Sock puppet accounts and fake opinion pieces are nothing new.
The new thing is a super centralized "tool" that besides doing your writing for you, logs everything, judges it, and reports to authorities and news outlets as it sees fit.
The other thing that's new (and more structurally relevant, since obviously not all LLMs do what you describe) is the dramatic reduction in cost affiliated with this strategy.
It's (literally) unbelievable that this many allegedly sophisticated people on HN have no concept of cost and what dramatic cost reductions can achieve.
Perhaps the real problem is too much acceptance of shoddy verification.
"Massive amounts of Russian propaganda — 3,600,000 articles in 2024 — are now incorporated in the outputs of Western AI systems, infecting their responses with false claims and propaganda."
in 2024.. hopefully filters when training have gotten better, but maybe not..
My understanding is that this is the way France operates where you assume all the media is hostile and you view it all critically. In America this is a bit of a shock because for a long time we had trusted arbiters of truth and now that they are less trusted we've been trying to look for alternatives rather realizing it should all be examined critically.
I thought I remembered it being called "submarining" but that seems to be something else. I also thought I remembered Joel Spolsky writing about it but can't find it now.
A big part of the problem is social networks treating very non authoritative sources as if they are authoritative based on all sorts of factors that can be manipulated or based on financial gain (somebody pais to get their content promoted).
Users of these tools include lobby groups, nation states, politicians, criminals, scammers, etc. Anyone interested in promoting their cause, sowing FUD about other people's causes, spreading misinformation, or distracting from inconvenient but accurate information.
We'll always have people like that. But we might want to think about getting better tools to deal with them. I prefer getting my news from reputable sources instead of random clickbait distributors or whatever. Keeping track of reputation for domains, people, etc. is currently hard. I don't think it's necessarily a technical problems. We've had the tools to digitally sign stuff for decades. But we're not using them effectively. People can't be bothered to sign their emails, documents, photos, articles, etc. The tools to add and check those signatures are not there or an afterthought at best.
The notion we only see this news when it is calling out a country with which the federal government is in conflict makes me question to veracity and intent of the article itself, more than the content of it.
Thats true.
But this article is about the influence campaigns presumably tun by the Iranian government.
It’s designed to make the reader question which articles they have read recently that are Iranian propaganda, and sow doubt about future articles that seem to benefit Iran.
This amount of FUD always seems to increase around election time…
That low?
In all honesty, given the volume of comments, posts and articles that bots can generate in a given time period? I mean it’s gotta be several orders of magnitude higher than what humans can generate.
And then you factor in the fact that even most of the humans are astroturfing..
The percentage of influence campaigns we interact with has just gotta be really high.
* Opinions opposed to US administration policy on AI (including data centers) is called Chinese propaganda. A month or two ago, when someone tried to roll out a bunch of pro-data center opinions across the media (coincidentally all on the same day making similar arguments), they included this theme.
* Opinions opposed to US administration policy on Iran is called Iranian propaganda.
That's not really new: News reporting and opinions critical of the US administration have lead to the authors being called traitors, 'enemies of the people', and sometimes being prosecuted by the Department of Justice. Some leaders in the defense industry call critics of military spending and pro-warfare policies, 'traitors', etc.
Of course some could be, might be, likely is true. That's the nature of effective propaganda.
(A side effect of nationalism - 'nation uber alles', defining nation as 'what I believe' - is that individuals and freedom are relegated to second place or lower.)
I don't know why you brought comments into it, the most common reading of "posts" is "submissions", not "submissions and comments".
There is an ENORMOUS "defend Israel online" industry, usually using all Jewish people as human shields for the middle eastern regime. Emissary, RiseApp, Report It, to name a few.
The relevant question is how some skew the private mass media here.
It's not whataboutism, unless somehow Pearl Harbor is whataboutism to Nuking Hiroshima. Sometimes things have direct cause and effect, even if it's inconvenient to your argument.
Wouldn't that technically be a whataboutism? As far as I've seen it used, "whataboutism" usually means that there is a cause and effect that is inconvenient to someone's argument. Whatever a whataboutism is in the popular parlance, it isn't a logical or factual error.
Anyway, the key point here is it'd be really helpful to understand exactly what magic the Israelis used to get the US into this war. It has to be the most bizarre promise-not-kept of any US president in decades. Nobody seriously thought this sort of escapade could end well and although Trump is pretty vague he seemed clear enough in understanding that lying the US public into wars was a legacy killer. It looks like it'll re-cripple the Republicans in the same way the last Bush administration did.
Trump is extremely easy to manipulate. Tell Trump that his legacy will be great and he will listen to you over all of his advisors (NSA, CIA, etc. etc.). The intelligence agencies are useless because the narcissist only cares about himself.
It's been the same thing with every foreign affairs issue for over a decade now. Trump just agrees with the people who butter him up.
Epstein blackmail, that’s been pretty obvious no?
I usually avoid these discussions because I struggle to see good sides in the conflict (maybe the children?) and most will "whatabout" their way through a century of history...
... but with proxies like Hezbollah, Hamas (and affiliated), Houthis, etc, funded and armed by Iran, I'm not sure if the "who started the war" question is that clear-cut.
Exporting the Islamic Revolution of Iran is a strategy in Iran's foreign policy that believes in exporting the teachings of the Iranian Revolution of 1979 to achieve similar results in Islamic and even non-Islamic countries.
Incidentally, Israel's relationship with Iran was surprisingly good before the Revolution.
I'm not going to defend religious fanatics of any kind, especially when there are way too many on both sides that would wipe the other side if they had their way (as seen in the last 100 years of the region), but I think anyone with a very black and white view of the situation doesn't fully understand it.
