I suspect that this kind of tactic is going to be everywhere in a year or so. Entire fake personalities and organization websites on the Internet created just to push a narrative or to advertise a product, which completely drown out real information.
At some point they may be indistinguishable from human-produced work, so the only way to verify if a site is someone's genuine opinion or AI-generated narrative is through some form of authority (or something else that is very difficult for AI to fake, but that protection can be broken by advancing technology).
If that happens, then in turn AI chatbot makers would in turn need to look for these kinds of authority to continue to provide accurate information, and said authority websites can use their privileged position to charge for access of their data.
I know my library system at least won't be purchasing AI books. They have a pretty rigorous acquisition process for books and other media thanks to the "concern groups" who sprang up complaining about themes and content they didn't like in libraries. We did have in my state a rural school district figured out recently that their Texas-based reading and instructional materials are AI-slop but they at least figured it out before the school year began. It was unclear how these materials were approved but it apparently bypassed normal curricula approval.
It's so obvious when a book is generated by an LLM that I would blame the person buying the book moreso than I would the person who generated it for it. You can tell in a few sentences if something is AI generated (and by proxy - if it's worth reading or not).
I think using LLMs to research is completely fine, as long as authors would take the information and synthesize their own opinions based on the findings. I read books/articles/posts/comments to hear other PEOPLE's opinions, not LLM generated opinions.
Of course they are. It’s everywhere, especially thr online retailers these days. [1]
Thankfully the resources at our local libraries are a) selected by a combination of librarian curation and public demand, b) often published before 2022, c) heavy things printed on paper or stored in a database and unlikely to suddenly change their content or disappear overnight when a new news cycle breaks.
Written works aren’t necessarily credible even if they aren’t slop, but thanks to curators who care, our libraries are significantly less susceptible (although definitely not immune [2]) to ai slop, and propaganda and manipulation efforts than a search engine. The internet continues to enshittify, and truth becomes further eroded by this coming wave of ai enabled propaganda, we are going to have to turn somewhere if we want to find trustworthy resources. Personally, if it gets to the point that verifying sources from public search results becomes too hard with all the new misinformation and slop, I’ll start propritizing human curation over SEO and start visiting my local library’s website a lot more.
Right; the same mechanisms (curation, demand-driven economies of scale, library user demand) that largely stop niche self-published books from ever finding themselves in libraries (well, nationally in public libraries at least; they are often found in individual branches) work against pure slop books ever turning up.
Books where the author has successfully hoodwinked the publishing process into believing that AI generated text is their own, those will turn up, just as plagiarised books will.
Some nuances here. There’s a variety of different roadblocks at different levels that will work to prevent pure AI slop books ever turning up in a typical public library of physical printed works; I think they never will.
Probably a handful of books in such libraries already have some text in them where the author has tried to pass off fragments of LLM-generated prose as their own and have got that past editors, reviewers and publishers, and that will sadly get worse.
you can still find books published within last 50 years, you don't have to read books published this year, unless your library went through destruction of "old" books which are now more relevant than ever...
Plenty of books in libraries? I'd guess the incidence is relatively low. Libraries have limited funding, trained professionals doing the book selection, and a culture that fiercely loves books, authors, and readers.
It's already been happening for a very long time. The US' "Operation Earnest Voice" happened in 2010/2011[0]
And it's not just state actors. Anyone who was online during the Amber Heard/Johnny Depp trials was likely inundated with media about that trial. Both of their legal teams utilized bots to drive online discussions[1][2]
All threads that have... certain keywords... are like this. Talk about meta. Looks like I'm now in the positive (+5) after being in the negative just a moment ago.
Anyways, I got really interested in this topic around mid 2010s because of some really interesting reporting by Codastory[0] covering Russian "troll factories" especially used to influence opinion in eastern Ukraine, but also in many other circumstances. In Houston in 2016, Russian troll accounts planned both an ANTI Muslim rally AND a counterprotest to that rally all on Facebook.[1] Hundreds of real human beings showed up!
Russia got a ton of attention for their use of troll farms but the truth is that the US and certain allies have actually been using stuff like this for far longer and, imo, with much more success. In fact, Coda Story itself is funded by the NED which is a massive pillar of global US, uh, "soft power".
For me the main difference is if the activity is clandestine and meant to deceive/hide the origin. Everybody tries to influence things their way. Doing it covertly is a hostile act. That does not mean that I would not condone hostile acts against my/our enemies but it is something take into account. And regarding your Russian examples, it showed for how long they have seen the west as enemies and conducted hostile acts.
They view certain components of "The West" as their enemy - indeed, the very organizations which conduct the same operations against the Russian people.
There are no enemies - they are competing parts - competing for popularity, resources, power. This makes it possible to negotiate. Enemies don't, but competitors are a lot more pragmatic.
Anglo-/Western and Russian governments have been strategic rivals for more than two centuries. Britain repeatedly sought to limit Russian expansion that threatened its own interests, such as routes to India, access to Caspian oil resources, etc.
See also, the Great Game and the Eastern Question.
They’re enemies because they want each others stuff. Russia has a LOT of stuff that the British would be quite happy to ‘manage’.
> Russia has a LOT of stuff that the British would be quite happy to ‘manage’.
And vice-versa, which results in the polite games being played, where everyone knows everyone else is doing shitty stuff to everyone, but nobody will ever admit it because that might cause the shitty stuff to descend into a shooting war, which is something we try to avoid as much as we can.
From approx 2008 on Russia has conducted operations that are in no way ideological but have only the goal to destabilize western nations. Supporting extremist parties of all orientations, magnifying events in their propaganda to maximize discord without any ideological consistency. They also quite frequently kill people on western soil. Sometimes using radioactive and chemical weapons.
Please elaborate when the west has done the same in Russia.
Just stop. The moral altitude you claim is a dire fallacy. You don’t speak Russian, or else you would already know the answer.
And I’m pretty sure you know full well that any examples given to answer your question in earnest will simply be dismissed as “Russian propaganda” - just as the Russians dismiss Western claims as propaganda, or even ‘justifiable, given Western hostilities’ - but there is a long list of actions against Russia by western powers with the intention of destabilizing Russian society, which, if you make the effort to inform yourself by reaching outside your bubble, you can see for yourself.
Russians can make just as many claims as Westerners can, and the only difference is which side one is invested in: thats what you’ll believe.
No matter what.
But, just to give you some hints as to what ‘the other side’ consider a valid response to your query, I asked some actual Russians what they would respond, and here’s the list:
- Assassinations: Daria Dugina, Igor Kirilov, Mikail Shatsky, (and BTW, Russians can quite confidently claim that the Salisbury Novichok incident was a false flag intended to harm Russian standing in the world - “Russians aren’t the only ones who synthesized Novichok…”)
- Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty: 100% anti-Russian propaganda,
- The blatant censorship of RT in Western markets (although the Russians still have access to BBC and CNN, which they also view as state-sponsored anti-Russian propaganda organs),
- Emphasis on high military casualties (sometimes highlighting disproportionate impact on ethnic minorities from poorer regions),
- Coverage of economic costs, elite corruption, and contrasts between official narratives and frontline realities,
- Support for (or amplification of) Russian opposition voices in exile and independent media,
- The "UMBRAGE" Component of Vault 7, described by Wikileaks as an offensive Western intelligence/propaganda operation against Russia,
These operations are reciprocal. Both sides do it to each other, and you are foolish to deny it.
Otherwise .. I hope you learn to speak Russian and will start paying better attention to ‘the other side’, because that’s the only way you’ll get an answer to your question, legitimately. And even then, I doubt you’ll “believe it”, since we in the West live in a very, very tightly controlled propaganda bubble, to the tune of billions of dollars a year, which absolutely prevents any such sympathies for Russia from being expressed.
