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

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.

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...

They always were. Problem is that people generally think the others are the ones being manipulated. Partially true...

Our democracy did actually function better before AI, social media and smartphones than it does now.

Everything was not always as bad as it is now. I know that's heresy and thoughtcrime to suggest, but it is true. Things weren't always perfect in the past, but in many ways they were better.

AI is useful in niche circumstances but we could absolutely stand to get rid of 99% of its "use cases."

Social media enables people to network and communicate in ways that would drastically harm freedom of expression if it were removed, and it's so ill defined that banning or regulating it could creep into banning or regulating most communication on the web. Same with smartphones - having a communication and computing device on hand is useful, the problems aren't with the existence of the devices themselves.

The problem with an AI MAGA influencer isn't that social media exists, or that cellphones exist, or even that AI exists, it's whatever deeper cultural and social problems allow MAGA to be a thing in the first place, and AI to be influential. Just banning all the modern things is an easy solution but not necessarily the correct one. I think that we can still have a modern computing and communications infrastructure including social media and smart phones and a working democracy as well.

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.

that Indian guy understood the assignment

Don't post generated/AI-edited comments. HN is for conversation between humans - 41 days ago, 1700 comments

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

  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.

> “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.

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

> 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 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.

That's not the kind of fantasy I'm talking about. I'm talking about the kind of fantasy person that could cause a progressive to feel some pull towards a para-social relationship. That kind of thing was obviously at play with this character. I don't think you're going to get that from a politician.

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

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...

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.

Come on over you'll fit right in!

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?

(Not an American)