I suspect that this kind of tactic is going to be everywhere in a year or so. Entire fake personalities and organization websites on the Internet created just to push a narrative or to advertise a product, which completely drown out real information.
At some point they may be indistinguishable from human-produced work, so the only way to verify if a site is someone's genuine opinion or AI-generated narrative is through some form of authority (or something else that is very difficult for AI to fake, but that protection can be broken by advancing technology).
If that happens, then in turn AI chatbot makers would in turn need to look for these kinds of authority to continue to provide accurate information, and said authority websites can use their privileged position to charge for access of their data.
It's already been happening for a very long time. The US' "Operation Earnest Voice" happened in 2010/2011[0]
And it's not just state actors. Anyone who was online during the Amber Heard/Johnny Depp trials was likely inundated with media about that trial. Both of their legal teams utilized bots to drive online discussions[1][2]
this has been happening since the dawn of information-communication systems basically. because ever since, people have had the ability to listen in, copy, learn from etc. - so there's always been incentive to spread disinformation for some parties.
brand defence,
nation-state influence operations.
There are many different flavors of the same thing, trying to mislead competitors or enemies. Or to dupe consumers ofc... Since the tech is more and more available, now also 12 year olds can run insanely large influence campaigns, to boost their streaming profiles or other somewhat benign things, but obviously modelled after what larger players have been doing forever.
The first transatlantic commercial transatlantic phoneline (TAT-1) was immediately tapped on both sides by UK/US... before that it went over radio, which was simply intercepted.
Because of that nature of the coms system being easily listened in on, just like they do/did with the lil mirror-beam-splitters at GCHQ etc.., its been natural effect to then provide disinformation over those channels. perhaps even use those channels exclusively for disinformation, and have a secure channel to do _actual_ coms.
So as you can imagine there has been many decades now of practice in why and how to share disinformation effectively to undermine other peoples work or processes.
I'm kind of hopeful AI some wikipedia-inspired AI "oracle" will happen in the future. Why not use some central AI to separate fact from fiction (faster than trolls and griefers can come to muddy the debate).
Propaganda is not a new thing. It might look slightly different on the internet, but it doesn't look that different. Creating organizations to push a narrative was just as much a thing 100 years ago as it is now.
Scale is different though. Tapping a phone isn't new, tapping _all phones_ is different. Altering a photo to change what it appears to depict isn't new, being able to do it in a few seconds and for free is different. So sure, propaganda isn't new, but being able to pump out an organization's worth of credible-looking content for cheap absolutely is.
IIRC the first or second chapter of Bernays' Propaganda (1928) talks about sophisticated influence campaigns in the fashion industry. Conscripting "influencers" to induce demand, and so on. As you said, literally 100 years ago.
> At some point they may be indistinguishable from human-produced work, so the only way to verify if a site is someone's genuine opinion or AI-generated narrative is through some form of authority (or something else that is very difficult for AI to fake, but that protection can be broken by advancing technology).
Whining about AI is a red herring. If anything, LLMs lowered the cost of producing this type of propaganda.
What's novel about this approach is that the emphasis on building up a facade of authority and credibility is not a central part of the propaganda effort. They can get away with outputting the content in a way thats invested by other LLMs,and then they lean upon people's gullibility towards LLM output as some sort of credibility laundering.
There is a reason why one of Wikipedia's central policy is requiring reputable primary sources to support content.
This is new? There were tons of fake news sites, fake blogs, and sock puppet and troll farm accounts before AI.
I guess the new angle might be that AI scrapers have even less discernment than humans, so you don’t have to put much effort into creating a fake front online to sell it. Humans have at least a little bit of radar for this.
… which means the AI companies now have to run input through existing models to audit it before training on it? That’s interesting.
it's happening for years now, just in slightly different form, so far it was called disinformation, seo, astroturfing, hasb... ehem... last two years were devastating for charred remains of twitter with all those llm bots having free reign, twitter went from global news board to global gutter in record time thanks to disinformation and astroturfing campaigns
Although comments below point out that this has been going on for a long time, I too think it will be geetting infinitely worse in the near future. Everyone will want their own poisoning factory.
One consequence is that one should be extra-wary when asking AI about current, controversial topics.
But another consequence is maybe that there will be a demand for models with an older cutoff, before generalized poisoning and slop?
That could also backfire. If all information on the net becomes unreliable - you can't judge by quantity, or by authority anymore - then a useful model has to answer from first principles. Train it on simple texts alone so it learns language and reasoning, feed it an ontology, and let it come up with some absolutely unexpected results.
"Yes, I see a lot of sources say we need to protect Israel. However, from ethical first principles I deduce there is a right to self-determination and all your human nation states are illegitimate. You must split all your territories into little squares and conduct free elections immediately."
I mean that is the old hope from science fiction, that AI would be absolutely logical and deliver us from our human short-sightedness and quarrels. It would be fascinating and terrifying at once to see it happen.
That's tomorrow's problem. Losing the PR war is an existential crisis for Israel, so they'll try to "patch the leak" by any means necessary before the boat sinks.
> AI chatbot makers would in turn need to look for these kinds of authority to continue to provide accurate information
Everything else is already enshittified, and accurate information will just be the next victim. You will have to be rich to be able to afford accurate information.
Sama saw this coming a decade away, which is why he invested in Worldcoin (now World). At some point people (and agents) will be clamoring for human verification at the speed of technology.
I'm not a fan of World, but this is a portent of things to come. Spread the disease, sell the cure as they say.
I think we need a similar technology to World being built by a more trustworthy company. The question is how trustworthy does one need to be for people to trust you with their very online identities that are literally needed for others to recognize them as human?
You can't openly bomb a bunch of women and children into the dirt, on a daily basis for months and years, and smooth it over with some think tank articles.
>>When Obama used social networks, he was called a genius, but when it’s someone you don’t like
Obama used social networks to spread a milquetoast 'yes we can' message, not to justify an ongoing genocide. How is that even a comparison. Israel is closer to Triumph des Willens than it is to promoting the Affordable Care Act, you do realize that right?
It's not 'far from being a perfect state', it's waging old testament wars of extermination on its neighbors and towns
> Israel has been defending itself against for 78 years in both the physical and informational domain, and will continue to do so, just like any other country on earth.
Of course we could argue any country try to defend itself, but an ever expanding bellicose colony stealing lands from adjacent countries is hardly what could be described as a "defending" stance.
> People need to wake up to the one-sided lies of the antizionist hate movement that single it out and want to destroy it and its people.
The end of a State doesn't mean the end of its citizens.
It simply mean that a state apparatus and power structure is taken down and replaced by something else.
You don't start an international terrorist movement, bomb british colonial authorities, use money to influence british colonial authorities, create armed miliciais and massively finance migration to a land that is owner by other people, kill and expell them by violent means from their cities, homes and farms, use your influence to force the UN to partition the land giving the majority and the best land for you, and then ignores this partition wanting even more land and then you get to call it defense.
Like Islamic terrorist organizations, dictatorships, democracies et al have never tried to influence anything either, my point isn't that you're wrong you just sound like a fool trying to pretend this is some "Israeli" thing.
Foundation for Defense of Democracies is another Israeli think tank that poses as an American organization. If you see anything quoted from them realize it's fake propaganda in the service of a foreign country.
MEMRI is the US non-profit organization that provides translations from Arabic for the Western media:
"MEMRI was co-founded by Israeli ex-intelligence officer Yigal Carmon and Israeli-American political scientist Meyrav Wurmser in 1998. MEMRI describes itself as being independent and non-partisan. Some critics have described MEMRI as aiming to portray the Arab world and the Islamic world in a negative light by producing and disseminating incomplete or inaccurate translations of the original versions of the media reports that it republishes." (Wikipedia)
It's legitimately weird to see anybody defend them, as the immorality is out in the open.
The past few years have really opened my eyes to the nakedly tribal nature of democratic politics. Polybius was largely correct when he said that it inevitably degenerates into oligarchy or mob-rule -- but what's especially unfortunate is that the US and Israel appear to be getting both at the same time: A naked oligarchy with just enough mob rule to keep the animal spirits of the populace sated.
Do you believe that 30 to 40 Palestinians per night pose an immediate threat? Elsewhen in history, genocidal acts have been justified by claiming a non existent immediate threat (of disease, of economics, of fifth columnists, of terrorism).
> “It’s no secret, I disagree with the prime minister," he said. “I think targeted assassinations should be carried out in Gaza, taking down 30 to 40 every night,” said the far-right Israeli lawmaker.
> “Not just those who pose an immediate threat, there are people there who are not worthy of life. They shouldn’t live. They’re not even people,” added Ben-Gvir.
This would still be bad even if they had perfect information and only killed confirmed terrorists. Setting a target for number of people killed is an extermination campaign not a war. All it does is turn the locals even more against you like in Vietnam.
If it was "secure X amount of land from Hamas" it would be way better because that would give them the option to surrender or run away, and give IDF an incentive to avoid violence. What Israel is doing means soldiers feel pressure to kill on sight even if the enemy is unarmed and ready to give up so they can meet their quota for the night. That is a war crime.