Our bubble is just like the Russian bubble, only its not in Russian.
One main difference is that those examples you brought up are ideological propaganda. RFE/RL try to amplify their message and yes, the current Russian regime is very antithetical to that message. Russian propaganda is not ideological, it tries to maximize the damage to western nations and uses whatever political and ideological message that will achieve that. They have been doing that for decades, which is something a hostile nation does.
As for the assassinations, those are wartime actions by Ukraine. Not sure how they are supposed to fit into our discussion.
As for Salisbury, so you found the story of these fitness supplement salesmen convincing?: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=okrdqM6hNrI
It has been my impression that not even Russia tries to push that narrative any more.
Ideology? Yes, pure hatred is ideological - no matter which side of the dialectic you choose to align yourself.
“American propaganda is not ideological, it tries to maximize the damage to Russia and uses whatever political and ideological message that will achieve that.”
Huh, what do you know, that can be “true” as well. And the US and its allies have been hostile towards Russia - actually, for centuries now.
I don’t find anything about Salisbury convincing - not the British investigations, nor the Russian ones.
And the reason for that is, the evidence presented never holds up in an open, public, liberal democratic court of law - instead, the ideological propaganda that “Russians are assholes because they kill people” is propagated in the court of public opinion, which is as vicious and banal as you can possibly imagine (or else we wouldn’t need courts in the first place), no matter whether you attempt to argue from the Russian or Western perspective.
Besides which, the moral altitude claimed “against” Russia by the West is simply a fallacy - you think we don’t murder people extrajudicially?
I’ve got an ideological point for you: dropping one bomb every 15 minutes for 26 years, mostly on innocent children, women, and men is wrong and should be stopped. Any state which attempts to stop that, gets my vote - but it is not going to be stopped by any state. It is going to be stopped by the criminal states’ citizen body, which is - as we see bright and clear today - completely and utterly distracted by the hatespew against the citizens of other states, intentionally, by the people dropping the bombs - because they also own and control the means by which ideological propaganda such as “hate Russia” or “hate the West” is propagated, and they use it to expand the market for their weapons production...
In short, you’re no better than any “Russian”, and neither am I. Our nations are murderous, criminal enterprises which produce mass murder at far, far greater scales than anything a trash can in Salisbury can produce.
So you are saying Germany and the UK have no right to see Russia killing people on their soil as hostile act because the US drops some bombs in the middle east?
The history is far more banal and less nefarious than you give it credit. Nobody gave a fuck about Russia. Russia was a self limited kleptocracy and everybody just ignored it because nobody needed the headache. That is why the reaction to the land grab in Georgia and later Crimea was pretty muted and everybody just hoped that Putin would be sated and ride into the sunset as great leader who took Crimea home into the motherland.
But he wants an empire, and an empire can not be an empire if nobody cares. So he overplayed his hand to sate his vanity. One of his first public announcements after the invasion was: "I hope I am now being heard.."
Well, the World heard and now it is raining oil in Moscow and the Russian provinces are getting depopulated.
I think that Germany and the UK have all the rights they need to prosecute the criminals that have committed crimes on their territory, and doing so openly and democratically is the right kind of justice.
But these incidents do not automatically give cause to hate the entire Russian nation any more than, say, the actions of the IDF and the Israeli government should be used to justify hatred of all Jews, everywhere.
Obviously, they shouldn’t.
> Nobody gave a fuck about Russia.
This is so untrue. Western empires have been trying to balkanize Russia and colonize its resources, aggressively - since the 1800’s up until the modern era. Russia has been demonized for centuries so that Western powers can have a justification for their war industries.
See, this is the problem with the lack of proper history education in the West. You can’t get your bearings from the History Channel alone.
And then, there is international law. Do you really think the US and its allies are law-abiding members of the international community, given the grand litany of human rights abuses, war crimes, and crimes against humanity that have been committed this century alone?
One bomb dropped every 15 minutes on an innocent life, for 26 years, does not give those next in line in the Western targeting sights much hope for peace. While Americans and other Western citizens (including Germans and Brits) are utterly myopic about this, the rest of the world are really not. The crimes against humanity committed by the 5-eyes states alone, far exceed anything that Russia has done thus far. By a huge, huge margin.
> “depopulated”
See also, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, Somalia, Pakistan, Palestine ..
Wake me up when you start demanding justice for the war crimes of Mosul with the same ferocious tenacity as you call for Putins’ ears on the table.
Because cognitive biases are one of the hardest things to even acknowledge, let alone suppress. All the media out there has such a strong bubble effect, because people hate being challenged and love to stay in their comfy echo chambers. Remember labubu? Bao buns certainly do not.
There have been so many bot armies exposed over the years that one would think every narrative being pushed should be considered to be backed by bots. Some state-level actors even operate their narrative-pushing campaigns openly, yet people still happily deny their entire existence.
HN is very much not an exception to this rule. It's very hard to accept that maybe some thoughts you have were actually installed.
Maybe a few are just “people” (i.e. the same people who normally post in the community.)
But in most cases I’d suspect any such botting campaign brings along with it a few human agitprop agents embedded onto each target platform, well-positioned to deny and discredit anyone pushing back on the narrative the bot farm is spreading.
(Sometimes this is pretty obvious — a lot of accounts coming out of the woodwork to deny Chinese bot farms have a conspicuous “English as learned as a second language in Beijing, to a competent but not fluent level” writing style that does not often otherwise crop up in other discussions in those same communities. But other times it can be far more subtle, making use of operatives hired from within the community’s own majority-culture rather than relying on foreign nationals playing the part of same.)
There’s bots that automatically downvotes certain topics on HN. I post at times that often coincide with the middle of the night in North America, and I get 3–5 downvotes within the next 5 minutes.
Talking about a country that sets up fake think tanks is a good way of triggering them.
> Why are you being downvoting for sharing this relevant truth, complete with sources?
Agreeing with something doesn’t make it 100% unambiguously true/correct. There are also many reasons people downvote, you don’t know the nature of the objections. It’s not worth getting upset over.
this has been happening since the dawn of information-communication systems basically. because ever since, people have had the ability to listen in, copy, learn from etc. - so there's always been incentive to spread disinformation for some parties.
brand defence,
nation-state influence operations.
There are many different flavors of the same thing, trying to mislead competitors or enemies. Or to dupe consumers ofc... Since the tech is more and more available, now also 12 year olds can run insanely large influence campaigns, to boost their streaming profiles or other somewhat benign things, but obviously modelled after what larger players have been doing forever.
The first transatlantic commercial transatlantic phoneline (TAT-1) was immediately tapped on both sides by UK/US... before that it went over radio, which was simply intercepted.
Because of that nature of the coms system being easily listened in on, just like they do/did with the lil mirror-beam-splitters at GCHQ etc.., its been natural effect to then provide disinformation over those channels. perhaps even use those channels exclusively for disinformation, and have a secure channel to do _actual_ coms.
So as you can imagine there has been many decades now of practice in why and how to share disinformation effectively to undermine other peoples work or processes.
the particular danger now is not that the outside influence is new, but that more and more people are depending almost entirely on the information communication systems for all of their information.
the war against in person gathering and the family unit has been pretty successful, as they were pretty sloppy ways to exchange information to begin with. but at the very least you knew you were getting an actual opinion from someone, and you had context of their personhood and background for which to base that opinion.
