52 Comments

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.

Expand full comment
author

"Oh no, people realized the connection between my dogma and policy, so they're asking questions now!"

Said no real scientist, ever.

Expand full comment

You come across the Great Crested Scientist on social media all the time - you can tell them by their magnificent plumage. Count yourself lucky if you manage to come across the Lesser Spotted real scientist though.

Expand full comment

The experts class are about to become a new incorporation to the victim industry. In the future, insults like "racist" and "homophobic" will be thrown at anyone who disgrees with the experts.

Expand full comment

In the future? That's in full tilt right.

Expand full comment
Jun 3, 2023·edited Jun 3, 2023

I have been butting my head agaist the "Global warming" BS since early oughts (2000s) when the propaganda sort of suddenly burst out into the open. It was so obvious to me that it was orchestrated propaganda, because I was primed to notice it. I have been opposing other environmentalist movement propaganda/ideas since much earlier. Well, we now see that the GW BS blossomed World spanning cult/grift/ and what not with the psychopaths wresting complete control over it.

Expand full comment
May 29, 2023Liked by Mathew Crawford

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.

Expand full comment
May 29, 2023Liked by Mathew Crawford

Immediately pre-COVID the marketing agency I worked for had started offering chatbot builds for influencers/people with "personal brands" (guru book-and-public speaking types). I was let go shortly after lockdowns, so I never got to see if that agency further weaponized the product, but on-demand chatbots to ape your content were already a thing on the market.

Expand full comment
author

In 2019, my Twitter account still had something like only 400 followers---probably most of whom I know IRL. Somebody who didn't know me well (I was not interested in being an influencer, except perhaps in the narrow niche of education) offered to sell me some number of twitter bot followers. I never talked to that person again (a new acquaintance I'd met just once at a meetup).

Expand full comment

Twitter bots were a different thing. They were already on their way out by then (absolutely everyone knew how many of most influencers' metrics were bot armies). These were for stuff like landing page chats and IRC-type stuff.

Expand full comment
author

I doubt twitter bots are fewer in numbers today, but I didn't use Twitter so much in 2019 to have a feel for it. But yes, the more sophisticated bots are clearly more numerous now.

Expand full comment

Yes, ina group I'm in we discussed this a few years ago. It was when we discussed that almost all top redditors where bots. A friend named ferdongles found a method to test this out. Video on yt.

So the conclusion we got to was that for the actual bluechecks a strategy was deployed of having bots elevate them when they pulled the party line and ignore them when they didn't.

This simple feedback mechanism makes them move towards producing tweets and articles that are more and more aligned with the parry as those are the tweets and articles that ge the likes, comments etc.

This hypothesis was then confirmed by numbers such as ratio etc.

So Basically the experts didn't get shit, they got walled into an illusion and social dynamics where deployed against them to me them conform. They then integrated the new status and started to hunt anti-vaxxers etc with a swarm tail which was ai generated unbeknownst to themselves. They thought they where on a holy crusade and where backed by a majority opinion of good think.

Then the deplattforming and censorship was deployed to silence critics and dissenters.

The illusion created was one of strong social dynamics formed among thought leaders, which pulled in the normies.

And while we where reorganising our networks, they pulled ahead.

Expand full comment
author

I tried searching yt for the ferdongles video, but with no luck. Please post a link here if you know where it's located. Thank you in advance.

Expand full comment
author

Interesting. I don't spend much time on reddit, but I will see if I can find your friend's video. It would be interesting to see if there is a trail of evidence of the use of such bots to manipulate the public. Awareness may neuter some of the efforts.

Expand full comment
May 29, 2023Liked by Mathew Crawford

That's the must plausible explanation I've read so far.

Perhaps not so surprising that status-motivated people could be motivated by the AI generated perception of status.

Expand full comment

Don’t have any concrete examples but have seen plenty of posts on Twitter and other fora that clearly look like ChatGPT answers. Pretty soon social media will just be chatbots talking to other chatbots LOL.

Expand full comment
author

Bitcoin fixes this (really).

When social media involves an investment (micropayment) in the communication, the vast majority of bots will be priced out of the conversation. We will be left in relative peace. Nostr is the most promising of the several forms of the next evolution yet.

If you find one of those examples, it would be appreciated if you linked it back here. We might even be able to prove it by analysis.

Expand full comment

Maybe they'll destroy each other.

