How Were Chatbots Used to Manipulate Public Perception During the Pandemic?
The Technology Wars, Part 1
Do we even know who we're chatting with on the internet?
What proportion of tweets are simply bots training on the human signal stream while pushing political or corporate agendas?
Igor Chudov caught wind of an article published in Nature about the use of chatbots for pushing vaccination during the experimental mass transfection campaign.
Here is what I would like to add to the conversation…
Augmentation, Not A.I.
Sure, A.I. chatbots have become good enough to fool a portion of audiences—at least for short durations. The 10% of the time I choose to engage with them on Telegram, I usually ask silly questions like what color underwear turns a cyborg on.
On a more serious note, I have a theory about a second way in which chatbots were used during the Pandemic. I've shared it privately with some friends, and some people in the medical authoritarianism resistance circles like J.J. Couey and Bret Weinstein.
The idea is this: augmentation of experts or other smart people by chatbots with good large language models (LLMs) can elevate their knowledge base (assuming the knowledge base they work with is good). But here is the worrying part: chatbots can elevate the appearance of the level of expertise of the expert regardless of whether or not the information is correct!
Even worse, the effect can be more powerful in groups. Suppose that some chatbot was distributed, unknown to the public, to a few thousand willing influencers. The result could be,
The steering of the influencers with biased, manipulative, or fabricated (dis)information.
The effect on the public would be like viewing the appearance of consensus among experts. To many, this is an even more powerful form of parasocial dunbar hacking.
An implicit Asch conformity experiment on physicians and scientists not otherwise engaged in the primary conversation, reducing the chance that new opposition confidantes might step in to sort the public's Asch conformity experiment out.
Honestly, I believe that this is what I saw when I stepped into social media forums and discussions with determined vaccine partisan physicians on Clubhouse. In fact, it was that wall of unnatural certainty that led me to start analyzing the Our World in Data COVID numbers to see that more vaccination meant more disease and death (by COVID), and that six nations did worse after vaccination than before (at least through the start of November 2021 when I was tracking those statistics weekly).
Do you have any knowledge of, or observations suggesting the use of chatbots to assist influencers?
I love the idea of parasocial Dunbar hacking where geographically far removed 'expert' actors take the place of tribal elders as figures of authority. I think you are spot on there and it's why TV/media and the internet have been so destructive in terms of cultivating brainwashed groupthink among the masses. You may be right that LLMs have been used to magnify this effect and suck in even more hapless victims during Covid mania, but I've been observing operational groupthink among 'experts' on climate change for years, which tends to crowd out any genuine expert opposition to the chosen narrative, which is where attribution substitution has played and does play a major role, i.e. 'climate change' is constantly substituted as the preferred attribution for a whole series of complex events and those who objected on the basis that these were complex events which could have alternative explanations were shouted down and othered as 'climate deniers'. They didn't need AI chatbots to do that.
Things might be changing though. The geographically remote 'experts' on climate change are complaining bitterly that the public are 'hating' on them by aggressively questioning their dogma on sites like Twitter.
Back in 2020 when I was killing it on Twitter, sometimes there would be sudden swarms of hostile comments in my replies (particularly on my best tweets). And then I started clicking on their profiles and they all had less than 10 followers and odd usernames. My guess is that those were mostly Pharma bots but I have no way of proving that.