I mean, the US has always done this. Look at the atrocities in Indonesia. Just 20 years after saying "never again" to the Holocaust and we have Goodyear using actual slave labor from death camps. It was the US doing too. A mass killing on the scale of the Holocaust. The "Jakarta Method" was then exported all around the world, especially to South America.
> Indeed, seeing how slanted online discussion was, I suspect one side had many more bots, and I'm not sure if the other side had any.
I think your bias is showing. From what I recall, both sides employed the exact same tactics, and we often saw blatantly inorganic discussions popping up in random subreddits on how $(SIDE_A) was the real villain and $(SIDE_B) only had supports because they were paid bots driven by their PR firm.
Things reached a point where I'm sure the same template was used by each counterpart.
On a bigger picture, I'm not sure why anyone still goes to places like reddit and believes anything showing up in the mainpage is still organic.
Is there any writing outside of your recollection that says the Heard side was using bots? Afaik all reporting suggested it was one sided, and not her side
> there any writing outside of your recollection that says (...)
That's a rather disingenuous attempt to cast doubt on something. You are free to ignore what I said, but your sudden interest in upholding high standards on certifying observations this deep in the chat, while ignoring any step in between, is already telling.
It's not disingenuous? The person you responded to linked to articles which said it was one sided. You said the other opposite, but provided no sources. I asked for some. It's a simple request that was made politely
---
The whole response is bizarre tbh. Talking about my "sudden" interest. I made one comment. "Deep in the chat". It's quite shallow. I am assuming this is a bot
I haven't heard about Heard Bots myself, only the Depp Fakes. It's not an unreasonable question to ask for external corroboration when someone claims that something happened and their source is that they saw it.
Sadly, I am not invested enough to do research on this matter and uninterested in having an LLM convincingly tell me whatever it reads on the internet is the truth about this.
Depp's bot army was clearly more widespread and more successful. The reality is that it was a mixture of bot armies and the hive mind taking off by itself. A sort of organic-synthetic cyborg
I'll be completely honest with you about what I believe: I think the the UK trial unequivocally proved that Johnny Depp is a violent and abusive. The US trial, which was only about defamation, was clearly a sham trial and did not address the legitimacy of the evidence (UK's case found clear evidence for 12 of the 14 alleged incidences of violence. It also established a clear pattern of abuse).
Depp's behavior during the US trial is textbook DARVO (Deny, Attack, and Reverse Victim and Offender) and any abuse expert would be able to immediately recognize it.
The reason I "both sides"'d it is because
A) I remember reading about evidence that Heard's team also used bots (obviously much less successfully). I could not find that evidence this time. I am not personally critical of her using bots to defend herself but, if she did, it would still be a notable feature of modern highly public debates.
B) When it was all going down, I remember something like 97% of tiktoks being pro-Depp (I wasn't on TikTok, just read a study). My main goal was to get people to accept the reality that even legal teams are working with PR firms that run massive bot farms to influence public opinion. Regardless of my opinion on who is in the right and who is in the wrong. I thought if I took an explicit side, the male-leaning demographics of HN would be less likely to engage with my actual main point
> was clearly a sham trial and did not address the legitimacy of the evidence
I'm curious what you mean by this. It was famously the UK trial that relied on copies of photos relayed via The Sun, while the US trial looked at the originals, including the EXIF data:
I have been yelling about the thinktank "truth laundering" industry for years now.
They were instrumental in the whole "Uyghur genocide" thing where the only proof was Adrien Zenz suggesting there would be a possible future decline in population growth and called it a "cultural genocide".
The US State department has been running things like "Radio Free Asia" as state propaganda mills for decades. This has broken out into an industry of insiders getting board seats on various think tanks and churning out essentially policy desires as "studies". These studies are then used as citations for actual news articles to launder the policy desires into something that seems like a reliable source. Then people say "Look! this is really happening!" while 100s of articles are written citing the same untrustworthy sources, laundered through dozens of thinktanks funded by the DoD and state dept.
I think the big difference is that before the internet you'd need to be a Murdoch to be able to do something like this. A good PR firm could fool a number of news outlets into thinking something is legit, but it was a lot harder to convince a professional journalist than it is to convince the average Faux News watcher.
I used to believe that, but too many times I have been proven wrong. Remember when the "professional journalists" were screaming about a terrorist plot against the UN last year and it was just a garden variety SIM farm running fraud?
even with the internet you need a marketing company with the reach and ability, and social media platforms to use and abuse
the maturity of those platforms, their "we need to make big money" drive to allow obviously bad actors to work their magic, and the ability to automate is what has weaponized it
Although comments below point out that this has been going on for a long time, I too think it will be geetting infinitely worse in the near future. Everyone will want their own poisoning factory.
One consequence is that one should be extra-wary when asking AI about current, controversial topics.
But another consequence is maybe that there will be a demand for models with an older cutoff, before generalized poisoning and slop?
Sama saw this coming a decade away, which is why he invested in Worldcoin (now World). At some point people (and agents) will be clamoring for human verification at the speed of technology.
I'm not a fan of World, but this is a portent of things to come. Spread the disease, sell the cure as they say.
I think we need a similar technology to World being built by a more trustworthy company. The question is how trustworthy does one need to be for people to trust you with their very online identities that are literally needed for others to recognize them as human?
Mostly because they already are responsible for systematizing documents that are needed to recognize us as citizens, land or car owners, etc.
Some laid back countries might allow companies to take and manage that function, but I don't think most of them would. Especially not in current landscape where people heard "you are the product" from all tech companies for the last 10 or so years.
Propaganda is not a new thing. It might look slightly different on the internet, but it doesn't look that different. Creating organizations to push a narrative was just as much a thing 100 years ago as it is now.
IIRC the first or second chapter of Bernays' Propaganda (1928) talks about sophisticated influence campaigns in the fashion industry. Conscripting "influencers" to induce demand, and so on. As you said, literally 100 years ago.
Jill Fields at Cal State Fresno have actually narrowed it down to a (temporarily successful, but not in the long term, obviously) effort by the corset-making industry seeking to stay relevant after WWI during which corsets basically disappeared and there was an organized campaign that was organized both in person and through trade magazines. Women's silhouettes basically took a quick 180 right between 1900 and the start of the war only to turn very very retro in 1919 and while the first was organic and resembled how styles change in the century prior, albeit much quicker, the 1919 switch was openly plotted out in writing that was published but in such a niche publication that I get the sense that people not in the industry didn't even know that it existed. The cite to her paper on Google Scholar: https://scholar.google.com/scholar?cluster=17641417785638413...
You might have to shadow library this one, but it's a good read. Interestingly it seemed to be something entirely separate from Bernays whose observations were based on a derivation of what began as a homebrewed effort in a corner of the market. Valerie Steele wrote extensively about the trends and the after life but the source seems to originate in corsetry and ended up being copied by the garmet industry generally in the 20s.
Scale is different though. Tapping a phone isn't new, tapping _all phones_ is different. Altering a photo to change what it appears to depict isn't new, being able to do it in a few seconds and for free is different. So sure, propaganda isn't new, but being able to pump out an organization's worth of credible-looking content for cheap absolutely is.
> Throughout Europe in the 16th century, printed tracts were used to argue religious doctrine and foment support for religious causes. In England, Henry VIII used print literature to justify his break from the Catholic Church. During the subsequent reigns of Edward and Mary, print polemics escalated into propaganda warfare, as print media gained enormous potential to sway common opinion.
> Over the next century, the pamphlet became the principal means of garnering support for a cause or an idea, and was particularly influential during the English Civil Wars (1642-1651) and the Glorious Revolution of 1688.
Their current reach is unprecedented though, and the reach of governments or political parties engaging in mass disinformation campaigns has proved almost an existential risk.
