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Top MAGA influencer revealed to be AI

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Re: Top MAGA influencer revealed to be AI

#31

Post by dfxm12 »

perarneng wrote: post #18

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 engineer…

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...

Re: Top MAGA influencer revealed to be AI

#32

Post by garganzol »

perarneng wrote: post #18

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 engineer…

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.

Re: Top MAGA influencer revealed to be AI

#33

Post by toyg »

bobthepanda wrote: post #5
DroneBetter wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

"Just because newspapers print something, it doesn't mean it's true!"

Re: Top MAGA influencer revealed to be AI

#35

Post by boothby »

tbrownaw wrote: post #19

Is 10k followers a lot?

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.

Re: Top MAGA influencer revealed to be AI

#36

Post by palmotea »

java-man wrote: post #2

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, su…

> 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.

Re: Top MAGA influencer revealed to be AI

#37

Post by dfxm12 »

bobthepanda wrote: post #5
DroneBetter wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

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...

Re: Top MAGA influencer revealed to be AI

#38

Post by coffeefirst »

garganzol wrote: post #32
perarneng wrote: post #18

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 engineer…

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.

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.

Re: Top MAGA influencer revealed to be AI

#39

Post by palmotea »

MBCook wrote: post #10
DroneBetter wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That only says those that fall for it might pay more. It doesn’t explain why so many more fall for it.

> 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.

Re: Top MAGA influencer revealed to be AI

#40

Post by AnimalMuppet »

tbrownaw wrote: post #26
perarneng wrote: post #18

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 engineer…

Meh. The Internet has always had a high noise floor, AI here just takes an existing problem and makes it slightly worse.

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.

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