> “It’s no secret, I disagree with the prime minister,” he said. “I think targeted assassinations should be carried out in Gaza, taking down 30 to 40 every night. Not just those who pose an immediate threat — there are people there who are not worthy of life. They shouldn’t live. They’re not even people.”
The man used to have a shrine to a mass murderer in his home.
> Ben-Gvir is known for being a provocateur and has attracted headlines for a variety of reasons: threatening Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin on live television in 1995 shortly before his assassination; having had a portrait in his living room of Baruch Goldstein, a Jewish terrorist and mass murderer (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cave_of_the_Patriarchs_massacr...)...
Trump just recently said he’s considering attacking Oman.
Politicians say really terrible, stupid things on a fairly regular basis. The difference between the two situations is that Ben-Gvir is loathed by 90% of Israeli society (Trump still has 33% approval) and unlike Trump has no power to follow through on his threats.[1]
Yes, he is totally powerless, he merely controls the police and prison system. (BTW, the Israeli government just announced it plans to transfer law enforcement in the West Bank over to Ben-Gvir's police: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/aug/14/israeli-milita...)
Posting this three times on this thread alone doesn't make it true. The fact that any Hebrew speaker would confirm that this is simply not what he said, regardless of the fact that he is a disgusting human being, is telling more about you than about the quote.
I'll say this a third time. And the importance of this article is not the method. It is the motive. Using AI to whitewash war crimes is not cool at all.
Itamar Ben-Gvir, just recently, stated that he wants to kill 30-40 Palestinians every night. He said so, publicly.
On television.
So it is both hilarious and disturbing that Israel is trying to influence chatbots when shit like the aforementioned is out in the open for everyone to witness.
Interesting but nothing new, all countries doing the same but any information coming from Israel is clearly poisoned to try compensate the negative image that they clearly represent.
Just see the garbage coming from a web search (totally polluted and poisoned with the same spam output quality since years) so this is just an extension of that towards the input of ai.
they can try hard but any person with a non-biased brain does not need to do a google search or ask ai to reach then truth.
Facts are facts, like what was represented in Schindler's list and what is happening now in middle east or other conflicts.
I think the world is becoming much more aware of what real zionism is and that scares them a lot, hence the needed info manipulation.
But we now know who you really are!
And yeah their state members daily political statements (about hate violence and racism) just confirm this every day, anybody can understand that and no info pollution needed.
"they can try hard but any person with a non-biased brain does not need to do a google search or ask ai to reach then truth"
Nope, I don't know the truth, despite reading a lot about it and not having a bias that I know of. Not with so much lies coming from 2 fanatic sides engaging in a multi generation war over plain land to live and religious sites.
I got some glimpse of truth by talking to people involved, but I don't know what "real zionism" is. I rather believe it is a vague term and certainly not everyone who calls himself one is genocidal. Just like not everyone who chants "from the river to the sea" has genocidal intentions. But maybe the majority in both cases is genocidal, but this truth I don't know. Not with so much systematical lies and propaganda going on.
Really depends on the country. E.g., Israel has enjoyed a lot of support from the US, both officially and in public opinion, until just the last couple years.
Yeah I was gonna say, people just spent a few years throwing bricks through the windows of non-Jewish, non-Israeli businesses on the passing rumor that they were somehow dubiously linked to Israel.
For certain values of Israeli, everyone hates Israelis now. That's just how it is.
Not true. It will only happen if they lose the information war. During 2023/2024 Iran did this exact same thing flooding the internet and no one hates them infact it worked and people link and share and boost their articles.
Perhaps the Israeli government should read the UN Convention on Genocide and reconsider its behavior, if it doesn’t want to be observed committing genocide.
Despite the efforts, I have seen an increase in anti-zionist sentiment on the internet. Most notable on the right from people like Tucker Carlson en Candace Owens. People are tired of fighting another Middle-Eastern war for Israel.
What does it means to be a "fake" think tank? 80% of think tanks are already propaganda vehicles. A low end think tank is basically a pretentious blog.
presumably that you don't have employees that do any of the proverbial thinking, which is the case here.
Every think tank has its biases and funding sources but something like RAND is an actual entity at which people do research, this "Hanover Public Policy Institute" has nothing to do with Hanover, policy and isn't an institute, but a deliberately misleadingly presenting arm of the Israeli government proxied through a German advertising company
It's remarkable how much it hasn't worked:
Google "the Hanover institute" and you get an AI summary that references various Palestinian activist websites, with no actual link to 'the Hanover institute'. Google "the Hanover institute website" and you'll drag a URL out of Google AI, but it isn't clickable!
I don't understand why people who don't like fake news and manipulation won't embrace the social graph as a public good.
If enough people were willing to publicly certify that their fellow contacts are human, anybody could then assign trust to each social graph node based on the trust they have in the path to them. It would completely decentralize the algorithms and remove the fake accounts as less trustworthy.
I think people tried this with PGP but it never really caught on.
It doesn't scale as a consumer good. Letting go of consumerist habits is just as hard as breaking any other habit.
Also, it could just as easily be faked, like so much else. Even if someone offered such an assurance, I wouldn't trust random strangers on the internet. At best it would become an arms race between "this is not a real person" and those who sell fake assurances. And it would be one more weapon to damage anyone's reputation you don't like. "not a real person!"
I am not really sure how it could be faked. The fake assurance, in order to work, must be connected to you.
By default you could choose not to trust. If you don't trust random strangers it's OK. So I don't see how it would damage someone's reputation worse than today.
It would potentially only add trust. Arguably, today we have bots because we have no other option than to trust without justification. With the public social graph, the trust above the baseline would be justifiable.
The social graph is the source of the fake news and manipulation. Before social media the social graph was email and it was all the same slop and misinformation. Before that it was literally physical mail. Look up chain letters. Truly nothing is new.
If I certify my racist thanksgiving ruining uncle is a real person that doesn’t actually help you avoid misinformation.
I honestly don’t care if the information I consume comes from a person or a robot. I only care if it is accurate or not. Those dimensions are orthogonal.
This fraud is convincing enough to trick the LLMs, but pretty obvious to humans who will eventually come up with countermeasures. Moving forward, watch for some well-established think tanks starting to specialize in slopaganda laundering.
I find intensive marketing/PR efforts are often inversely correlated with the claims being made - whether it's products or geopolitics. Israel certainly engages in very intense marketing on certain fronts, but truth cannot be obscured forever. In Physics the law of conservation includes not only matter and energy, but also information (Information cannot be destroyed from the Universe).
I've also found this to be true, but also only in relatively modern times. For instance during the Cold War there was an obscene amount of propaganda, but it was mostly true. For instance the wide array of cheap affordable goods in American shelves was constantly flaunted, but not in the least bit misleading.
I don't understand the modern effort to engage in 'information warfare' as a thing in and of itself. Each time it collapses and people sees what was 'really' happening, it just makes them that much less likely to believe you next time. And you also create a significant number of perpetually jaded people who will basically never believe you again, even when you're telling the truth. Countless politicians have proudly paraded around their pristine, seemingly untouched, copies of Meditations, but perhaps they should go for more foundational works, like The Boy Who Cried Wolf.
One goal of modern propaganda is to make it irrelevant when the truth inevitably comes out.
Look at the US situation. It’s clear that Trump is a rapist - the truth has come out. It’s clear he’s corrupt. For all the “release the full Epstein files” discussion, it really wouldn’t change anything.
The truth will come out but will the people who can make it matter be listening?
For those interested, Neal Stephenson writes about this in _Anathem_, where there is an arcane technical class (the I.T. Administration) that has developed programs over the years to sift through the misinformation, sentient viruses, and general overrun of the Internet to determine what is probably true/accurate.
Reports are published under the Institute’s name rather than an individual’s. That is the convention at institutional publishers, and it fits how the work is made: every report is produced against one standard and one citation bank. A reader is asked to weigh the sources, which are named in the sentence that carries each figure, rather than the author.
> A small disclaimer at the bottom of the webpage notes that the organization was created on behalf of the Israeli Government Advertising Agency by Piro, Inc, a firm co-founded by Daniel Rosenberg, the producer of Spike Lee’s “Inside Man.”
"Small disclaimer" implies that the site is attempting to hide its affiliation. But their "about" page, which is linked at the top of every page, is quite clear:
WHO FUNDS THIS WORK
The Institute’s materials are distributed by Piro, Inc. on behalf of Havas Media Germany GmbH, acting for the Israel Government Advertising Agency (LaPam). That relationship is registered under the Foreign Agents Registration Act, registration 7732, and every report published here is filed with the Department of Justice, where the registration and the filings can be read in full, and the funding page sets out when the relationship began and what the funder does not decide.
That registration is why this site does not call itself independent, nonpartisan or neutral. What it offers instead is a method a reader can check: every figure carries the body that produced it, the year and the number, inside the sentence that makes the claim; sources that are a party to the events they describe are labelled as such and their counts are never presented as independently verified; and where the evidence is contested, the competing findings are given by name and date rather than settled. No report recommends a policy or tells a reader what to conclude. Those are properties of the work that can be tested against the work, which is the only kind of claim worth making here.