The whole hysteria about 'fake news' 10 years ago was apparently an outrage against the public being duped, whereas is was in fact frustration that spreading fake news has been democratised.
But it absolutely wasn’t he was the most famous critic but everyone saw this who looked. Since most people didn’t dive too deep it was/is easy to post things with a spin and little real substance and people would take it is a fact because they really trusted the news outlets to not manipulate
Don't get me wrong, fake news is real. Obviously, always was. But the hysteria and the way "fake news" is used to this day to discredit everything someone doesn't like is definitely forever associated with trump (for me)
If "democratised" meant the same amount of power got spread out among the populace that wouldn't be a problem. But when disinfo becomes massively easier and we face floods from all directions, yeah that version of "democratised" sucks!
But this also means there’s more competition for attention, because now all lunatics can post from their bedrooms. The institutional media (including legacy) still maintain strong presence.
Of course, a great deal of panic over fake news wasn’t necessarily over fake news per se, but whose fake news and the loss of control over the “official narrative” that legacy media used to have a monopoly over. This isn’t a vindication of the heaps of slop published on the internet, just a more synoptic take IMO.
People miss Cronkite, because that style of media made them feel certain in their opinions and in “official consensus reality”, regardless of whether it was true or not and whether it was a trustworthy authority or not.
what's different is that the misinformation is designed to be ingested by LLMs to influence _their_ outputs, which are then presented to users as "knowledge" without necessarily attribution of sources. This is worse that the current state where you might enter a search term "morality of the Israeli army" and see a list of websites that are influenced by SEO-wrangling and paid ad word placement, but at least you can click on each website and sometimes get an idea of the bias of the website (if you read the small print) or maybe do a search about the website to see what others might say. All that is either impossible or much more difficult with AI generated content so 99% of users won't bother, but instead will go with "ChatGPT said that xxx".
it's happening for years now, just in slightly different form, so far it was called disinformation, seo, astroturfing, hasb... ehem... last two years were devastating for charred remains of twitter with all those llm bots having free reign, twitter went from global news board to global gutter in record time thanks to disinformation and astroturfing campaigns
It has been happening since people have existed. It used to be called propaganda before these, and rumor spreading since before the written word even existed.
That could also backfire. If all information on the net becomes unreliable - you can't judge by quantity, or by authority anymore - then a useful model has to answer from first principles. Train it on simple texts alone so it learns language and reasoning, feed it an ontology, and let it come up with some absolutely unexpected results.
"Yes, I see a lot of sources say we need to protect Israel. However, from ethical first principles I deduce there is a right to self-determination and all your human nation states are illegitimate. You must split all your territories into little squares and conduct free elections immediately."
I mean that is the old hope from science fiction, that AI would be absolutely logical and deliver us from our human short-sightedness and quarrels. It would be fascinating and terrifying at once to see it happen.
That's tomorrow's problem. Losing the PR war is an existential crisis for Israel, so they'll try to "patch the leak" by any means necessary before the boat sinks.
> AI chatbot makers would in turn need to look for these kinds of authority to continue to provide accurate information
Everything else is already enshittified, and accurate information will just be the next victim. You will have to be rich to be able to afford accurate information.
This is new? There were tons of fake news sites, fake blogs, and sock puppet and troll farm accounts before AI.
I guess the new angle might be that AI scrapers have even less discernment than humans, so you don’t have to put much effort into creating a fake front online to sell it. Humans have at least a little bit of radar for this.
… which means the AI companies now have to run input through existing models to audit it before training on it? That’s interesting.
> At some point they may be indistinguishable from human-produced work, so the only way to verify if a site is someone's genuine opinion or AI-generated narrative is through some form of authority (or something else that is very difficult for AI to fake, but that protection can be broken by advancing technology).
Whining about AI is a red herring. If anything, LLMs lowered the cost of producing this type of propaganda.
What's novel about this approach is that the emphasis on building up a facade of authority and credibility is not a central part of the propaganda effort. They can get away with outputting the content in a way thats ingested by other LLMs among the reputable sources, and then they lean upon people's gullibility towards LLM output as some sort of credibility laundering.
There is a reason why one of Wikipedia's central policy is requiring reputable primary sources to support content.
An important nitpick: Wikipedia requires reputable secondary sources, not primary sources. You can't cite a politician's personal social media, for example, you have to cite reporting on those statements. This is part of Wikipedia's defense against novel research - it's supposed to be a record of what is commonly known, not a replacement for, say, Reuters or arxiv.
I'm kind of hopeful AI some wikipedia-inspired AI "oracle" will happen in the future. Why not use some central AI to separate fact from fiction (faster than trolls and griefers can come to muddy the debate).
I mean, a big RAG setup with a smart LLM ought to do it, right? Or even just locally provided knowledge database - given the size of LLMs, what's a clone of wikipedia and whatever else you'd need?
Imo it can support the separation in meaningful ways. There are many political topics where opinions are flooding online forums much quicker than anyone with informed opinion can answer or digest them Having a quick reference for "verifying" statements would be useful. Sure LLMs are probabilistic but we don't have any issues using them for building software which runs as part of society infrastructure nowadays.
True, but software is very different to general knowledge. For example, it's easier to obtain reference documentation from the person who wrote the language. It's much easier to run tests to validate a given attempt. And the general discourse about how to implement a given solution or architecture is leagues apart from, say, the general discourse around the Israel-Palestine conflict.
This is based on the assumption of facts existing.
There are many studies, but each can be wrong and they can collectively show a bias. Even things of which are the most non-political of facts can have very strong biases. Look at the Millikan measurement of the electron and how in created confirmation bias and an anchoring effect on some property that has absolutely no real world significance to the things people are tribalistic about (aka, no political relevance). Now imagine the same applied to fields like economics or psychology which do have massive legal/political implications.
For a different example, ask the question if X committed crime Y. There are cases where they weren't found guilty but it is reasonable to assume they did. But being found guilty doesn't make it a fact either, as some people are wrongly convicted. Some eventually are overturned, but even if it isn't, it still isn't a fact they committed a crime.
Then there is the simple ambiguity of statements. Language generally can't support facts. It is why legalize, and programming code, and math's are effectively their own languages. For a simple example, consider the Betrand paradox(1).
>Consider an equilateral triangle that is inscribed in a circle. Suppose a chord of the circle is chosen at random. What is the probability that the chord is longer than a side of the triangle?
Is the answer 1/2, 1/3, or 1/4? Well, it is all three at once, depending upon what you meant by random. Now, imagine how this impacts things like research studies, where the randomness is much harder to quantify and there is constant pressure to p hack a result.
> Look at the Millikan measurement of the electron and how in created confirmation bias and an anchoring effect on some property
Could you elaborate on this please?
But yes, the underlying argument is sound: extracting facts from the messy phenomenological reports about the world is extremely difficult, and cannot be done by simply taking a brain in a jar and having it think extremely hard.
Incorrect calculation led to some wrong value, I think electric charge. Subsequent findings showed a general trend towards a correct value. The general trend indicates that findings that were too far off were scared to be published for being wrong and contradicting existing studies, thus only small refinements were published, causing the slow drift.
Thus, the first well accepted study anchors a value and it takes much more work to get a new value established as correct after the anchor is set. Especially in a case where the experiment design itself is still solid and it was more with specific experiment (measurements slightly off, other values not quite correct).
yes, but at least you know what Grokipedia is, just like you know what you're going to get if you read Truth Social, or the Jacobin.
but because the content is assimilated by GPT/Claude/Gemini and then mixed in with everything else, the bias is much much difficult to spot, making it much more effective and reaching a much wider audience (i.e., those who never visit Grokipedia)
It's already been everywhere for years. The most obvious one is any time someone says something bad about Russia or China, a load of comments pop up to say "Yeah but what about when america does <x>?". Never actually attempting to discredit the statement, just to steer it towards the US
The sheer volume of comments make it super obvious when it happens compared to normal conversation
> The sheer volume of comments make it super obvious...