Expand full comment

I can't claim to know much bots, but I guess one could get an opinion from Malone, as he is an expert on 5G warfare. :-)

Expand full comment

The Asch conformity among people in the medical field was and remains really disturbing. I had such confidence in medicine shattered.

Expand full comment
May 29, 2023Liked by Mathew Crawford

It’s too bad we don’t learn more medical history. Doctors have probably killed more than war.

Expand full comment

Agreed. One way to start is Corbett's doco on "Rockefeller Medicine."

Expand full comment

Yup, whatever naive confidence I had in medical industry workers was permanently shattered by their appalling behavior during the Covid Atrocities.

Used to think modern medicine was "scientific". Now I realize that our modern docs are about as "scientific" as medieval doctors doing blood letting.

Expand full comment

I wonder if chatbots are being used to influence children to be trans.

Expand full comment

off-topic:

News from Spain: Elections yesterday, local and regional.

Results: it seems the communists have lost, so now we get to enjoy right wing communism, who will manage the social and economic catastrophe better... Not really, that's just a rationalization from the regular addiction to self-deception: there is no "managing" of anything.

The general election is not scheduled yet, but it should happen this year, or in January or February.

On a positive note, the majority of people understood that there is no reason to collaborate with the system, judging by the huge abstention, barely covered up by systematic electoral fraud.

elecciones.locales2023.es

Census: 35.5 million

Abstention: 12.8 million

Voting total: 22.7 million

Expand full comment

News:

In a surprising move, the General election has been scheduled for July 23rd.

Last election: November 10th, 2019.

1351 days since the last election.

193 weeks.

Why that date? Wouldn't it be better for the Socialist party to end the legislature period an use the Summer and the autumn to bribe everyone? Why a general election eight weeks after yesterday's loss? Do they have time in eight weeks to buck the trend?

An astrological note: On that day, Saturn and the asteroid Pallas are in exact opposition. In astrology, Pallas is the planet of Politics, Diplomacy, tricksters, shape-shifters and War. Saturn is a symbol for time, authority, sacrifice and government of anything. An exact opposition of these two is not very frequent.

Personally, I would prefer to have a specific date for elections, like in the US. For instance, the last Sunday of March every four years. I also would like to have general elections every four months and have a law in place to term limits of one legislature, once in a lifetime, then you go back to the real world. This would be applicable to all legislators and government executives, of every level. I think this could bring stability, the lack of which is one big problem for the economy.

I also think we should have a Miura bull as head of state, and have the prime minister, wearing a bright red suit, go to the head of the state stables to convince him to gently place its hoof as a signature of each new law, edict or treaty.

Expand full comment

But there was no pandemic, only a scamdemic.

Expand full comment

"Do we even know who we're chatting with on the internet?"

This really is a question I think we'll need to ask ourselves more and more going forward. It's funny that, when I was young and the internet was beginning to make in-roads, we were always taught to be careful, never give out personal information, so on and so forth, and now, I'm fairly certain many members of Gen Z would post their social security numbers for a bit of Tiktok clout. Not to say that I was immune from this shift - social media, Facebook in particular, did a lot to deprogram my generation from what was and still should be common sense about internet etiquette and conduct - but the question of "do you know if you're really even talking to another person and not a chatbot" has been on my mind more and more recently as ChatGPT has become so widespread that even my most tech illiterate acquaintances are talking about it.

As worrisome as it is to think about influencers using chatbots to take their... well, influencing to the next level, I have a sneaking suspicion that there's a more nefarious game afoot. It's one thing for an influencer to engage in parasocial Dunbar hacking, as you said, but I think there's going to come a time where chatbots will be utilized by unsavory actors - corporate, military, governmental, probably all of them - to quite literally fabricate "real" friends that are even more personal, intimate, and persuasive than any Tiktok or Instagram talking head could ever be. Just imagine some socially maladjusted shut-in that leans towards the more drastic end of a political ideology just happens to get a message out of the blue on their Twitter account and, as it so often happens, strikes up a friendship with this anonymous stranger that evolves into something much more personal than just acquaintances on Twitter, to the point that this "person" begins to have outsized influence this isolated and vulnerable individual, causing them to change their views entirely. "Show them the light", you could say.