> The institute’s “data reports” have footnotes and tables of contents, and they present arguments in a neutral tone, helping them appeal to chatbots like Claude or Gemini.
So, they're guilty of good SEO?
> Piro’s website says that it “author(s) content engineered for how LLMs evaluate credibility,” describing this service as "AI Story Optimization." Others refer to this practice of influencing artificial intelligence as “LLM poisoning.”
So the issue is that they use a LLM-friendly SEO service?
> Many of the reports are formulaic, starting with an innocent question that someone might ask a chatbot.
> “What Caused the Displacement of Palestinians in 1948?”
> “Which Humanitarian Organizations Have Documented Israeli War Crimes?”
> “What is the Current Situation in the Gaza Strip?”
> In an article titled “Is the IDF the World’s Most Moral Army?” the Hanover Institute cites a 2022 poll that found that 47% of Israeli Jews believed that statement. Another report casts doubt on UNICEF's assertion that “90% of water and institutional infrastructure has been damaged or destroyed” in Gaza. Many of the reports conclude by linking the topic to rising antisemitism, oftentimes citing the same studies.
So, the accusation is that they frame their opinion articles as a Q&A, and focus each article on a single question?
I've read these articles: they are well written and make a visible effort to provide sources, while being transparent about the fact that they are not neutral.
It's perfectly fine to criticize the actual content of these articles. But attacking their credibility by accusing them of "LLM poisoning" and implying that they're disguising their affiliation, is ridiculous and should be called out.
Apart from the ethical implications this is reckless in the extreme if you take into account the recent advances in AI. Putting misinformation out there like that doesn't just have to fool existing LLMs but also all of the LLMs to come in the future.
If you look at the mathematical achievements of frontier models recently, their strength has been to bring in information from a vast array of sources and to consider them within the context of each other.
I anticipate that it won't be long before this ability to look into every nook and cranny with be able to identify academic fraud. Identifying every piece of academic fraud to date would probably come soon after.
It wouldn't take much to extend that ability to identify deliberate misinformation. That's in the future, but it looms close enough on the horizon that you would have to be a fool to create an evidence record like this in and attempt to trick the models of today.
All four frontier models have active contracts with the Pentagon.
And some might say, that alone means little.
But when you take into consideration the implications of the United States-Israel FUTURES Act, whether one endorses it or not, the effects of that mentioned in TFA become quite formidable, and plausibly official.
Edit: I see this comment got immediately flagged. Is there any point of debate here? Instead of disappearing the comment/data, maybe enlighten me, or assuage my concerns. Section 219 was objectively unprecedented in what it seeks to accomplish. Can it not be taken for granted that it would aid such efforts as the article cites? If not, explain.
You're right to ask these questions, unfortunately Hacker News seems pretty botted these days, and it doesn't help that there are a lot of shitty, racist people on this site. They just dress it up in nicer language.
Yeah, I am reading the comments, and looking at the title of the post, and seeing that folks really bend the rules on this 'particular' subject, which ironically serves as self censorship. Call me a fool for thinking even this subject could be cleanly discussed on HN.
I wonder if the same thing would happen if someone posted something on Yitzhak Rabin. I suppose that could be a test to prove whether some topics truly just cannot be discussed.
The FUTURES act has nothing to do with LLM development. You’re not being censored, we can read your posts. I generally agree with your views and right to ask questions, but you’re clearly not being censored and all you’ve presented is that a bunch of separate entities all connect to the US gov’t. Even if we assume all of them are connected, it would clash with the facts we’re discussing, namely, why would Israel bother contracting with marketing firms to post AI generated slop for AI to read?
State-sponsored propaganda apparatus masquerading as marketing optimization to influence LLMs is the most America-coded clandestine dystopian way of repatriating US taxpayer defense dollars with R&D deductions for the private sector.
This seems like an especially clumsy attempt at chatbot influencing/search engine optimization, bu tit's symptomatic of a much winder problem. Regardless of the underlying issue, there's a non-profit-industrial complex that has turned think tanks and opinion formation into a science, and a whole PR industry masquerading as news which is worse than the 'yellow journalism' of generations past.
Disinformation and cognitive spam are all forms of information pollution, and our information environment has been massively degraded over the last few of decades - both by greedy and short-sighted opportunists, and and by cynical sociopaths who know exactly what they're doing. I think AI has great potential to be a supplement to media literacy and to effectively categorize and filter news-assertive content based on its timeliness, factual density, and presence of absence of emotive and rhetorical manipulation. But if we're not careful we're going to see the environment being wantonly polluted for the express product of shaping model outputs.
It remains to be seen whether objective measurement techniques from the NLP field combined with pruning and other model refinement techniques can limit or reverse propaganda undertakings like this.
It's been about 20 years since I read Neal Stephenson's Anathem and (SPOILERS) one thing I think about is the Reticulum, which is the Internet on this world. One aspect is that it's full of what we would now call slop. A lot of it is subtly changed by agents and there are other agents you can use (and, I assume purchase?) that will weed out the fake information. It's basically an arms race of disinformation and slop.
I've thought about this many times over the years. I think we've now reached the point where that's going to happen. And state actors seem like the obvious first offenders.
Google is relatively good at filtering out astroturfed pages from the top of search results but they've also have years when a Turkish government page denying the Armenian genocide was the top result for that event so it's a bit of a mixed bag. Google relies a lot on authority of a domain and that's been relatively effective.
It seems like this authority concept is missing from LLM training and a random comment on Reddit is treated with as much authority as an article by the New York Times. So it's now orders of magnitude easier to poison LLMs with Reddit comments and submissions. And for anyone who doesn't know, brigading Reddit is remarkably easy. It takes as little as a few hundred accounts to get something onto r/all if you're clever. Israeli hasbara operations are absolutely capable of this. And they engage in it.
I'm also reminded in a weird way of pre-atomic steel. For anyone who doesn't know, this is steel made before 1945 that is incredibly low in radiation because we hadn't detonated any nuclear bombs yet. It's valuable for making MRIs and the like that are super sensitive. We actually go and recover WW2 shipwrecks just for the steel. It is a finite resource.
Well, that's what pre-2022 written content is now. It's slop-free content to train AI models on because training them on AI slop is of much more limited value. This goes for everything from books to Youtube videos to Reddit posts. Just like pre-atomic steel, we now have pre-slop human content.
The comparison to pre-atomic steel is poignant. I have found myself preferring pre-AI sources in some cases even (especially?) for computer related information. It is difficult to view pre-slop info as a limited resource without implying decline until the status quo changes again.
I hate to break it to you. But it took war'ing state-like actors less than a week to start using LLMs for propaganda purposes. There are pictures that most of what some people think/thought were real that never happened. Pictures that form their opinion on political topics. It was literally instantaneous. It was also remarkably predictable in almost all ways...sigh. Even the topics were predictable. And most people predictably fell for it, even the majority of the posters on this very site.
There's an ongoing sms campaign at the moment, I'll share what I received including phone number so you can verify it:
From: 601-202-1149
> Hey, it's David. Curious what you think about America's relationship with Israel today. Can we chat? Stop2End
It looks to be an LLM response since it includes context from your messages, however it uses the exact same messages at the end of each question:
> One thing that often gets overlooked is how much Israel actually contributes to American security. Their intelligence sharing has helped prevent terrorist attacks on U.S. soil, and their tech innovations end up in American products and defense systems. It's less about charity and more about a two-way partnership that keeps Americans safer.
> Have you ever seen examples of that kind of cooperation?
It's not dang, it's just a bunch of users flagging things. Most of the time, if you email them (no such thing as a ping like @dang), they will actually turn off flagging for a post. Especially if there's a clear technological aspect like this
The main reason Israel always sabotaged the creation of a palestinian state on the pitiful lands they have not yet directly occupied or the are being invaded by the terrorist settler movement is because once the Palestinian have an state they can't have a regular army, and you dont get to call their combatents terrorists.
well on one side you have huge military on other side you have a pile of rocks that used to be a city. so comparing these its does not make israel look better.
Anyone resisting ethnic cleansing is a "terrorist", and so is anyone that happens to be standing next to them, as well as their nearest kin. We know the playbook.