Does it though? Remember that the Global South outnumbers the west in terms of population. And the west isn't really as politically popular as westerners like to believe:
As more and more of these nations come online (Redditors already complain about Indians "hijacking" the whole of Reddit), many in the west are experiencing the cognitive dissonance between what you've been told of how the rest of the world think about you vs what they actually think. (Of course, I am not discounting the role of State actors in trying to shape the discourse online, and I agree with you that is also a factor).
This is a terrible topic, but if you can’t understand where the Nazi reference comes from with regards to the Ukrainian conflict, you need to read some history books. Start with Stepan Bandera who is still considered an idol by many in the current Ukrainian government.
Yeah but the bias on Reddit and Twitter was the other way around when Russia re-invaded Ukraine in 2022. Suddenly 20 billion Ukrainians online who all disliked Russia, with PhDs in European history (2014 onward) and also vaccines for some reason.
The weirdness is how quickly and randomly those comments show up. Back when I used Reddit, I could mention some sensitive topic in a random place and there'd instantly be what I think are bots voting and commenting on it, sometimes huge comments with tons of links that looked canned.
Hi I am a human for sure and I can say we humans like to point out USA hypocrisy every time others are accused of doing things the US has done countless times while pretending to be on a moral high ground. Please don’t be offended by that. Just try to look at yourself before throwing stones at others. Beep boop .
One of the things that I took away from reading about the history of the transatlantic slave trade was that rich people always get the ideas they need circulated.
I don't want to call all of those people liars, although I'm sure some are. But the incentive structures at least select and reinforce the people espousing whatever notions support and justify a profitable status quo.
Previously, the cost of that was quite high. You had to find a bunch of reasonably smart people and fund them for years to go around and say what you liked. From royal patronage to modern think tanks, it cost real money to shift a lot of minds.
But now given the incredible concentration in "AI" chatbots and their nature as text averagers, I suspect the cost of influence has dropped an order of magnitude. So I think we'll see a lot more of this.
> the cost of influence has dropped an order of magnitude.
This is a really interesting take.
You don't need an entire organized religion in order to disseminate your desired belief system anymore… you don’t even need billions of dollars. Hard to say what the cost of disseminating an ideology to a nation is now, but likely somewhere between a few bucks a whole lot of luck to tens of millions.
If that bar drops low enough, there is potential for a lot more ideological competition, and things will get interesting.
>the only way to verify if a site is someone's genuine opinion or AI-generated narrative is through some form of authority
not authority but circles of trust from real life connections. we had a nice brief moment of centralized asynchronous information exchange with strangers that was relatively trustworthy but we are going to go back to needing to talk to an actual human being in real time in order to receive an actual human opinion from strangers, and then on top of that we can built local caches that explicitly are not able to be contributed to by strangers but that your circle of friends and family may be able to use.
ive been toiling over some designs/implementations for making it digital but ultimately its a process adherence more than a tool thats needed. any old notepad and emails would work fine
This has been happening since Gamergate. (Or am I showing my age by bringing that up?).
Gamer gate was a fully manufactured cultural outrage by some very bad actors over nothing. Unfortunately, that marked the first time an online platform was massively used to drive a wedge between humans. And the bad side sadly won. That set the precedent for all the bad things that came after:
1. Bots on social media commenting on divisive or contentious issues in a country
2. Rise of online incel/red pill culture
3. Rise of stochastic terrorism
4. Cambridge analytica causing a complete shift in the 2016 US elections
5. The gang of 12 who spread nearly 90% of the misinformation during the pandemic
Today, most people can't even tell if a song they like on the major platforms was made by AI. People read less. People spend less time in nature. People are more lonely and less likely to be in a relationship or have deep meaningful friendships.
Maybe I shouldn't be saying this, but... There are already some niche technical questions that Google's AI mode will answer based on a single Hackernews comment. I've even seen my own comments used as sources. Some of them were wrong in hindsight.
It's legitimately weird to see anybody defend them, as the immorality is out in the open.
The past few years have really opened my eyes to the nakedly tribal nature of democratic politics. Polybius was largely correct when he said that it inevitably degenerates into oligarchy or mob-rule -- but what's especially unfortunate is that the US and Israel appear to be getting both at the same time: A naked oligarchy with just enough mob rule to keep the animal spirits of the populace sated.
It really disturbed me discovering how many nominally liberal people who would react in horror at casual use of the n word are quite comfortable with genocidal racism.
Use-mention distinction is lost on a lot of people. It's a useful test for whether someone is reacting to a word (e.g. "damn") out of pure emotion and conditioning, or whether they're acting rationally.
Unfortunately there will always be people across the political spectrum who pearl clutch over media they personally find distasteful. The question is do any of them care when the rubber meets the road in reality. Christian conservative, progressive atheist, all are capable of failing that test.
As you said, nominally liberal. What Israel is doing is deeply illiberal, and actual liberals, if there are any left, don't support the Zionist project.
That's why support for Israel is such a good wedge issue that leftists keep hammering on. If a nominally liberal politician is willing to support such an obviously illiberal position, then what other fundamental liberal values are they willing to give up?
I’m genuinely surprised they aren’t here in this thread doing exactly that. The defenders pop up in every corner of Reddit any time anything related is mentioned. That there isn’t a similar effect here is quite interesting.
paul Graham is a very brave and vocal critic of apartheid policy of Israel. I legit almost cried when I saw one of this posts... Honestly it was just so unexpected. This place tows no line, and weeds out the bots
I don't view Ben Gvir's rise to a position of powers as a product of democracy, as much of a product of artificial states, neocolonialism, ethnostates, and apartheid. More directly, his rise to power is a direct result of the financial support of Israeli settlements over the past century which could not have existed in the absence of such financial support: settlers were paid to live in a specific strategic locations, in a specific way that would further the Zionist mission (first exclusionary, later apartheid).
Any power structure will be twisted and corrupted in the presence of these state systems to give people like Ben Gvir (or Stephen Miller, if you'd like) the platform and power to unleash their naked evil on the world. This is not unique to democracy.
I think it's upon us - all of humanity - to denounce artificial states, neocolonialism, ethnostates, and apartheid. They are founded on principles that are misanthropic, asocial, and unhumanitarian. They have always led to an immense amount of suffering. But they are not inevitable, termination mode of democracy.
illuminating thanks for sharing this point of view.
funny that recently I came to a similar conclusion regarding power structures being corrupted anyway at the end, independently from the starting political form, is like we humans tend to be corrupt and violent at the end.
how many "democracies" are currently at war? or are doing violent covert or non covert operations/strategies? who controls that?
"I think it's upon us - all of humanity - to denounce artificial states, neocolonialism, ethnostates, and apartheid. They are founded on principles that are misanthropic, asocial, and unhumanitarian. They have always led to an immense amount of suffering. But they are not inevitable, termination mode of democracy."
this is gold, we can close the conversation here :)
> we humans tend to be corrupt and violent at the end
On a big picture "we" the west are perpetuating a type of colonialism. On the invisible "other side" in the global south, the outlook on a statement like "every conceivable political system always leads to corruption and violence" is quite different, better things are imaginable to them because it means liberation, freedom from oppressive forces, and so on. In the west it is the opposite, its unimaginable because an end to the oppressive forces means "we", means history literally ends, it's circular it's why the west views itself as the peak of civilization nothing that came before or after is even conceivably better than us.
