This is no different than Chatgpt picking up a RadioFree* think piece in the grand scheme.

... well that's one thing that's new.

The other thing that's new (and more structurally relevant, since obviously not all LLMs do what you describe) is the dramatic reduction in cost affiliated with this strategy.

It's (literally) unbelievable that this many allegedly sophisticated people on HN have no concept of cost and what dramatic cost reductions can achieve.

There's also the other side of it, poisoning the AIs... https://www.newsguardtech.com/special-reports/moscow-based-g...

"Massive amounts of Russian propaganda — 3,600,000 articles in 2024 — are now incorporated in the outputs of Western AI systems, infecting their responses with false claims and propaganda."

in 2024.. hopefully filters when training have gotten better, but maybe not..

I don't think it is a verification problem. It wasn't like before in the days of controlled media and radio there wasn't a narrative to push, it's just that most people didnt have any awareness of alternatives. Nowadays people are more aware of alternative viewpoints or perspectives. The solution isn't to try and force one approved source of truth, but to just assume everyone is trying to push their version of the truth and examine it critically.

My understanding is that this is the way France operates where you assume all the media is hostile and you view it all critically. In America this is a bit of a shock because for a long time we had trusted arbiters of truth and now that they are less trusted we've been trying to look for alternatives rather realizing it should all be examined critically.

Been happening forever, PR departments plant news stories all the time. They just need a few willing reporters/writers to get something published to start the ball rolling.

I thought I remembered it being called "submarining" but that seems to be something else. I also thought I remembered Joel Spolsky writing about it but can't find it now.

"Journalism" hasn't worked for decades. It's all nepo-baby emo diaries, subsidy milking and clickbait farming these days.

It's quite old now, but check out the book "Trust me, I'm lying" by Ryan Holiday. Talks about how he did this as part of a marketing strategy when he was working at (IIRC) American Apparel, among other places. And how easy/often it happens in politics. Keep in mind the book is almost 15 years old, and talking about things that even at that point were what he'd done in a previous life/career.

Yeah, and it’s not just obscure outlets, you can do this for big magazines people here read for the right price

This wasn't in newspapers, this was only in marginal publications that take anything, such as Daily Kos, Middle East Monitor, and apparently the "Port St. Joe Star, a tiny Florida weekly newspaper."

Other than those, it was literally Medium and social media.

What you can do is write a polished opinion piece and tell one of your assets, or pay some politician, to publish it as an OpEd in outlets like the WaPo and NYT. Or you can get nobodies who know nothing to publish similar articles to each other in Wired, the International Business Times, and Forbes (either by "leaking" to them or because they're on your payroll), then get politicians to mention those articles in Congress and to write furious letters to WaPo and NYT accusing them of covering this story up - and then they'll write your propaganda themselves.

You seem to presume that the media owners are interested in critiquing and debating with submissions, rather than just selecting whatever fits their narrative.

Need to take into account how belief and human brains work. Once human brains become locked on to something ideologically, similar to religion, its not the quality of the evidence or argument that changes minds. To an extent we're designed this way to keep the world moving, as the natural order of things is relatively indifferent to suffering. You can indeed flood segments of the world with disinformation, and by the time you move to refute it, its roots are set and actions in motion.

I don't really know what the best approach is to it, but I don't think a simple hands off, engage with the argument as such, is a winning strategy. I don't really like the alternatives any better.

You can fool some of the people, all of the time. Attempting censorship to stop that isn't worth it.

I kind of had the same take. If an LLM spits out legitimate arguments and they get published, i mean...

How does open weights address the issue of nation states injecting covert propaganda into another nation's public discourse?

One can only imagine how much of the news is just dictated by US intelligence. Social media too- remember the Elgin AirForce base being revealed as the top most Reddit addicted city?

Edit: Resolved now it was on my end. > fyi not working for me

It’s news because it still needs to be called out. Not everyone recognizes AI-generated content, but even if everyone did, calling it out serves a real social purpose.

Why does it have to be an adversarial country? Why does it have to be a country at all? Couldn’t it be the mayor of some town? Or a PR team at a fast food franchise group? Or one of SBF’s polycule members?

The notion we only see this news when it is calling out a country with which the federal government is in conflict makes me question to veracity and intent of the article itself, more than the content of it.

This is classic FUD, Fear Uncertainty and Doubt.

It’s designed to make the reader question which articles they have read recently that are Iranian propaganda, and sow doubt about future articles that seem to benefit Iran.

This amount of FUD always seems to increase around election time…

Drew Curtis figured this out in 2007 and even wrote a book about it.

Just because something is true doesn't mean it's not propaganda. Propaganda is not defined by how true or false it is. https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/propaganda

Much of modern internet content is far worse than cable advertising in the 90s. I remember when I was a kid; I'd aggressively mute the commercials because I hated the idea that someone was attempting to influence me. The modern internet is orders of magnitude worse buy nearly any measure. The nastiest, most outrageous content is plastered on every wall. Every single person has an angle. Every bit of content meant to pull you in one direction or another, and given the addictiveness of novelty and powerful emotions, we keep coming back for more. It's an absolute disaster we don't know how to walk away from.

>95%???

That low?

In all honesty, given the volume of comments, posts and articles that bots can generate in a given time period? I mean it’s gotta be several orders of magnitude higher than what humans can generate.

And then you factor in the fact that even most of the humans are astroturfing..

The percentage of influence campaigns we interact with has just gotta be really high.

It didn’t generate a link (sources) when it claimed it was in stock

Did you consider that the website made it up and fed it to ChatGPT?

It sounds like a bundle of very common SEO tricks combined with the differential between your human user agent’s visit.

Perhaps ChatGPT only showed you what the nursery told it about.

This phenomenon is not unique to LLM. If you telephone a store, chances are that the salesman who answers the phone will tell you only what you want to hear. They don’t even strictly need to lie. The store only wins if you drive there and walk in the door. Why should they discourage you from doing that very thing?

This concept was driven home to me at the dry cleaners. Why should a dry cleaner stop work and answer the phone, only to tell a customer that their batch isn’t ready? They just got taken off-task for a non-revenue interaction. It doesn’t matter, because even if the customer’s batch is ready, they aren’t there to pay and pick it up!

Not being able to trust your tools is certainly dystopian...

It seems that it generated a page with a plausible answer for a very long tail subject for which the random part of the generation could become prominent. We used to say that it hallucinated the answer. Another term is confabulation.

If only the nursery had a MCP server /s

Only since Bezos. I used to actually pay for WaPo pre-bezos. It was fine for a while and then he started clearly messing with editorial decisions and I bailed. It's now a garbage source.

It also dies in the darkness of a takeover by billionaire with an agenda.