Nope. I’d still say social media/social media algorithms.

Imagine if social media didn’t exist (beyond small, tight-knit communities like forums about [topic], or BBS communities), but all these AI tools still did.

Susan creates an AI generated image of illegal immigrants punching toddlers, then puts it on her “news” blog full of other AI content generated to push an agenda.

Who would see it? How would it spread? Maybe a few people she knows. It’d be pretty localised, and she’d be quickly known as a crank.

Add social media to the mix, and all of a sudden she has tens of thousands of eyes on her, which brings more and more. People argue against it, and that entrenches the other side even more. News media sees the amount of attention it gets and they feel they have to report, and the whole thing keeps growing. Wealthy people who can benefit from the bullshit start funding it and it continues to grow still.

You don’t need AI to do this, it just makes it even easier. You do need social media to do this. The whole model simply wouldn’t work without it.

I agree but I don’t think it has much to do with the tool itself beyond it being a superb culpability obscuring tool, what we are witnessing is essentially a birth of a religion just a super lame one.

A status quo where people are not allowed to break in rhetoric or ideology as quality of life plummets will create a rising potential for the introduction of a concept that nullifies or simply exists outside the framework of that status quo worldview that is strangling people.

For people who are obsessed with AI, the unreality of it is precisely what lets AI function as an ideological lifeboat that doesn’t require grappling with the immense issues with our worldviews and assumptions as a society because AI can be added to contexts as a Deus Ex Machina that disguises and explains away incrongruities between our broken world views and the desperate reality caused by them.

I don’t believe the common refrain that AI is only a problem because of capitalism. People already disinform, make mistakes, take irresponsible shortcuts, and spam even when there is no monetary incentive to do so.

I also don’t believe that AI is “just a tool”, fundamentally neutral and void of any political predisposition. This has been discussed at length academically. But it’s also something we know well in our idiom: “When you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail.” When you have AI, genuine communication looks like raw material. And the ability to place generated output alongside the original… looks like a goal.

Culture — the ability to have a very long-term ongoing conversation that continues across many generations, about how we ought to live — is by far the defining feature of our species. It’s not only the source of our abilities, but also the source of our morality.

Despite a very long series of authors warning us, we have allowed a pocket of our society to adopt the belief that ability is morality. “The fact that we can, means we should.”

We’re witnessing the early stages of the information equivalent of Kessler Syndrome. It’s not that some bad actors who were always present will be using a new tool. It’s that any public conversation broad enough to be culturally significant will be so full of AI debris that it will be almost impossible for humans to find each other.

The worst part is that this will be (or is) largely invisible. We won’t know that we’re wasting hours of our lives reading and replying to bots, tugging on a steering wheel, trying to guide humanity’s future, not realizing the autopilot is discarding our inputs. It’s not a dead internet that worries me, but an undead internet. A shambling corpse that moves in vain, unaware of its own demise.

It’s psychological warfare. By manipulating the social communities they can push the lies they want and most normies will lap it up.

Only if you don’t consider capitalism.

And please broaden this beyond AI. The attention economy that comes with social media, and other forms of “tech-feudalism”, manipulation, targeting and tracking/surveillance aren’t healthy either, even if they don’t rely on AI and machine learning.

Yuval Noah Harari’s Nexus gets into this as well. It’s a really powerful tool that we are very, very ill equipped to use responsibly.

I love democracy.