. And they fall for it,” Sam said.
    • palmotea7 hours ago
      > He said he also attempted to make a liberal counterpart for Hart on Instagram, but “Democrats know that it’s AI slop, so they don’t engage as much,” he said.

      > “The MAGA crowd is made up of dumb people — like, super-dumb people. And they fall for it,” Sam said.

      What exactly is the liberal counterpart to this? Because liberals and conservatives are different, and I don't think a politics-swapped clone of this [1] would be good fit for progressives' unfulfilled fantasies. They may respond similarly to a different fantasy influencer though.

      [1] Say a "model" in a trans-flag bikini spewing progressive talking points.

    • anovikov7 hours ago
      Perhaps the easier explanation is not "dumb" but that MAGA crowd is just older and thus richer so better monetizable by definition.
      • jayd167 hours ago
        They're more male, but I would also file that under "easier to dupe" with this sort of content.
      • pjc507 hours ago
        Like the Nigerian Prince emails, by selecting MAGA he's pre-selecting people who want to be lied to and have an easily-pressable set of ideological buttons.

        (before someone asks what the left equivalent is, bluesky has a plague of accounts claiming to be Palestinian refugees and asking for money)

      • smallmancontrov7 hours ago
        No, the same pattern showed up during the 2016 election when direct monetization wasn't the goal. The Russians were throwing bipartisan spaghetti at the wall, their biggest hit in MAGA land was "Pope Endorses Donald Trump," which went mega-viral, while their biggest hit with the Dems was "Elizabeth Warren Endorses Bernie Sanders," which was a comparative flop.
      • presbyterian7 hours ago
        I think both can be true.
      • scrollop7 hours ago
        Who are you trying to convince? /r/conservative?
      • anovikov6 hours ago
        I'd go on to say, that when we are looking at a large group of people, "dumb" and "rich" not just usually coincide, but are the same thing. If someone is smart enough you won't make money off them, if someone is poor enough you won't, either. So if we look at people as sources of money, dumb and rich are interchangeable and in large groups, difficult to distinguish.

        Also, because different groups of people are different by net worth and IQ, we will start (unknowingly) selecting them for either dumb, rich, or both.

        Hence the myth that "Americans are dumb" - they of course aren't, it's just that in almost every other country people rich enough to make enough money off them are the elite and thus too smart to profit off them, and only in America, because the country is rich, even dumb people frequently have cash worth bothering. Germans may not be any smarter than Americans, but poorer - thus appear smarter as a group.

      • 7 hours ago
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      • DroneBetter7 hours ago
        yes, that is pretty much what he disclosed in the article

        > He turned to Google’s Gemini AI for advice and decided to create a “hot girl” crafted specifically for the “MAGA/conservative niche,” after the software told him that “the conservative audience (especially older men in the US) often has higher disposable income and is more loyal,” according to Wired.

        • MBCook7 hours ago
          That only says those that fall for it might pay more.

          It doesn’t explain why so many more fall for it.

          • palmotea7 hours ago
            > It doesn’t explain why so many more fall for it.

            It's pretty easy: he started out trying to create a "hot girl" influencer, then refined that. It could be his starting point was biased towards filling a certain type of conservative fantasy, but wasn't as easily adaptable to progressives. For instance: it could be that lonely straight progressive men are more neurotic about their sexuality, and thus less-likely to respond positively to a bikini model picture, even if the "model" is flattering their political ideology.

            Also there's been a demographic divergence, and young women are much more liberal than men, which means there's less of a supply of "hot girl" conservatives and more unfulfilled demand for them.

            I suspect the progressive version of this is something a lot less discoverable by a random slop-making foreign man.

            • java-man5 hours ago
              "Progressive fantasy" would be AOC and Bernie, and we already have that in real life.
        • bobthepanda7 hours ago
          It is kind of crazy that growing up I recall hearing a lot of “be careful don’t trust the internet” and then now that same generation of people is falling for all manner of scams and fake news peddlers online.
          • toyg7 hours ago
            "Just because newspapers print something, it doesn't mean it's true!"

            <proceeds to believe everything 'printed' on the internet>

          • hydrogen78007 hours ago
            Apologies if it seems I'm just stoking a stereotype, but this comes from personal experience with family. For a demographic who generally are proud to be "old school", "not computer people", skeptical, distrustful of technology, self-reliant, and at least paid lip service to those ideals when raising their children, they sure do love being lied to and manipulated by the very enemies they claimed to be resistant to.
          • dfxm127 hours ago
            I also recall hearing, "do as I say, not as I do" a lot as well.

            If these folks really did change to be more susceptible to scams though, I hope for my own sake that this is less a function of aging and more a function of being fed a steady diet of conservative propaganda. I can avoid the latter...

  • silexia3 hours ago
    How many comments on this post were AI written?
  • whateveracct7 hours ago
    again?
  • 2OEH8eoCRo07 hours ago
    > trying to save up enough to emigrate to the US after graduation.

    Come on over you'll fit right in!

  • shevy-java7 hours ago
    That explains the strategy used by the current US administration. They ask ChatGPT what to do. And this then happen.

    The output is stupid chaos.

    Can we sue the responsible administration? I mean globally - they need to pay for the damage here. Inflation already went up significantly in the EU. Why do Europeans have to suffer due to the orange AI king?

    • dgellow7 hours ago
      I really don’t think AI has anything to do with the current US administration behavior. If not with AI, they would do the same
      • __MatrixMan__7 hours ago
        Really, you think Musk and Bezos and Zuckerberg bought a president and don't have instructions for him regarding their investments in AI?
        • dgellow4 hours ago
          The parent was talking about the US administration _using_ AI
        • Rekindle80906 hours ago
          [flagged]
    • jameskilton7 hours ago
      As the American Justice system is fundamentally broken now, if Interpol decides to "disappear" Trump to the Hague next time he's in Europe it would be greatly appreciated.
  • bettercallsalad7 hours ago
    Our current president himself seems to be AI sometimes. Constantly improvising, strategizing by the moment, posting memes of him as messiah and what not. What a wild time to live in!
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