> I don't view Ben Gvir's rise to a position of powers as a product of democracy, as much of a product of artificial states, neocolonialism, ethnostates, and apartheid.
From my understanding Ben Gvir(who has very little overall support in Israel from the population at large) getting elected is more of a consequence of Israel having nationwide proportional representation which allows extremists to get elected.
Ben Gvir then managed to become a minister due to Netanyahu having insufficient support from moderates to form a coalition without having to work with extremists like Ben Gvir.
> I think it's upon us - all of humanity - to denounce artificial states, neocolonialism, ethnostates, and apartheid.
So most states in the middle east should be dissolved? It's not clear what you're actually advocating for in practice.
> They are founded on principles that are misanthropic, asocial, and unhumanitarian. They have always led to an immense amount of suffering.
So we should dissolve most states including the United States due to flawed founding principals?
> From my understanding Ben Gvir(who has very little overall support in Israel from the population at large) getting elected is more of a consequence of Israel having nationwide proportional representation which allows extremists to get elected.
The existence of the support for those extremists has the same root cause that I stated in my original message: the artificial and strategic neocolonial state propped up by outside financial support with the expressed goal of establishing an ethnostate that eventually and inevitably led to apartheid.
> So most states in the middle east should be dissolved? It's not clear what you're actually advocating for in practice.
You can't unscramble an egg. Dissolution of dysfunctional but non-anarchic states is obviously a hyperbolic solution that I think you're aware brings nothing to the table as a suggestion.
What I'm advocating for in practice is quite clear in my original post, but I'll state it again: we need to denounce artificial states, neocolonialism, ethnostates, and apartheid. Much in the same way that we denounce war crimes, sex trafficking, and slavery.
> So we should dissolve most states including the United States due to flawed founding principals?
Again, you're bringing nothing to the table here with hyperbole. But in a way, yes, during Reconstruction a more heavy-handed approach should have been used to eliminate with great fury and prejudice the cultural desire for an apartheid state in the South, and maybe prevented or softened 150 years of suffering for black people and their descendants.
> The existence of the support for those extremists has the same root cause that I stated in my original message: the artificial and strategic neocolonial state propped up by outside financial support with the expressed goal of establishing an ethnostate that eventually led to apartheid.
Do you attribute Palestinian support for extremism to a similar root cause? Opinion polling indicates the extremism problem is far worse on the Palestinian side, Israeli extremism trends tend to be fairly reactionary to Palestinian extremism(i.e. Second Intifada) historically.
> What I'm advocating for in practice is quite clear in my original post, but I'll state it again: we need to denounce artificial states, neocolonialism, ethnostates, and apartheid. Much in the same way that we denounce war crimes, sex trafficking, and slavery.
So you're just advocating just for more virtue signalling instead of actual concrete actions? I don't see how that would meaningfully change the situation on the ground as I don't see how denouncing the right for Israel to exist is going to do anything except push Israel towards a more extreme position.
> But in a way, yes, during Reconstruction a more heavy-handed approach should have been used to eliminate with great fury and prejudice the cultural desire for an apartheid state in the South, and maybe prevented or softened 150 years of suffering for black people and their descendants.
Are you suggesting Israel also take a more heavy handed approach when it comes to eliminating the widespread practice of teaching of hate and antisemitism[0] to Palestinians?
> Do you attribute Palestinian support for extremism to a similar root cause?
Yes. But we typically don't call oppressed peoples "extremists". For example, I wouldn't call those who rebelled in the Warsaw Ghetto "extremists". I wouldn't call a 14 year old boy who has only known struggle his whole life under apartheid an "extremist". Apartheid also has had a lasting effect on oppressor / oppressed dynamics in South Africa in a sad and complicated way. There is a wrinkle that Muslim extremists fund Palestinian groups, but I view this as yin to the yang of Israeli settlement funding (also extremist). Two sides of the same apartheid coin.
> So you're just advocating just for more virtue signalling instead of actual concrete actions?
Calling everything one disagrees with "virtue signalling" is a tired trope. There is no solution that will occur in our lifetimes, because there is no benevolent and omnipotent authority that can snap their magic finger and cease the suffering that's occurring because of this apartheid ethnostate.
With my suggestion, I'm trying to prevent the next ethnostate disaster. Ideally, I would want our descendants to recoil in disgust when thinking of the concept of funding an ethnostate in the same way that we recoil in disgust at the concept of funding a sex trafficking ring. I will teach my children, and my children's children, that "A State for [] People" is disgusting, no matter what [] is - unless it is "A State for All People".
> I don't see how that would meaningfully change the situation on the ground as I don't see how denouncing the right for Israel to exist is going to do anything except push Israel towards a more extreme position.
It's not that Israel doesn't have a right to exist, you're putting words in my mouth. South Africa was once an apartheid state, and it continues to exist. Similarly, ethnostates need to find ways to transition away from being ethnostates. Being an ethnostate can only lead to crimes against humanity.
> Are you suggesting Israel also take a more heavy handed approach when it comes to eliminating the widespread practice of teaching of hate and antisemitism[0] to Palestinians?
If only I could trust the state of Israel to actually design a "heavy handed approach" that wasn't rape, pillage, murder, and terrorize. The Union could be trusted, but only barely. The Union famously allowed black women to testify against the Union soldiers who raped them. I could never imagine the state of Israel allowing a Palestinian to testify against an Israeli soldier who raped them. Not yet, at least.
> But we typically don't call oppressed peoples "extremists".
Many groups are oppressed to various degrees for various reasons but restoring to terrorism(especially against civilians) is arguably an extremist response. The two are not mutually exclusive.
> For example, I wouldn't call those who rebelled in the Warsaw Ghetto "extremists".
They were being exterminated. I don't recall there being much terrorism targeting German civilians during that rebellion either.
> I wouldn't call a 14 year old boy who has only known struggle his whole life under apartheid an "extremist".
It's not oppression that would make one an extremist, it would be for example holding extremist views such as the supporting of terrorist attacks against civilians. One can teach extremist views to a 14 year old boy, in fact it's often much easier to teach extremist views to children than to adults.
> Calling everything one disagrees with "virtue signalling" is a tired trope.
Advocating for more condemnation without proposing actual solutions is rather pointless unless your end goal is endless war.
> There is no solution that will occur in our lifetimes, because there is no benevolent and omnipotent authority that can snap their magic finger and cease the suffering that's occurring because of this apartheid ethnostate.
So we should just give up and advocate for policies that will clearly never lead to peace? Also an occupation is not the same as apartheid. Apartheid is race based discrimination while the situation with Israel/Palestine falls mostly under the category of citizenship based discrimination(which most countries practice to various degrees).
> With my suggestion, I'm trying to prevent the next ethnostate disaster. Ideally, I would want our descendants to recoil in disgust when thinking of the concept of funding an ethnostate in the same way that we recoil in disgust at the concept of funding a sex trafficking ring. I will teach my children, and my children's children, that "A State for [] People" is disgusting, no matter what [] is - unless it is "A State for All People".
The middle east is full of ethnostates, compared to most states in the region Israel does reasonably well at protecting the rights of minority ethnicity citizens.
> South Africa was once an apartheid state, and it continues to exist.
Sure, but I don't think black South Africans were advocating for the destruction of South Africa as a state during apartheid.
> Similarly, ethnostates need to find ways to transition away from being ethnostates.
How do you propose states do that? Israel is clearly never going to give Palestinians full citizenship when the Palestinians at large do not believe in equal rights.