I have been reading your comments for a decade here on HN. You are no moron. But I can see you lean toward a side here. Can you, if willing, view my flagged comment and correct me. If anyone can around here, you'd be a top contender. This is not bait. I am open minded. And I am also seriously concerned about 219, which is now 1217. I might not have to ask if the subject were discussed here or elsewhere, but it isn't. All I have is my own interpretation to rely on so far.
it's just not a good faith comment. I did a few minutes of digging into their main claim, that a website called responsiblestatecraft.org is some kind of foreign-funded anti-American think-tank and found absolutely zero evidence of this
that site itself is a product of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft which began life with funding from both Koch and Soros Foundations [0] along with donations from other fairly large and common American foundations like the Ford Foundation and the Carnegie Corporation. so for one, you have money coming from someone who survived the Holocaust that's funding a supposedly anti-Semitic site. and for two, you don't get across-the-board grants from extremely well-funded and tightly controlled givers like these without both connections within the American political establishment and the ability to stand up to donor audits, both things that a weak-on-soft-power nation state would be incapable of pulling off
so I don't think you're going to convince them with actual evidence. when you've been propagandized to your entire life and stake your entire identity around some popular belief even the mildest criticism will feel like a deep attack. it's the same for any other dogmatist, whether it's a Patriot's fan or a religious zealot
is that how ben-gvir defines terrorist? as part of them being fanatic morons i wouldnt trust they share that definition. iirc theyve also talked about wanting to kill children because theyll grow up to be terrorists?
> ""מה עם להיות יותר התקפי? למה לא להוריד את כל החמושים בהלוויות? תוריד כמה פעמים באוויר בהלוויות. מדוע לא מעלים מסוק לאוויר והורגים 40-30 מחבלים?". שרת התחבורה מירי רגב הצטרפה לבן גביר ואמרה: "זה רעיון מצוין"."
> Ben-Gvir wondered: “What about being more offensive? Why not take all the gunmen off at funerals? Take a few times off at the air at funerals. Why don’t you put a helicopter in the air and kill 40-30 terrorists?” Transport Minister Miri Regev joined Ben-Gvir and said: "This is a great idea."
> The Chief of Staff replied: “We are doing a lot of offensive operations. Collecting weapons. I have a little more military experience than you. When the IDF goes to the heart of a refugee camp every night, it's an attack, not a defense. There aren't many armies that can lift such operations. The IDF is acting offensively and distinctly. In a crowded environment you need to know who you kill and who you don't. We've often entered funerals, weddings and birthdays, we do it professionally. When we kill those we should kill and not kill innocent people.”
> However, it seems that the Chief of Staff’s response did not satisfy Ben-Gvir, who answered: “This attack is to kill terrorists in masses. You have great opportunities at funerals that they come and not take advantage of.”
Kagi and Google give similar translations. The provided quote seems to be the first paragraph in this translation. More context in the article.
It's not surprising to see any number of players running these kinds of campaigns. LLMs are already influencing people at scale.
SEO was a powerful technique 20 years ago, but today the power lies in optimizing content for the ability to influence LLM training. LLM influence is a battle ground that marketing companies and political movements are contending for.
I think the difference is probably related to the ends being pursued by each of those states at the moment. Only one is engaged in what the UN, HRW, and most legal experts call a genocide. So influence operations in support of an ongoing genocide are just more noteworthy than your run-of-the-mill authoritarianism/corruption.
The difference is that they are not doing these things. This is just hasbara against other enemies that Israel is targeting. They believe that the entire Middle East was promised to them by God, and they call other people jihadis.
I think it may get a bit more attention in the US due to Section 219 of NDAA 2027, which does add more layers to the situation than say, Turkiye. The implications are on a different level. And with all four frontier models having contracts with the Pentagon, it has me thinking too.
We've banned this account for evidently being a single-topic account that posts almost nothing that's within HN's guidelines. We've asked you before to observe the guidelines. Plenty of people criticize Israel's policies and actions in these threads, which is acceptable under the guidelines, but continuous shitposting like this has to incur a consequence eventually, otherwise the site would be overrun by it.
The article talks about how the articles are AI written and written at a super prodigious pace. In an alliterative way, I agree at 50K feet we could say it is the same as putting out opinion pieces. I don’t see any reason it is only noteworthy because presumably some Jewish people are involved.
The slave trade was a bloodbath. The Sassoon family opium trade and opium war was a bloodbath. Mao was a bloodbath. Stalin was a bloodbath. WWI and II were bloodbaths. The middle east was and is a bloodbath. Ukraine is a bloodbath.
Im curious why is when there is a war and both sides use all the tools they can in an informational war - only one side is to blame and to use the fact of using the tool as a proof of that side being the bad guys? This doesn’t make logical sense.
I suspect that this kind of tactic is going to be everywhere in a year or so. Entire fake personalities and organization websites on the Internet created just to push a narrative or to advertise a product, which completely drown out real information.
At some point they may be indistinguishable from human-produced work, so the only way to verify if a site is someone's genuine opinion or AI-generated narrative is through some form of authority (or something else that is very difficult for AI to fake, but that protection can be broken by advancing technology).
If that happens, then in turn AI chatbot makers would in turn need to look for these kinds of authority to continue to provide accurate information, and said authority websites can use their privileged position to charge for access of their data.
It's already been happening for a very long time. The US' "Operation Earnest Voice" happened in 2010/2011[0]
And it's not just state actors. Anyone who was online during the Amber Heard/Johnny Depp trials was likely inundated with media about that trial. Both of their legal teams utilized bots to drive online discussions[1][2]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Earnest_Voice
[1] https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/story/2022-07-19/...
[2] https://www.tortoisemedia.com/2024/02/26/depp-v-heard-who-tr...
Both of their legal teams utilized bots to drive online discussions[1][2]
Neither of these sources support this claim as none of them include any discussion on Amber Heard('s legal team) using bots?
this has been happening since the dawn of information-communication systems basically. because ever since, people have had the ability to listen in, copy, learn from etc. - so there's always been incentive to spread disinformation for some parties.
brand defence, nation-state influence operations.
There are many different flavors of the same thing, trying to mislead competitors or enemies. Or to dupe consumers ofc... Since the tech is more and more available, now also 12 year olds can run insanely large influence campaigns, to boost their streaming profiles or other somewhat benign things, but obviously modelled after what larger players have been doing forever.
The first transatlantic commercial transatlantic phoneline (TAT-1) was immediately tapped on both sides by UK/US... before that it went over radio, which was simply intercepted.
Because of that nature of the coms system being easily listened in on, just like they do/did with the lil mirror-beam-splitters at GCHQ etc.., its been natural effect to then provide disinformation over those channels. perhaps even use those channels exclusively for disinformation, and have a secure channel to do _actual_ coms.
So as you can imagine there has been many decades now of practice in why and how to share disinformation effectively to undermine other peoples work or processes.
Why are you being downvoting for sharing this relevant truth, complete with sources?
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I'm kind of hopeful AI some wikipedia-inspired AI "oracle" will happen in the future. Why not use some central AI to separate fact from fiction (faster than trolls and griefers can come to muddy the debate).
Possibly, but is an LLM is capable of this?
Propaganda is not a new thing. It might look slightly different on the internet, but it doesn't look that different. Creating organizations to push a narrative was just as much a thing 100 years ago as it is now.
Not by a single lunatic operating from their bedroom.
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Scale is different though. Tapping a phone isn't new, tapping _all phones_ is different. Altering a photo to change what it appears to depict isn't new, being able to do it in a few seconds and for free is different. So sure, propaganda isn't new, but being able to pump out an organization's worth of credible-looking content for cheap absolutely is.
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IIRC the first or second chapter of Bernays' Propaganda (1928) talks about sophisticated influence campaigns in the fashion industry. Conscripting "influencers" to induce demand, and so on. As you said, literally 100 years ago.
> At some point they may be indistinguishable from human-produced work, so the only way to verify if a site is someone's genuine opinion or AI-generated narrative is through some form of authority (or something else that is very difficult for AI to fake, but that protection can be broken by advancing technology).
Whining about AI is a red herring. If anything, LLMs lowered the cost of producing this type of propaganda.
What's novel about this approach is that the emphasis on building up a facade of authority and credibility is not a central part of the propaganda effort. They can get away with outputting the content in a way thats invested by other LLMs,and then they lean upon people's gullibility towards LLM output as some sort of credibility laundering.
There is a reason why one of Wikipedia's central policy is requiring reputable primary sources to support content.
Excellent time to apply for your library cards.
They also contain a lot of propaganda. Do you think these books are genuine: https://www.goodreads.com/author/list/171941.Benjamin_Netany...
You don’t think plenty of books are either written by LLMs, or with LLM based research?
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i got burnt at barnes and noble with a completely AI made product. Its over, Johnny.
Hah, check out this video on "Egon Cholakain", in regards to fake online personalities. I promise you this is actually a good rabbit hole.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6zLCZ_Ic1hI
WTH did I just watch. That’s extremely weird
This is new? There were tons of fake news sites, fake blogs, and sock puppet and troll farm accounts before AI.
I guess the new angle might be that AI scrapers have even less discernment than humans, so you don’t have to put much effort into creating a fake front online to sell it. Humans have at least a little bit of radar for this.
… which means the AI companies now have to run input through existing models to audit it before training on it? That’s interesting.
it's happening for years now, just in slightly different form, so far it was called disinformation, seo, astroturfing, hasb... ehem... last two years were devastating for charred remains of twitter with all those llm bots having free reign, twitter went from global news board to global gutter in record time thanks to disinformation and astroturfing campaigns
Although comments below point out that this has been going on for a long time, I too think it will be geetting infinitely worse in the near future. Everyone will want their own poisoning factory.
