Comment by locknitpicker

16 hours ago

> And it's all because of ads.

Not really. A while ago there was a news piece stating that Israel was behind a series of fake think-tanks with very accessible websites which were created with the express purpose of feeding AI agents with alternative facts aligned with their foreign policy.

If anyone has the link at hand, please post it.

14 comments

locknitpicker

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xenadu02  13 hours ago

Some of us have been predicting this for a while.

People with an axe to grind or states with an agenda are already devoting tremendous effort toward affecting LLM models and it is very difficult to determine real from astroturf for humans let alone an LLM trying to train.

Much like PageRank now that the cat's out of the bag all the current approaches may prove to be useless in the long run.

kspacewalk2  11 hours ago

If by "not really" you mean it's not all because of ads, some governments dabble in it too, you're right. But it's still overwhelmingly because of ads.

  • csallen  9 hours ago

    It's just incentives in general. Humans are self-motivated creatures, and in the absence of meaningful consequences they'll often do what they're incentivized to do, even if it harms others.

    The internet is uniquely devoid of consequences (esp. reputational consequences, social faux pas, etc.) and makes effort expenditure minimal. So you get lots of bad behavior.

    I think "ads vs not ads" is maybe the wrong way to model it. Ultimately people are just doing what benefits themselves across every dimension possible.

  • trimethylpurine  4 hours ago

    Campaign funding and lobbying being legal activities implies that governments participate in advertising. I can't separate those.

    But you're right, I think that's what they meant.

bjt  15 hours ago

There are incentives other than marketing, but I doubt the SEO company referred to by the ancestor comment is planning to do lots of business in the political propaganda space.