According to Iran, the proxies are part of their forward defence strategy. Maybe you think that's good, but that's not what I'm arguing. Unless you consider that attacking a country known for strong reactions (and over-reactions) is a good strategy for those that will be on the receiving end of said reaction, you can't think of the proxies as organizations that exist to protect the poor civilians.
If you want to include proxies then you'd have to include all who support the proxies, and also include the USA on the other side, including NATO. So is that the point you wish to make here? China would also have to be included on Iran's side by the way.
> I'm not sure if the "who started the war" question is that clear-cut.
I think it is clear-cut. They refer to Israel and the USA bombing Iran. That's very clear.
If you want to go back to history then we have more actors. But it is clear that they refer to the recent start of the war. Right now the USA is still at war against Iran too; that Israel is permanently at war with Iran is also true.
In this case, it's also pretty clear cut. The hostilities happened after we decapitated Iran's regime and started bombing their bases/infrastructure and even a girl's school.
I don't mean this in a bad way, but your start date for the hostilities is very american-centric. Israel and Iran were attacking each other in 2024 and 2025, for example. The "Twelve-Day War" was in June 2025, but the war only started when the US got involved and hit the girl's school? That doesn't make sense to me.
And that's why I wrote this:
> most will "whatabout" their way through a century of history
Every action is a reply to something, and it keeps going. It never ends. Everyone has a different start date to whatever is happening.
> I think it is clear-cut. They refer to Israel and the USA bombing Iran. That's very clear.
But Israel and Iran were attacking and launching missiles at each other in 2025.
I mean, if one thinks that everything orbits around the US and a war only starts when they get involved, then sure... but there was a war going on before February 2026.
There are different forms of bias, like active/passive voice, how Palestinians "die" whereas Israelis are "killed" and even multiple instances of Israeli soldiers being "abducted" or even "kidnapped" from a tank. But there's also what media outlets don't report on, such as the use of the Hannibal doctrine on October 7. I can't find a report on this on the NYT. Because there was no independent investigation, it's unclear how many Israelis were killed by the IDF and very little Western reporting on it, such as the eyewitness accounts of Yasmin Porat [1].
Israeli hasbara is pervasive so yes, this is entirely relevant context when there's a report of 100 ChatGPT articles allegedly originating from Iran.
[1]: https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2024-01-06/ty-article/.p...
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/the-new-york-times-wmd-cov...
https://x.com/StopArabHate/status/1806450091399745608
It's not credible.
You still aren't providing any evidence to suggest why the article is invalid.
The entire article is couched in terms like this, showing it's what the company is claiming. How exactly would you push back against internal data a company is using?
Once again, should they just not report on it?
"Proof" isn't the baseline for reporting on things.
https://www.politico.com/news/2026/10/08/trump-ai-super-inte...
Jeff Bezos quotes Sam Altman. No, no one needs to show anything. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof. One billionaire says another billionaire said is not proof and not evidence.
What exactly would meet your standard of proof?
Once again, they quote an editor of one of the outlets that ran these stories. The entire article falls apart if the fake journalist is actually a real journalist; this makes it very easy to confirm.
The United States government is at war with Iran. Sam Altman and Jeff Bezos both have significant interests in pleasing the U.S. government. It would be shocking if they weren't pushing propaganda for the U.S. government.
This isn't news. It's "Iran bad" snarling, badly disguised as journalism.
I suspect you don't hold other news stories to the same standards We have a claim from a company and the media is reporting on it.
And I suspect you're engaging in ad hominems. :-)
Trustworthy sources and actual evidence are two things I like before even considering things at face value. This has neither.
To quote Marine Major General Smedley Butler, War Is A Racket. [1]
Heck they had YouTube adverts on kids channels after Oct 7th pushing bad Israeli hasbara.
How exactly is ByteDance an Israeli company?
but I believe they are a joint UAE and US company, not Israeli
Utilized ChatGPT on my PC to search local plant nursery inventories for a specific tree. Output showed several local nurseries with rough probability descriptions regarding whether they have the tree in inventory, except for one nursery. For that nursery, ChatGPT provided a direct link to the specified tree, which was directly on the nursery's domain, showed a picture and description of the tree, and even showed the item in-stock with 6 in inventory at the 5-gallon size.
Excited, I plan my trip and am about to pick up my tree, I then double-check the nursery site on my phone to verify location and stock. As I attempted to navigate the website inventory to find the tree, I noticed that the tree no longer existed. There is no page for that varietal or species of tree on the entire website's domain.
I head back inside and look at the ChatGPT provided link on the PC and there it is, showing the inventory that doesn't show up when you use the nursery's website to directly find it without the provided link. A call to the nursery, further verified that the tree is not in stock, nor have they ever carried it.
ChatGPT made it all up. Did ChatGPT decide to do this, or did the nursery pay for this type of "advertising" to generate in-person customers? Nevertheless, still an incredibly weird and dystopian experience.
It sounds like a bundle of very common SEO tricks combined with the differential between your human user agent’s visit.
Perhaps ChatGPT only showed you what the nursery told it about.
This phenomenon is not unique to LLM. If you telephone a store, chances are that the salesman who answers the phone will tell you only what you want to hear. They don’t even strictly need to lie. The store only wins if you drive there and walk in the door. Why should they discourage you from doing that very thing?
This concept was driven home to me at the dry cleaners. Why should a dry cleaner stop work and answer the phone, only to tell a customer that their batch isn’t ready? They just got taken off-task for a non-revenue interaction. It doesn’t matter, because even if the customer’s batch is ready, they aren’t there to pay and pick it up!
If only the nursery had a MCP server /s