A.I. Is Starting to Wear Down Democracy | Content generated by artificial intelligence has become a factor in elections around the world. Most of it is bad, misleading voters & discrediting elections
nytimes.com
Of course it is.
Fascists can create the illusions they need to convince morons whilst at the same time making them distrust reality ("nah that's AI")
A lot of people are going to suffer
Yeah a lot of propaganda isn’t about any one agenda it’s about people losing their bearings on reality, cutting people loose to create chaos
Fascists can create
We really need to get over this idea that it's only "fascists" using AI to push their ideology. In 2025 you'd be hard pressed to find any National Government, Political Party, or Ideologically based group who is not using a metric fuckton of AI bots to distribute AIGen content in an attempt to sway elections and opinions. The IPIE report on this makes it quite plain that at least 80% of elections worldwide had problems with this in 2024.
At this point blaming this solely on "Fascists" is wilful blindness and a clear indicator that someone is either living in a bubble of single-sided information or is an ideologue themselves.
Did I say "only"?
Fascists are the most dangerous and frankly, alarmingly flooding the internet with their shit right now
"Magnitudes" is a borderline dangerous understatement of the difference in their output versus any other corner of political thought.
Hyper targeted advertising on the internet means you categorically will not be seeing anything close to the worst of it.
I wish you were right. I don't mind governments and political parties who aren't fascist. Democratic socialists and responsible environmentalists can AI-pump their ideology all they like and it's not going to do much harm to civilization. But if they are doing it at all, they're not doing it anywhere near the level that fascists and kleptocrats are. The latter benefit from radical change, and they are using AI to achieve that.
Atoada so. I fuckin atoadaso.
Yea so let's alienate the left against it while the right embraces it. Fucking brilliant guys. Or or or maybe let's keep spreading reasons the left should hate instead of embrace it so that we allow laws which leave it absolutely gutless for us but still has all the power and features for them to use against us. Then we can get more content from starving artist charging $100 monthly patrons to their Garfield clone webcomic while the right keep winning public opinion and elections and taking away our rights.
Let's see how that plays out cotton.
Idk about this. I think the main issue is social media and filter bubbles. Generative AI contributes, but enough fakes news is there anyways. People will also use real riot videos from 4 years ago and claim that's the LA riots. The Russian troll farms can do this with or without AI. Trump, too. They'll just come up with drinking bleach is good with their own brains.
I don't want to refute this. Generative AI accelerates it immensely and makes it easier and way more. But mind that the core of the problem is society, education and most of all social media.
Also this isn't exactly new, we had Cambridge Analytica since 2014 or something. And manipulating elections and politics by technology is even older than that.
Maybe people need to learn to not suck as bad, check their sources, ask questions like how do I know this is true?
Basic shit we should have learned long before we reach adulthood? 🤷
The NUMBER FUCKING 1 RULE when we first got online. That all the normals repeated over and over and over. Then the se ond they get social media all that shit was flushed like a morning turd.
Oh wow! The incredibly easy and obvious prediction has come true?!
Skynet won. This is Judgement day sans nukes (so far).
It is clear. AI is poison and pollution.
but...but... lemmy is far too small for such companies paid to post these things to go after. it would cost too much more for them to just type in a few more urls to post to, so it's ok, there's none on lemmy.
but...but... reddit is far too big for such companies to go after, they wouldn't dare. reddit admins/mods would catch it and block the users.
but...but... facebook wouldn't have such content because meta has so much money they can build like reverse AI that would find it and they'd be able to automatically detect it and remove it.
I read a scifi book where this was a plot line. I think everyone just distrusted whatever they read online eventually. Time to touch grass?
Liberal democracy was always a race of who could buy the biggest megaphone. Now they are worried that AI is making it even easier to fling shit and spin lies. Nothing however breaks because of AI, it was all about as dysfunctional as it could get before. What NYT and other legacy media is mostly worried about is that with AI psyops and fake news is becoming more and more democratized instead of an expensive top-down ordeal and for making harder for anybody to trust anything anymore, a trust that they relied on to control the narrative.
Nothing however breaks because of AI
The trajectory is the same, but AI put more gas in the tank in a machine that one might have assumed had reached its limits a decade ago when outsourcing had played itself out.
What NYT and other legacy media is mostly worried about is that with AI psyops and fake news is becoming more and more democratized instead of an expensive top-down ordeal and for making harder for anybody to trust anything anymore, a trust that they relied on to control the narrative.
I think you've got it a bit backwards. The NYT operates as a paper of record in large part because it emits a signal that echoes through downstream media. And that stems from the general trust the paper has cultivated (undeserved trust, but welcome to the dictatorship of the bourgeois, folks).
The implementation of AI as a system of record is replacing the NYT as a trustworthy source, in part because the NYT has finally degraded its own credibility. And in part because why would I go fight with a bunch of paywalls and pop-ups and ad banners on the NYT when I can (seemingly) get the same information from a nice clean OpenAI / Gemini / Deepseek prompt.
The expense of setting up a system of record is still enormous. The catch is that the AI companies have more money to propagandize their own reputation. Meanwhile, the NYT and the WaPo and the cable news channels have been suffocating in comparative obscurity when they weren't outright touting AI venues as alternatives to themselves.
News isn't being democratized. Its as horded as ever. These older outlets have simply become vectors to send people to the new and far more efficient Consent Manufacturing Machines.
Don't blame AI for human failings. This is on humans, not machines.
Guns don't kill people—people kill people!
How I'm reading your comment.
Here me out: life is entropy in action, actively breaking down and crumbling through time. Well, I've thought for a couple of years now that AI will help enshittify everything around it, and be forced into everything by the evil %1, and thus truly hasten the fall of civilization in tandem with global warming. Ergo, it can be thought of as a further tool to hasten the extinction (entropy!) of all human life.
The interesting thing though, is that technological life continuing leads to more entropy faster, not slower.
Hmm yes, you make a very good point here!
oh my goodness. who could have seen this coming.
its too bad half the population is borderline mentally removed and even the majority of the other half think theyre immune to propaganda and too smart to fall for disinformation.
Let AI run the government.
Given its current state, this is a singularly bad idea.
palantir enters the chatroom
Thanks for your input, AM