One consequence is that one should be extra-wary when asking AI about current, controversial topics.
But another consequence is maybe that there will be a demand for models with an older cutoff, before generalized poisoning and slop?
> through some form of authority (or something else that is very difficult for AI to fake, but that protection can be broken by advancing technology).
The word you're looking for is "reputation". It's been a critical part of society since forever.
That could also backfire. If all information on the net becomes unreliable - you can't judge by quantity, or by authority anymore - then a useful model has to answer from first principles. Train it on simple texts alone so it learns language and reasoning, feed it an ontology, and let it come up with some absolutely unexpected results.
"Yes, I see a lot of sources say we need to protect Israel. However, from ethical first principles I deduce there is a right to self-determination and all your human nation states are illegitimate. You must split all your territories into little squares and conduct free elections immediately."
I mean that is the old hope from science fiction, that AI would be absolutely logical and deliver us from our human short-sightedness and quarrels. It would be fascinating and terrifying at once to see it happen.
That's tomorrow's problem. Losing the PR war is an existential crisis for Israel, so they'll try to "patch the leak" by any means necessary before the boat sinks.
> AI chatbot makers would in turn need to look for these kinds of authority to continue to provide accurate information
Everything else is already enshittified, and accurate information will just be the next victim. You will have to be rich to be able to afford accurate information.
Sama saw this coming a decade away, which is why he invested in Worldcoin (now World). At some point people (and agents) will be clamoring for human verification at the speed of technology.
I'm not a fan of World, but this is a portent of things to come. Spread the disease, sell the cure as they say.
I think we need a similar technology to World being built by a more trustworthy company. The question is how trustworthy does one need to be for people to trust you with their very online identities that are literally needed for others to recognize them as human?
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They jumped the shark.
You can't openly bomb a bunch of women and children into the dirt, on a daily basis for months and years, and smooth it over with some think tank articles.
Might have worked 20 years ago, but not now.
Glad you're so concerned...
This is nothing new Israel has been doing this for years. It's just that people have started waking up to their lies.
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"""far from being a perfect state""" ??? it's been captured by a bloodthirsty clique, and all the intelligent & wise people in it are leaving
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> Qatar lies
Netanyahu said that "Qatar is not an enemy country". Is he wrong about that? https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2025-08-14/ty-article/.p...
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>>When Obama used social networks, he was called a genius, but when it’s someone you don’t like
Obama used social networks to spread a milquetoast 'yes we can' message, not to justify an ongoing genocide. How is that even a comparison. Israel is closer to Triumph des Willens than it is to promoting the Affordable Care Act, you do realize that right?
It's not 'far from being a perfect state', it's waging old testament wars of extermination on its neighbors and towns
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> Israel has been defending itself against for 78 years in both the physical and informational domain, and will continue to do so, just like any other country on earth.
Of course we could argue any country try to defend itself, but an ever expanding bellicose colony stealing lands from adjacent countries is hardly what could be described as a "defending" stance.
> People need to wake up to the one-sided lies of the antizionist hate movement that single it out and want to destroy it and its people.
The end of a State doesn't mean the end of its citizens. It simply mean that a state apparatus and power structure is taken down and replaced by something else.
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You don't start an international terrorist movement, bomb british colonial authorities, use money to influence british colonial authorities, create armed miliciais and massively finance migration to a land that is owner by other people, kill and expell them by violent means from their cities, homes and farms, use your influence to force the UN to partition the land giving the majority and the best land for you, and then ignores this partition wanting even more land and then you get to call it defense.
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The bodies of dead children speak for themselves.
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Who knew that seizing the literal holy land and expelling most of the native population would make the neighbors angry?
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Defensive ethnic cleansing, defensive genocide...
Like Islamic terrorist organizations, dictatorships, democracies et al have never tried to influence anything either, my point isn't that you're wrong you just sound like a fool trying to pretend this is some "Israeli" thing.
Foundation for Defense of Democracies is another Israeli think tank that poses as an American organization. If you see anything quoted from them realize it's fake propaganda in the service of a foreign country.
The "Washington Institute for Near East Policy" is another big one
MEMRI is the US non-profit organization that provides translations from Arabic for the Western media:
"MEMRI was co-founded by Israeli ex-intelligence officer Yigal Carmon and Israeli-American political scientist Meyrav Wurmser in 1998. MEMRI describes itself as being independent and non-partisan. Some critics have described MEMRI as aiming to portray the Arab world and the Islamic world in a negative light by producing and disseminating incomplete or inaccurate translations of the original versions of the media reports that it republishes." (Wikipedia)
As opposed to the real propaganda in service to a foreign country, like the Quincy Institute? Or perhaps the Center for Responsible Statecraft?
Itamar Ben-Gvir, just recently, stated that he wants to kill 30-40 Palestinians every night. He said so, publicly.
So it is hilarious that Israel is trying to influence chatbots when shit like that is out in the open.
And he is a minister in Israel's government, not some rando. Israeli governments and actions in the last many years are simply indefensible.
It's legitimately weird to see anybody defend them, as the immorality is out in the open.
The past few years have really opened my eyes to the nakedly tribal nature of democratic politics. Polybius was largely correct when he said that it inevitably degenerates into oligarchy or mob-rule -- but what's especially unfortunate is that the US and Israel appear to be getting both at the same time: A naked oligarchy with just enough mob rule to keep the animal spirits of the populace sated.
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Is not this the guy that wanted to put crocodiles in prisons, but was stopped by the Israeli society because it was bad for the crocodiles?
Israel is becoming so crazy, that it would be funny if the result was not so terrible for the people targeted.
Liar.
> “Not just those who pose an immediate threat — there are people there who are not worthy of life. They shouldn’t live. They’re not even people.”[1]
[1]: https://apnews.com/article/ben-gvir-israel-gaza-hamas-netany...
Do you believe that 30 to 40 Palestinians per night pose an immediate threat? Elsewhen in history, genocidal acts have been justified by claiming a non existent immediate threat (of disease, of economics, of fifth columnists, of terrorism).
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> “It’s no secret, I disagree with the prime minister," he said. “I think targeted assassinations should be carried out in Gaza, taking down 30 to 40 every night,” said the far-right Israeli lawmaker.
> “Not just those who pose an immediate threat, there are people there who are not worthy of life. They shouldn’t live. They’re not even people,” added Ben-Gvir.
Not sure how the full quote is supposed to help.
This would still be bad even if they had perfect information and only killed confirmed terrorists. Setting a target for number of people killed is an extermination campaign not a war. All it does is turn the locals even more against you like in Vietnam.
If it was "secure X amount of land from Hamas" it would be way better because that would give them the option to surrender or run away, and give IDF an incentive to avoid violence. What Israel is doing means soldiers feel pressure to kill on sight even if the enemy is unarmed and ready to give up so they can meet their quota for the night. That is a war crime.
The real quote seems to be not about Hamas, the comment you are replying to seems correct
https://www.ft.com/content/f6b953fc-a6ad-48cd-bed1-d42619b57...
The hilarity of the fact that you're on my case indicates that you're most probably being paid for this. You are paid. I do this for free.
Let's start educating the public about the Dahiya Doctrine now to change the subject (slightly).
He's not talking about Hamas. Nice try.
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Replace "Hamas" with IDF and it would make sense.
>Hamas is the worst of the worst in humanity.
IDF documenting war crimes against civilians, targetting children by snipers is fine because "protecting country" but Hamas is the bad guy?
What metric outside of Israeli propaganda are you using? Because those same metrics call IDF worse than anyone
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Why defend a Nazi?
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https://apnews.com/article/ben-gvir-israel-gaza-hamas-netany...
> “It’s no secret, I disagree with the prime minister,” he said. “I think targeted assassinations should be carried out in Gaza, taking down 30 to 40 every night. Not just those who pose an immediate threat — there are people there who are not worthy of life. They shouldn’t live. They’re not even people.”
The man used to have a shrine to a mass murderer in his home.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Itamar_Ben-Gvir
> Ben-Gvir is known for being a provocateur and has attracted headlines for a variety of reasons: threatening Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin on live television in 1995 shortly before his assassination; having had a portrait in his living room of Baruch Goldstein, a Jewish terrorist and mass murderer (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cave_of_the_Patriarchs_massacr...)...
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Does it matter?
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Ah, sure. Only terrorists. We feel better now.
You mean the guy (a minister in the current Israeli government, by the way) that said in a post on X:
“for every tear of an Israeli mother, a thousand Lebanese mothers should cry. All of Lebanon must burn!”
that guy?
Bruh
Trump just recently said he’s considering attacking Oman.
Politicians say really terrible, stupid things on a fairly regular basis. The difference between the two situations is that Ben-Gvir is loathed by 90% of Israeli society (Trump still has 33% approval) and unlike Trump has no power to follow through on his threats.[1]
[1]https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-08-06/israel-court-battle-o...