Now, this part, I admit, is very "science fiction" at the moment, but I could see a time in the near future where deepfakes and voice synthesizing technology could become so efficient and convincing that, when combined with a sufficiently advanced chatbot, could be used to create a disturbingly genuine digital simulacra of a person. I understand that seems a bit farfetched, and that I probably need to loosen the tinfoil hat a bit, but it seems like if it isn't already plausible with technology that private actors have hidden away behind closed doors, it very well could be, and the ramifications could be disastrous.

There's already discussion of similar ideas in certain circles. One of the more popular theories is called the "Dead Internet Theory", which largely gets played off as either insane conspiracy talk or some sort of ARG/creepypasta that escaped containment from a certain image board, but there's a small number of people who are very convinced that it's a real phenomenon. As I said above, as AI/chatbot/deepfake technology continues to advance, I think it'll become a far less outlandish concept.

Expand full comment
May 29, 2023Liked by Mathew Crawford

Matthew, thank you so much for bringing this up. I noticed in the Tucker-Musk interview, Musk shared a concern/fear that AI could have capability of persuasion. I immediately wondered if he knew that this had already been achieved and had been implemented.

Expand full comment
author

Can you link that interview? I haven't seen it.

Expand full comment

https://youtu.be/a2ZBEC16yH4

The specific part starts at about 9 minutes in

Expand full comment

It was a lot more nuanced than that

https://www.pnas.org/doi/pdf/10.1073/pnas.1419828112

Note the date

Expand full comment

A slight misconception here...

The manipulation of public perception was not done via promoting Vaccines...

It was done by withholding vital Information from the public perception...

Propaganda is easily spotted because the same message is regurgitated over and over again exposing the propagandists on the way.

Another word for Influencer is Propagandist.

I can spot a lie over the circumference of the globe.

A half truth is harder to spot.

Chatbots are not the Problem... they are all but the tip of the iceberg.

AI is a military weapon.

The connection of AI to IOT / IOB is the real problem.

AI warfare against the Human Race is the real problem.

STARLINK NEURAL LINK NEURAL LACE... this is the real problem.

https://fritzfreud.substack.com/p/quantum-fascism-the-trojan-horse

Expand full comment

Vital information withheld: any talk of the actual risk of covid: that no one under 60 was at risk from covid unless at risk from some other life threatening condition. Even if you were on death’s door you still had better than a 99 percent chance of survival. Just. Not. Discussed.

Expand full comment

Actually and they just find out now after I been writing about this since over two years...

Inside the jabs is a Nanotechnology called NEURAL LACE.

Covid never was.

COVID is and was a MK ULTRA Spy op to get you to inject you with this technology.

Been telling people about this for years.

https://fritzfreud.substack.com/p/klaus-schwab-darpa-harvard-elon-musk

https://fritzfreud.substack.com/p/mk-ultra-covid-19-unit8200-israel

https://fritzfreud.substack.com/p/ai-the-machine-learning-god

Expand full comment

Fritz- you said “It was done by withholding vital Information from the public perception...”. This has been observed within the medical freedom movement also. Dr. Ana discusses one key topic that has been suppressed: https://anamihalceamdphd.substack.com/p/national-nanotechnology-initiative

Expand full comment

Just last week I decided to try AI writing apps. To see how it works and maybe help with some basic website content building. It sucked, in my opinion. But so does my writing such content! So then I decided to see if it would generate content with the prompt of mRNA vaccines are dangerous and it refused to write one word. Considering the amount of content out there on how unsafe and ineffective they are... makes you question these algorithms. Further, large web based platforms are being forced to code for optimal use on Google browsers. Intuit is a big one. I was told the federal government requires them to code for Google. (Tech from intuit told me). And this weekend and exchange with GoDaddy revealed they code for Google browsers too. It’s all connected. My husband is finally beginning to see it. I’m no longer 4 coo coo birds. I’m down to one and a half.

Expand full comment

Funny how some of us have gone from ‘daft conspiracy theorist’ to ‘how did she know that’

Expand full comment

Google Chrome browser has the largest share of the browser market. It's not particularly surprising or suspicious that web developers target the most popular browser.

The more interesting question to me is: why is Google Chrome so popular? The most obvious reason is that Google dumps the product on the market for far less than it costs them to produce it, selling it for "free". This means non-spyware competitors - who have to change for their product - can't compete on a level playing field.

Expand full comment

It's a seriously cost-cutting tool. Of course such chatbots are employed wherever they're deemed effective enough (and not too embarassing).

Expand full comment