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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   29937 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 12, 2024

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My galaxy brained take - political parties are using AI to astroturf online spaces in coordination of superusers to dominate election discussion. Can humans really argue with AI who can output an infinite amount of shlock? AI will (or should) be this year's Cambridge Analytica. I think Republicans/Trump may be too slow to adapt with how AI transformed the internet to really understand what they're against.

After the election, party-aligned AI models will come under scrutiny and be regulated to only whomever is in control.

If I were China here's what I would be doing:

Use bots to create Reddit accounts, subscribe to major subs, and then upvote comments based on woke and pessimistic sentiment analysis. This would be very easy to accomplish and could be done for at most 10 million dollars per year all in. With this small investment they could dominate all top level subreddits. It would be virtually undetectable by Reddit. Honestly, they don't even need bots.

https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=china+click+farm

You don't need to write comments, you just need to vote. When China brainwashed American POWs in Korea, they never told them what to say. They simply rewarded them for saying the right things. The Americans invented the Communist propaganda themselves. Training people on Reddit using updoots would be the simplest thing in the world.

I would be surprised if China wasn't already doing this on a large scale with Reddit, Tiktok, and other social networks.

You don't need to write comments, you just need to vote. When China brainwashed American POWs in Korea, they never told them what to say. They simply rewarded them for saying the right things. The Americans invented the Communist propaganda themselves. Training people on Reddit using updoots would be the simplest thing in the world.

That actually explains modern "journalism" frighteningly well. Use capitalist incentives against your opponents by signal boosting and paying the absolute worst journalists (see the top level post below) the most money to generate the most divisive shlock.

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