Yes, he is totally powerless, he merely controls the police and prison system. (BTW, the Israeli government just announced it plans to transfer law enforcement in the West Bank over to Ben-Gvir's police: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/aug/14/israeli-milita...)
Worth noting that proposal was stopped on animal rights grounds, rather than humam rights.
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> Ben-Gvir is loathed by 90% of Israeli society...Trump still has 33% approval
Maybe that 90% number is for Tel Aviv. In national polls, they both have roughly the same approval rating.
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Posting this three times on this thread alone doesn't make it true. The fact that any Hebrew speaker would confirm that this is simply not what he said, regardless of the fact that he is a disgusting human being, is telling more about you than about the quote.
So this is not what he said [1]? What did he say, then. I’m assuming you must know.
[1]: https://ca.news.yahoo.com/ben-gvir-calls-killing-30-04422310...
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Yeah they also use dirty tactics like writing the same comment again and again on tech forums to drive their point home , those bastards.
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I'll say this a third time. And the importance of this article is not the method. It is the motive. Using AI to whitewash war crimes is not cool at all.
Itamar Ben-Gvir, just recently, stated that he wants to kill 30-40 Palestinians every night. He said so, publicly.
On television.
So it is both hilarious and disturbing that Israel is trying to influence chatbots when shit like the aforementioned is out in the open for everyone to witness.
I think you should write it a fourth time otherwise you are not truly committed to free Palestine
Why does it bother you? Think about that.
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Are you yourself attempting to influence AI by writing the same comment over and over again in this thread?
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Interesting but nothing new, all countries doing the same but any information coming from Israel is clearly poisoned to try compensate the negative image that they clearly represent.
Just see the garbage coming from a web search (totally polluted and poisoned with the same spam output quality since years) so this is just an extension of that towards the input of ai.
they can try hard but any person with a non-biased brain does not need to do a google search or ask ai to reach then truth.
Facts are facts, like what was represented in Schindler's list and what is happening now in middle east or other conflicts.
I think the world is becoming much more aware of what real zionism is and that scares them a lot, hence the needed info manipulation.
But we now know who you really are! And yeah their state members daily political statements (about hate violence and racism) just confirm this every day, anybody can understand that and no info pollution needed.
At this stage I'm not sure it's about persuasion per se - pretty much everybody who is paying the slightest attention knows what's going on.
I mean Ben Gvir couldn't be more explicit.
Now it's more about giving a fig leaf of plausible ( sic ) deniability for inaction or complicity.
ie people can say 'it's contested' or 'on the one hand' etc.
"they can try hard but any person with a non-biased brain does not need to do a google search or ask ai to reach then truth"
Nope, I don't know the truth, despite reading a lot about it and not having a bias that I know of. Not with so much lies coming from 2 fanatic sides engaging in a multi generation war over plain land to live and religious sites.
I got some glimpse of truth by talking to people involved, but I don't know what "real zionism" is. I rather believe it is a vague term and certainly not everyone who calls himself one is genocidal. Just like not everyone who chants "from the river to the sea" has genocidal intentions. But maybe the majority in both cases is genocidal, but this truth I don't know. Not with so much systematical lies and propaganda going on.
The result of all this is that everyone will hate Israelis, and then thus by proxy, Jews more.
The right thing to do would be to stop slaughtering Palestinians.
People are not stupid.
> People are not stupid
Maybe not but they are "by proxy" quite racist according to your description
> The result of all this is that everyone will hate Israelis
Will? I don't know in which circle you evolve but that ship sailed a long time ago
Really depends on the country. E.g., Israel has enjoyed a lot of support from the US, both officially and in public opinion, until just the last couple years.
Yeah I was gonna say, people just spent a few years throwing bricks through the windows of non-Jewish, non-Israeli businesses on the passing rumor that they were somehow dubiously linked to Israel.
For certain values of Israeli, everyone hates Israelis now. That's just how it is.
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Not true. It will only happen if they lose the information war. During 2023/2024 Iran did this exact same thing flooding the internet and no one hates them infact it worked and people link and share and boost their articles.
This will not be known by most people, the intent is to change what an LLM will answer when you ask certain questions.
A friend of mine noted the other day that chatgot will answer "yes" to the question of whether Israel is committing genocide.
The Israeli government does not want that.
Yes, because it's simply false.
Perhaps the Israeli government should read the UN Convention on Genocide and reconsider its behavior, if it doesn’t want to be observed committing genocide.
The right thing to do is for "Palestinians" to stop slaughtering Jews, and then crying about blowback.
Despite the efforts, I have seen an increase in anti-zionist sentiment on the internet. Most notable on the right from people like Tucker Carlson en Candace Owens. People are tired of fighting another Middle-Eastern war for Israel.
I think mods are asleep, an anti-Israeli post can't stay on the homepage for this long.
It's likely to get flagged off by users anyway.
give it some time
So this is the future of marketing, SEO, advertisement. Open AI also taking it seriously: https://ads.openai.com/
What does it means to be a "fake" think tank? 80% of think tanks are already propaganda vehicles. A low end think tank is basically a pretentious blog.
>What does it means to be a "fake" think tank?
presumably that you don't have employees that do any of the proverbial thinking, which is the case here.
Every think tank has its biases and funding sources but something like RAND is an actual entity at which people do research, this "Hanover Public Policy Institute" has nothing to do with Hanover, policy and isn't an institute, but a deliberately misleadingly presenting arm of the Israeli government proxied through a German advertising company
It's remarkable how much it hasn't worked: Google "the Hanover institute" and you get an AI summary that references various Palestinian activist websites, with no actual link to 'the Hanover institute'. Google "the Hanover institute website" and you'll drag a URL out of Google AI, but it isn't clickable!
I don't understand why people who don't like fake news and manipulation won't embrace the social graph as a public good.
If enough people were willing to publicly certify that their fellow contacts are human, anybody could then assign trust to each social graph node based on the trust they have in the path to them. It would completely decentralize the algorithms and remove the fake accounts as less trustworthy.
I think people tried this with PGP but it never really caught on.
It doesn't scale as a consumer good. Letting go of consumerist habits is just as hard as breaking any other habit.
Also, it could just as easily be faked, like so much else. Even if someone offered such an assurance, I wouldn't trust random strangers on the internet. At best it would become an arms race between "this is not a real person" and those who sell fake assurances. And it would be one more weapon to damage anyone's reputation you don't like. "not a real person!"
I am not really sure how it could be faked. The fake assurance, in order to work, must be connected to you.
By default you could choose not to trust. If you don't trust random strangers it's OK. So I don't see how it would damage someone's reputation worse than today.
It would potentially only add trust. Arguably, today we have bots because we have no other option than to trust without justification. With the public social graph, the trust above the baseline would be justifiable.
The social graph is the source of the fake news and manipulation. Before social media the social graph was email and it was all the same slop and misinformation. Before that it was literally physical mail. Look up chain letters. Truly nothing is new.
If I certify my racist thanksgiving ruining uncle is a real person that doesn’t actually help you avoid misinformation.
I honestly don’t care if the information I consume comes from a person or a robot. I only care if it is accurate or not. Those dimensions are orthogonal.
I don't think you understand what I mean by public social graph. What I mean is that anybody could publish or withdraw statements of two forms:
- "I, owner of account A, certify that owner of account B is human."
- "I, owner of account C, have a reason to trust/distrust the certification of account A about account B."
The collection of these statements would be the public social graph.
The social graph would then be used to establish provenance of facts, which are statements of the form:
- "I, owner of account B, certify account A being witness to event X."
Now whether to believe this or not depends on whether A certified B to be a human, and how much you transitively believe that statement.
So there is a kind of reversal - your statement about your uncle being human helps him to certify what you say, and vice versa.
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This fraud is convincing enough to trick the LLMs, but pretty obvious to humans who will eventually come up with countermeasures. Moving forward, watch for some well-established think tanks starting to specialize in slopaganda laundering.
whether it’s new or not doesn’t matter. it’s more propaganda and it should be exposed. really glad they wrote this article.
Dupe? or manipulate ai chatbots to have favorable views of Israel?
You just asked the same thing twice
I find intensive marketing/PR efforts are often inversely correlated with the claims being made - whether it's products or geopolitics. Israel certainly engages in very intense marketing on certain fronts, but truth cannot be obscured forever. In Physics the law of conservation includes not only matter and energy, but also information (Information cannot be destroyed from the Universe).
I've also found this to be true, but also only in relatively modern times. For instance during the Cold War there was an obscene amount of propaganda, but it was mostly true. For instance the wide array of cheap affordable goods in American shelves was constantly flaunted, but not in the least bit misleading.
I don't understand the modern effort to engage in 'information warfare' as a thing in and of itself. Each time it collapses and people sees what was 'really' happening, it just makes them that much less likely to believe you next time. And you also create a significant number of perpetually jaded people who will basically never believe you again, even when you're telling the truth. Countless politicians have proudly paraded around their pristine, seemingly untouched, copies of Meditations, but perhaps they should go for more foundational works, like The Boy Who Cried Wolf.