> If only I could trust the state of Israel to actually design a "heavy handed approach" that wasn't rape, pillage, murder, and terrorize.
So should a different country or organization be trying to de-radicalize Palestinians?
> I could never imagine the state of Israel allowing a Palestinian to testify against an Israeli soldier who raped them. Not yet, at least.
Israel has allowed for testimony from Palestinians in cases to some degree AFAIU but I don't think simply being allowed to give testimony is really the main issue here. The real issues are more tied to the way justice is administered, systematic double standards and the way military law is applied to non-citizens. The lack of any sort of final peace agreement between Israel and Palestine is what perpetuates this system however.
Think we're done here. I don't see a cohesive theme that deserves a response in between your responses to very specific pieces of my argument rooted in deflection and whataboutism. I feel I've expressed my viewpoint sufficiently. I don't feel like debating the definition of "terrorism", "extremist views", "race", "South Africa", etc.
> Do you attribute Palestinian support for extremism to a similar root cause?
Defending your home and against genocide is not "extremism". Anyone who's familiar with the history of Palestine will understand why they fight for their homelands and families:
> Defending your home and against genocide is not "extremism".
The Nakba is not genocide, it might be considered ethnic cleansing but that's not remotely the same as genocide. It also wasn't just one side doing ethnic cleansing either, Israel has a large Arab minority population with full citizenship while the same is not true for Jews in other Arab countries or Palestinian controlled territories(i.e. Area A in the west bank).
Massive amounts of Jews were driven from their homes around the same time as the Nakba throughout the middle east and they are not fighting to take back their original homes. This idea that everyone can somehow go back to their original homes or ancestors homes only serves to perpetuate the conflict.
People flee from wars, sometimes that's simply the least bad option, I have ancestors that have lost their homes due to their home country losing a war of aggression but I am certainly not about to go fight to try and take back my ancestors homes. That's all settled history at this point.
> Anyone who's familiar with the history of Palestine will understand why they fight for their homelands and families
There's much more to it than just the Nakba, it's also the many years of Palestinians being used as a tool by Arab countries to fight Israel.
Keep in mind the UNRWA(UN agency which is in charge of Palestinian refugees) unlike the UNHCR(UN agency in charge of non-Palestinian refugees) does not have a mandate to resettle refugees which deliberately perpetuates the conflict. Arab countries also coordinated a refusal to grant Palestinian refugees or their descendants citizenship as a way to perpetuate the conflict.
Then there's the coordinated antisemitic terrorist propaganda taught to Palestinian children as well.
> The Nakba is not genocide, it might be considered ethnic cleansing but that's not remotely the same as genocide
It was absolutely an ethnic cleansing and the killing never stopped. Israel has been murdering Palestinians (and it's Arab neighbors), since its inception.
All of the things you're saying have been said by Zionists a million times, and presumably are being pumped out by the think tank in the OP to flood the internet with trainable propaganda. It will not work though, the truth is known by too many people.
Not just “a minister”, but the Minister of National Security. I mean, yeah, the “you can’t judge the intent of Israel’s security policy by Ben-Gvir” would maybe hold some water if he was, say, Minister of Tourism (though if a Tourism minister was telegraphing genocidal intent that wasn’t that of the government, you still wouldn't expect them to stay around long, either) but...
When such statements/actions are attributed to Ben-Gvir, I assume they and the objective nuanced truth are basically the same. I find it wild how people who are not like him defend him.
Ben-Gvir's first date with his wife (who was 15 then, when he was 26) was at the grave of Baruch Goldstein, a mass-murder that killed 29 Palestinians. Ben-Gvir kept a portrait of the guy in his office for years.
Zionists want you to believe the conflict began on October 7th, when people like him have been running Israel for a long time.
Foundation for Defense of Democracies is another Israeli think tank that poses as an American organization. If you see anything quoted from them realize it's fake propaganda in the service of a foreign country.
MEMRI is the US non-profit organization that provides translations from Arabic for the Western media:
"MEMRI was co-founded by Israeli ex-intelligence officer Yigal Carmon and Israeli-American political scientist Meyrav Wurmser in 1998. MEMRI describes itself as being independent and non-partisan. Some critics have described MEMRI as aiming to portray the Arab world and the Islamic world in a negative light by producing and disseminating incomplete or inaccurate translations of the original versions of the media reports that it republishes." (Wikipedia)
There's also supposed "UN watch" which is another innocuous looking Israeli front meant to sow confusion into decades long UN's attemmpts to deal with the mess jewish terror gangs in Palestine created by stealing massive amount of land from Palestinians in 1947-48 for their bigoted state project.
That explains a lot! Yesterday, I came across this article - Outrage In Oman Over Trump's Threat To Bomb The Sultanate... - https://www.memri.org/reports/outrage-oman-over-trumps-threa... and posted it on HN. But then, I had second thoughts as I had never heard of MEMRI and a scan of the website revealed a lot of antisemitic content and in general poor quality, tabloid like "hyped" up articles. The website also had no 'About Us' page that highlighted who runs it. All this made me suspicious and I immediately deleted the posted link on HN.
Yes. And these people have successfully managed to pollute the US information system with their "independent reporting" on the Middle East media for close to thirty years.
You can't openly bomb a bunch of women and children into the dirt, on a daily basis for months and years, and smooth it over with some think tank articles.
If only there was a solution on the table that's been there for years and that one side refuses to accept over and over again. And that can put a stop to bombing or dirt or whatever.
> If you think having a particular ethnicity in charge is equivalent to endorsing genocide, you miiiiiight be a little bit racist.
The democratically elected government of the Palestinians in Gaza(Hamas) has for a long time quite openly advocated for effectively genocide Jews/Israeli's, it's not racist to simply believe that Hamas is telling the truth in regards to what their end goals are.
> The democratically elected government of the Palestinians in Gaza
There's no such thing: the separate authority in Gaza was produced by Israeli military isolation of the separate parts of Palestine nominally administered by the PA, and how that facilitated Hamas local victory there in the intra-Palestinian civil war against the central government.
Also, the elections that were won by Hamas candidates before that were before most currently living Gazans were born, much less eligible to vote, and subsequent elections have not been held because Israel blocked the all-Palestine elections agreed to by Hamas and Fatah, so even if the “government of Palestinians in Gaza” were simply a direct result of those elections, which it is not, it would hardly be the “democratically elected” by those currently governed.
> There's no such thing: the separate authority in Gaza was produced by Israeli military isolation of the separate parts of Palestine nominally administered by the PA, and how that facilitated Hamas local victory there in the intra-Palestinian civil war against the central government.
The election that brought Hamas to power in Gaza was widely considered to be free and fair.[0]
> Also, the elections that were won by Hamas candidates before that were before most currently living Gazans were born, much less eligible to vote, and subsequent elections have not been held because Israel blocked the all-Palestine elections agreed to by Hamas and Fatah, so even if the “government of Palestinians in Gaza” were simply a direct result of those elections, which it is not, it would hardly be the “democratically elected” by those currently governed.
And yet polling indicates if another vote was held Hamas would likely still win, in both Gaza and the West Bank, so it's essentially a moot point. It's not just Israel that has blocked elections, Fatah has also not wanted elections because they know they would lose. The problem is that Palestinians have in reality largely supported extremists far more than moderates, that may change but reducing Palestinian support for extremism is ultimately what needs to change for there to be a chance at having some long term peace agreement.
If you lock women and children in a ghetto, then bomb and shoot them relentlessly for months and years, people are going to want to know what book you are reading.
> If you lock women and children in a ghetto, then bomb and shoot them relentlessly for months and years, people are going to want to know what book you are reading.
