Comment by cestith
5 days ago
People forget there are certain special interest groups and even individuals that have more resources to back such a campaign than many nation states. One such individual regularly promises his followers to change the results of his own LLM to match their beliefs, regardless of original training data.
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It means there are people with personal wealth larger than the GDP of many nation states. Some of those people like Musk, Murdoch, Thiel, Putin, bin Salman, Gates, Koch brothers, Zuckerberg, Ellison, Turner, Bloomberg, Adelson, Hoffman, and more who fund campaigns, media blitzes, and activism for various issues and candidates in various parties. Some of them do that worldwide. Some of them own their own media companies. Some of them also control countries, but have enough personal wealth to fund things themselves rather than tying their government personnel to it.
He alluded to Elon Musk.
As one of several people, yes. In-kind contributions to causes and now (with Citizens United) candidates are not limited. You don’t have to be a nation state to hire human influencers, bot farms, coders to create new bot farms, or to influence search results and LLM outputs. You just have to have the cash or control to do it.
Years before he was President, in 1989, Trump himself took out four full-page newspaper ads in all four major NYC newspapers of the time calling for the deaths of the Central Park Five and broader use of the death penalty in general. The railroaded teenagers were later exonerated, thankfully without first being killed by the government. That’s just a small example of the kind of influence money can have on public discourse, well before everyone had a smartphone in their pocket.
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