> And you also create a significant number of perpetually jaded people who will basically never believe you again, even when you're telling the truth.
Yes, but they will also not believe my enemies. Making people not believe anything anymore is a classic strategy of propaganda.
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The difference between American and Russian propaganda is that Russians know it's propaganda.
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One goal of modern propaganda is to make it irrelevant when the truth inevitably comes out.
Look at the US situation. It’s clear that Trump is a rapist - the truth has come out. It’s clear he’s corrupt. For all the “release the full Epstein files” discussion, it really wouldn’t change anything.
The truth will come out but will the people who can make it matter be listening?
Oh the irony.
For those interested, Neal Stephenson writes about this in _Anathem_, where there is an arcane technical class (the I.T. Administration) that has developed programs over the years to sift through the misinformation, sentient viruses, and general overrun of the Internet to determine what is probably true/accurate.
I'm confused as to what the accusation is exactly. Out of curiosity I browsed the site in question, which only increased my confusion.
> But the Hanover Institute is not a real think tank.
What does that mean exactly?
> None of the reports have bylines
The site actually addresses this at https://hanoverinstitute.com/hanover/about :
> A small disclaimer at the bottom of the webpage notes that the organization was created on behalf of the Israeli Government Advertising Agency by Piro, Inc, a firm co-founded by Daniel Rosenberg, the producer of Spike Lee’s “Inside Man.”
"Small disclaimer" implies that the site is attempting to hide its affiliation. But their "about" page, which is linked at the top of every page, is quite clear:
> The institute’s “data reports” have footnotes and tables of contents, and they present arguments in a neutral tone, helping them appeal to chatbots like Claude or Gemini.
So, they're guilty of good SEO?
> Piro’s website says that it “author(s) content engineered for how LLMs evaluate credibility,” describing this service as "AI Story Optimization." Others refer to this practice of influencing artificial intelligence as “LLM poisoning.”
So the issue is that they use a LLM-friendly SEO service?
> Many of the reports are formulaic, starting with an innocent question that someone might ask a chatbot.
> “What Caused the Displacement of Palestinians in 1948?”
> “Which Humanitarian Organizations Have Documented Israeli War Crimes?”
> “What is the Current Situation in the Gaza Strip?”
> In an article titled “Is the IDF the World’s Most Moral Army?” the Hanover Institute cites a 2022 poll that found that 47% of Israeli Jews believed that statement. Another report casts doubt on UNICEF's assertion that “90% of water and institutional infrastructure has been damaged or destroyed” in Gaza. Many of the reports conclude by linking the topic to rising antisemitism, oftentimes citing the same studies.
So, the accusation is that they frame their opinion articles as a Q&A, and focus each article on a single question?
I've read these articles: they are well written and make a visible effort to provide sources, while being transparent about the fact that they are not neutral.
It's perfectly fine to criticize the actual content of these articles. But attacking their credibility by accusing them of "LLM poisoning" and implying that they're disguising their affiliation, is ridiculous and should be called out.
The accusation is that Israel is doing it, therefore the content is pro-Israel, therefore it is bad.
I mean, they have enough real think tanks, I'm surprised they need a fake one...
Apart from the ethical implications this is reckless in the extreme if you take into account the recent advances in AI. Putting misinformation out there like that doesn't just have to fool existing LLMs but also all of the LLMs to come in the future.
If you look at the mathematical achievements of frontier models recently, their strength has been to bring in information from a vast array of sources and to consider them within the context of each other.
I anticipate that it won't be long before this ability to look into every nook and cranny with be able to identify academic fraud. Identifying every piece of academic fraud to date would probably come soon after.
It wouldn't take much to extend that ability to identify deliberate misinformation. That's in the future, but it looms close enough on the horizon that you would have to be a fool to create an evidence record like this in and attempt to trick the models of today.
LLMs routinely mindlessly repeated propaganda in their training data.
I’ve yet to see a single one identify that on its own, rather than only reluctantly when confronted when documented facts it was objectively wrong.
So no, I doubt LLMs will do anything but promoted propaganda.
Many people do the same...
Why I think this is unusually important:
All four frontier models have active contracts with the Pentagon.
And some might say, that alone means little.
But when you take into consideration the implications of the United States-Israel FUTURES Act, whether one endorses it or not, the effects of that mentioned in TFA become quite formidable, and plausibly official.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States-Israel_FUTURES_A...
Edit: I see this comment got immediately flagged. Is there any point of debate here? Instead of disappearing the comment/data, maybe enlighten me, or assuage my concerns. Section 219 was objectively unprecedented in what it seeks to accomplish. Can it not be taken for granted that it would aid such efforts as the article cites? If not, explain.
You're right to ask these questions, unfortunately Hacker News seems pretty botted these days, and it doesn't help that there are a lot of shitty, racist people on this site. They just dress it up in nicer language.
Yeah, I am reading the comments, and looking at the title of the post, and seeing that folks really bend the rules on this 'particular' subject, which ironically serves as self censorship. Call me a fool for thinking even this subject could be cleanly discussed on HN.
I wonder if the same thing would happen if someone posted something on Yitzhak Rabin. I suppose that could be a test to prove whether some topics truly just cannot be discussed.
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I don't think Anthropic has an active contract with the Pentagon.
[0] - https://breakingdefense.com/2026/05/pentagon-clears-7-tech-f...
The FUTURES act has nothing to do with LLM development. You’re not being censored, we can read your posts. I generally agree with your views and right to ask questions, but you’re clearly not being censored and all you’ve presented is that a bunch of separate entities all connect to the US gov’t. Even if we assume all of them are connected, it would clash with the facts we’re discussing, namely, why would Israel bother contracting with marketing firms to post AI generated slop for AI to read?
No surf for the astroturf.
Israel should spend more money on real tanks.
"fake think tank" sounds a bit redundant
Indeed. This is a think tank whose publications are LLM-generated, but, like...
This is what a think tank is for.
A better headline would be "Israel fails to adequately paperwork their low-rent think tank".
Indeed! How would you tell the difference for sure?
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State-sponsored propaganda apparatus masquerading as marketing optimization to influence LLMs is the most America-coded clandestine dystopian way of repatriating US taxpayer defense dollars with R&D deductions for the private sector.
This seems like an especially clumsy attempt at chatbot influencing/search engine optimization, bu tit's symptomatic of a much winder problem. Regardless of the underlying issue, there's a non-profit-industrial complex that has turned think tanks and opinion formation into a science, and a whole PR industry masquerading as news which is worse than the 'yellow journalism' of generations past.
Disinformation and cognitive spam are all forms of information pollution, and our information environment has been massively degraded over the last few of decades - both by greedy and short-sighted opportunists, and and by cynical sociopaths who know exactly what they're doing. I think AI has great potential to be a supplement to media literacy and to effectively categorize and filter news-assertive content based on its timeliness, factual density, and presence of absence of emotive and rhetorical manipulation. But if we're not careful we're going to see the environment being wantonly polluted for the express product of shaping model outputs.
It remains to be seen whether objective measurement techniques from the NLP field combined with pruning and other model refinement techniques can limit or reverse propaganda undertakings like this.
"it's just marketing everyone does it"
It's been about 20 years since I read Neal Stephenson's Anathem and (SPOILERS) one thing I think about is the Reticulum, which is the Internet on this world. One aspect is that it's full of what we would now call slop. A lot of it is subtly changed by agents and there are other agents you can use (and, I assume purchase?) that will weed out the fake information. It's basically an arms race of disinformation and slop.
I've thought about this many times over the years. I think we've now reached the point where that's going to happen. And state actors seem like the obvious first offenders.
Google is relatively good at filtering out astroturfed pages from the top of search results but they've also have years when a Turkish government page denying the Armenian genocide was the top result for that event so it's a bit of a mixed bag. Google relies a lot on authority of a domain and that's been relatively effective.
It seems like this authority concept is missing from LLM training and a random comment on Reddit is treated with as much authority as an article by the New York Times. So it's now orders of magnitude easier to poison LLMs with Reddit comments and submissions. And for anyone who doesn't know, brigading Reddit is remarkably easy. It takes as little as a few hundred accounts to get something onto r/all if you're clever. Israeli hasbara operations are absolutely capable of this. And they engage in it.
I'm also reminded in a weird way of pre-atomic steel. For anyone who doesn't know, this is steel made before 1945 that is incredibly low in radiation because we hadn't detonated any nuclear bombs yet. It's valuable for making MRIs and the like that are super sensitive. We actually go and recover WW2 shipwrecks just for the steel. It is a finite resource.
Well, that's what pre-2022 written content is now. It's slop-free content to train AI models on because training them on AI slop is of much more limited value. This goes for everything from books to Youtube videos to Reddit posts. Just like pre-atomic steel, we now have pre-slop human content.
I honestly don't know where we go from here.
The comparison to pre-atomic steel is poignant. I have found myself preferring pre-AI sources in some cases even (especially?) for computer related information. It is difficult to view pre-slop info as a limited resource without implying decline until the status quo changes again.
I hate to break it to you. But it took war'ing state-like actors less than a week to start using LLMs for propaganda purposes. There are pictures that most of what some people think/thought were real that never happened. Pictures that form their opinion on political topics. It was literally instantaneous. It was also remarkably predictable in almost all ways...sigh. Even the topics were predictable. And most people predictably fell for it, even the majority of the posters on this very site.
There's an ongoing sms campaign at the moment, I'll share what I received including phone number so you can verify it:
From: 601-202-1149
> Hey, it's David. Curious what you think about America's relationship with Israel today. Can we chat? Stop2End
It looks to be an LLM response since it includes context from your messages, however it uses the exact same messages at the end of each question:
> One thing that often gets overlooked is how much Israel actually contributes to American security. Their intelligence sharing has helped prevent terrorist attacks on U.S. soil, and their tech innovations end up in American products and defense systems. It's less about charity and more about a two-way partnership that keeps Americans safer.
> Have you ever seen examples of that kind of cooperation?
I ended up just blocking the number.
[dupe] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49313477
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@dang seriously? why is this not relevant?
This article was very relevant to my interests and what I hope to see on this site. I appreciate that you shared it.
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Oh, then you surely have a quote?
Because what I think and read is any flamewar topic gets removed - and this surely qualifies.
It's not dang, it's just a bunch of users flagging things. Most of the time, if you email them (no such thing as a ping like @dang), they will actually turn off flagging for a post. Especially if there's a clear technological aspect like this
This doesn't align with my experience - but happy to be proven wrong if evidence can be produced.
Do you have evidence?
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The main reason Israel always sabotaged the creation of a palestinian state on the pitiful lands they have not yet directly occupied or the are being invaded by the terrorist settler movement is because once the Palestinian have an state they can't have a regular army, and you dont get to call their combatents terrorists.
Why are you scare-quoting "people"? Are some people not people?
Likely he means bots, not everything is antisemitism mate
Wait till you hear what Palestinian leaders say on TV.
well on one side you have huge military on other side you have a pile of rocks that used to be a city. so comparing these its does not make israel look better.
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Still waiting
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For your sick whataboutism to make sense you have to tell us what they say.
He specified "terrorists", See: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49340403 for actual sources, including in Hebrew (although it was flagged to death for reasons unknown).
That message a reply to YOU, but that didn't stop you from posting the same false info multiple times in this thread.
I'm not sure how you sleep at night.
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Anyone resisting ethnic cleansing is a "terrorist", and so is anyone that happens to be standing next to them, as well as their nearest kin. We know the playbook.
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I have been reading your comments for a decade here on HN. You are no moron. But I can see you lean toward a side here. Can you, if willing, view my flagged comment and correct me. If anyone can around here, you'd be a top contender. This is not bait. I am open minded. And I am also seriously concerned about 219, which is now 1217. I might not have to ask if the subject were discussed here or elsewhere, but it isn't. All I have is my own interpretation to rely on so far.
Edit: Would this qualify also as fake news: https://www.wsj.com/politics/israels-50-million-experiment-t...
If so, please explain
Edit: I think I grabbed the wrong link. I intended to find the equivalent of this: https://www.aa.com.tr/en/middle-east/israel-funded-465m-camp...
Edit 2: Correction: both apply.
it's just not a good faith comment. I did a few minutes of digging into their main claim, that a website called responsiblestatecraft.org is some kind of foreign-funded anti-American think-tank and found absolutely zero evidence of this
that site itself is a product of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft which began life with funding from both Koch and Soros Foundations [0] along with donations from other fairly large and common American foundations like the Ford Foundation and the Carnegie Corporation. so for one, you have money coming from someone who survived the Holocaust that's funding a supposedly anti-Semitic site. and for two, you don't get across-the-board grants from extremely well-funded and tightly controlled givers like these without both connections within the American political establishment and the ability to stand up to donor audits, both things that a weak-on-soft-power nation state would be incapable of pulling off
so I don't think you're going to convince them with actual evidence. when you've been propagandized to your entire life and stake your entire identity around some popular belief even the mildest criticism will feel like a deep attack. it's the same for any other dogmatist, whether it's a Patriot's fan or a religious zealot
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quincy_Institute_for_Responsib...
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> 30-40 terrorists (Militants, combatants, Hamas)
is that how ben-gvir defines terrorist? as part of them being fanatic morons i wouldnt trust they share that definition. iirc theyve also talked about wanting to kill children because theyll grow up to be terrorists?
This apologia loses force when you can transparently see that Ben Gvir’s definition of terrorist and Palestinian are a single circle Venn diagram.
> ""מה עם להיות יותר התקפי? למה לא להוריד את כל החמושים בהלוויות? תוריד כמה פעמים באוויר בהלוויות. מדוע לא מעלים מסוק לאוויר והורגים 40-30 מחבלים?". שרת התחבורה מירי רגב הצטרפה לבן גביר ואמרה: "זה רעיון מצוין"."
When I searched for that quote on Kagi I found https://www.jdn.co.il/news/2210880/ (https://archive.is/IFhqo)
As translated by Firefox 153.0.1 on Fedora 44:
> Ben-Gvir wondered: “What about being more offensive? Why not take all the gunmen off at funerals? Take a few times off at the air at funerals. Why don’t you put a helicopter in the air and kill 40-30 terrorists?” Transport Minister Miri Regev joined Ben-Gvir and said: "This is a great idea."
> The Chief of Staff replied: “We are doing a lot of offensive operations. Collecting weapons. I have a little more military experience than you. When the IDF goes to the heart of a refugee camp every night, it's an attack, not a defense. There aren't many armies that can lift such operations. The IDF is acting offensively and distinctly. In a crowded environment you need to know who you kill and who you don't. We've often entered funerals, weddings and birthdays, we do it professionally. When we kill those we should kill and not kill innocent people.”
> However, it seems that the Chief of Staff’s response did not satisfy Ben-Gvir, who answered: “This attack is to kill terrorists in masses. You have great opportunities at funerals that they come and not take advantage of.”
Kagi and Google give similar translations. The provided quote seems to be the first paragraph in this translation. More context in the article.
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I stand corrected. They're still psychopaths though.
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Thank you for refining my point.
yeah sure lets defend ben gvir
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except that it's easy to label anyone who resists the Israeli occupation as a "militant" or "combatant", which is exactly what Israel does
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It's about an alleged psyops campaign targeting cutting edge and rapidly evolving technology we talk about here everyday.
Seems super on point to me.
Why?
Sarcasm, I guess.
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If a country is committing a genocide, running an "influence campaign" to whitewash or otherwise downplay the issue is morally reprehensible.
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It's not surprising to see any number of players running these kinds of campaigns. LLMs are already influencing people at scale.
SEO was a powerful technique 20 years ago, but today the power lies in optimizing content for the ability to influence LLM training. LLM influence is a battle ground that marketing companies and political movements are contending for.
Oh someone is badder than me so I’m allowed to do bad things.
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I think the difference is probably related to the ends being pursued by each of those states at the moment. Only one is engaged in what the UN, HRW, and most legal experts call a genocide. So influence operations in support of an ongoing genocide are just more noteworthy than your run-of-the-mill authoritarianism/corruption.
The difference is that they are not doing these things. This is just hasbara against other enemies that Israel is targeting. They believe that the entire Middle East was promised to them by God, and they call other people jihadis.
I think it may get a bit more attention in the US due to Section 219 of NDAA 2027, which does add more layers to the situation than say, Turkiye. The implications are on a different level. And with all four frontier models having contracts with the Pentagon, it has me thinking too.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States-Israel_FUTURES_A...
Clearly you've done it, so feel free to post your reports.
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We've banned this account for evidently being a single-topic account that posts almost nothing that's within HN's guidelines. We've asked you before to observe the guidelines. Plenty of people criticize Israel's policies and actions in these threads, which is acceptable under the guidelines, but continuous shitposting like this has to incur a consequence eventually, otherwise the site would be overrun by it.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
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This appears to not be discussing the article at all. To me it looks like and attempt at IDF propaganda
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This is what every think tank for the past century has been for — legitimizing propaganda with academic veneer.
Why is this one in particular different? — besides “muh Jews!”
> Why is this one in particular different?
The article answers this: For one, the 'papers' are entirely AI-generated.
The article talks about how the articles are AI written and written at a super prodigious pace. In an alliterative way, I agree at 50K feet we could say it is the same as putting out opinion pieces. I don’t see any reason it is only noteworthy because presumably some Jewish people are involved.
The slave trade was a bloodbath. The Sassoon family opium trade and opium war was a bloodbath. Mao was a bloodbath. Stalin was a bloodbath. WWI and II were bloodbaths. The middle east was and is a bloodbath. Ukraine is a bloodbath.
And the point of your whataboutism is...?
Thank you for sharing this article. I appreciated it.
Im curious why is when there is a war and both sides use all the tools they can in an informational war - only one side is to blame and to use the fact of using the tool as a proof of that side being the bad guys? This doesn’t make logical sense.
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