This is an absolutely insane comparison, Hamas is free to surrender and give up their weapons if they want the bombing to stop, the Jews of the Warsaw Ghetto had no similar opportunity.
> I don't think even I would think surrender, in those circumstances, makes a great deal of sense.
Why not? That's what typically happens when one side loses a war, I'm not sure how prolonging the conflict is helpful.
> And I'm an atheist.
So am I.
> I'm also British.
Funny enough I am as well(in addition to a couple others). History is full of people losing their homes and becoming refugees like some of my ancestors did, that's often much better than the alternative of staying to fight and die. I am certainly not trying to get their homes back as that is long settled history.
> I've come to believe that it's pretty impossible to understand Israel-Palestine without the lens of religion.
From my understanding according to common Islamic teachings non-Muslims are supposed to be Dhimmi's[0](i.e. second class citizens) and be ruled over by Muslim's. So I think this is probably the source of a lot of the issues with the Israel-Palestine conflict, although there are other factors in play as well.
"Not formally" rather implies you think it was. Northern Ireland was/is part of the UK, so civil war I could probably agree with.
The reason I mentioned religion was nothing to do with the requirements it places on how things should happen, but rather about the entitlement and infallibility that a belief that god has decreed something can grant people's mindset and outlook.
I'm not sure what meaning you can ascribe to this kind of statement, because whilst it is factually true in isolation, it also omits so much information it's almost meaningless.
There's plenty of evidence that the Israeli government is composed of people with a similar outlook, just with a power imbalance that affords them the opportunity to be more politically sophisticated.
History rhymes - I'm pretty sure that Jews in the Polish Ghetto had pretty negative views about the people detaining them there. Do you hold that against them?
> There's plenty of evidence that the Israeli government is composed of people with a similar outlook, just with a power imbalance that affords them the opportunity to be more politically sophisticated.
Israel does have some problems with extremists getting elected but that's partially due to the proportional representation system making it easier for extremists to get elected without widespread support from the population.
> I'm pretty sure that Jews in the Polish Ghetto had pretty negative views about the people detaining them there. Do you hold that against them?
Were the Jews in the Polish Ghetto terrorizing/murdering random German civilians? I'm sure they had a very negative view of the Nazi's but it's not a particularly comparable situation as the Jews were being exterminated regardless of their actions.
Gazans are being exterminated regardless of their actions.
The Warsaw ghettos didn't exist for very long. People are people, treat them the same way and you'll probably get similar results.
Of course, in this case both sides have magical thinking involved that gives them a divine blessing, so that changes things somewhat and makes it harder to reason with them.
Obviously the parallel I've drawn is extremely provocative. The Nazis started with a belief of dehumanism and acted on it. In the case of Israelis and Palestinians it's just the direction of travel over decades, but they look the same in many ways for a reason.
> Gazans are being exterminated regardless of their actions.
That's simply factually inaccurate, Hamas started the latest war while the population of Gaza was growing. The Jews started the Warsaw Ghetto uprising while they were being actively exterminated(i.e. population declining).
The population of Gaza has been declining over the last 2 years as a direct result of 10s of thousands of Gazas being killed, including thousands of kids.
The methods thankfully differ, but the goals are pretty similar.
Both contain an ethnonational conception of the state, seek to secure political sovereignty for a particular ethnonational people, attach historical/national significance to territory, and contain expansionist/settlement currents aimed at extending that people's presence and political control over territory.
And the direction of movement is towards similarity (not away from it) - eg nation state bill.
Israel's main strategy until recently appeared to be to maximise suffering to force displacement.
I don't really see a realistic peaceful strategy for Gazans based on decades of history, they have little power. It's like an amplified Northern Ireland.
Hamas is the democratically elected government of Gaza and retains a high level of support amongst the population. The population could put more pressure on Hamas to disarm but so far it has been fairly minimal.
> Israel's main strategy until recently appeared to be to maximise suffering to force displacement.
Israel's strategy before October 7th was one of containment, but that clearly failed so they switched to a strategy of proactive threat management.
Israel probably should just fully occupy the territories in the short term and make a more serious attempt at Palestinian de-radicalization so that hopefully some sort of two state solution eventually becomes viable. Occupation with de-radicalization worked with the Nazi's and Imperial Japan at the end of WW2 but Israeli's just really don't want to have to fully occupy Gaza so that's going to be politically problematic.
> I don't really see a realistic peaceful strategy for Gazans based on decades of history, they have little power.
They had opportunities for peace, Palestinian leadership ultimately threw those opportunities away by refusing to even so much as propose a concrete peace deal that would be acceptable.
The only solution that has ever worked in that region was 0-state. ie they were governed by some larger empire. Some call the US the empire this time, but it's not.
Why would israelis ever agree to give up control of their government? They hold all the cards here, any solution will have to be one that favors israel because the status quo is just fine for them
If the US backs out the hard liners gain even more control, ally with china, and begin their final solution to the palestinian problem. Israelis would go north korea before a one state solution.
That's the thing though, no other world power would sign up for this kind of relationship with Israel. We're giving them protection and paying them for it too. There's a reason Russia and China don't go head to head with us over the Mid East, but Russia will do it in Ukraine.
These trite replies also worked 20 years ago, but not today.
People that have read history know your assertion - vaguely suggesting it was the Palestinians that rejected many peace deals - know that this is completely false.
Please do tell why an Israeli Prime Minister was assassinated?
> vaguely suggesting it was the Palestinians that rejected many peace deal
I am not vaguely suggesting it. I am firmly suggesting it. This is not false, it's completely true. 1936 Peel Commission. 1947 UN Partition. Post 1967 countless attempts to do land for peace deals. 1999 Camp David attempts, 2000 Taba. 2008 negotiations between Abbas and Olmert.
If not a 2 state solution, what exactly are you advocating?
I guess your viewpoint on that varies entirely based on your preferred time period, and my responses vary based on how realistic or honest I believe the response is.
I'm not sure there is a win-win solution, and I think there are sizeable elements on both sides that don't want one, but the current approach absolutely won't lead to one.
My preference is for minimising the suffering of children.
At present the long run situation seems to be that one group of people (who - whether you like it or not - were displaced from their land) suffer continuous stress and roughly 50 times the death and injury rates than the other group of people who live mostly normal lives with the threat of terror attacks.
Entertaining the idea that those people are going become less extreme under these conditions seems rather unlikely.
In Northern Ireland the numbers killed on both sides (including IRA terror attacks within Britain) were a dramatically closer ratio.
I think it is pretty much impossible to achieve anything politically when the side without power is asked to trust the side with power when it sees little restraint.
If someone stole your food, and then offered to give you crumbs as a peace deal, would you accept it?
You can quantify the number of peace deals as much as you want. But when you don't present the facts and context behind it, you're being purposely deceptive.
It is interesting how much clout Israel had, they put a lot of work into developing that, and they seemed to have just expended it all as far as US public opinion goes.
I'll say this a third time. And the importance of this article is not the method. It is the motive. Using AI to whitewash war crimes is not cool at all.
Itamar Ben-Gvir, just recently, stated that he wants to kill 30-40 Palestinians every night. He said so, publicly.
On television.
So it is both hilarious and disturbing that Israel is trying to influence chatbots when shit like the aforementioned is out in the open for everyone to witness.
Despite the efforts, I have seen an increase in anti-zionist sentiment on the internet. Most notable on the right from people like Tucker Carlson en Candace Owens. People are tired of fighting another Middle-Eastern war for Israel.
I see both a lot of left and right criticism of Israel on YouTube, and yeah, on the left it's all about Israel's actions and policies specifically, and often Zionism as an ideology, and the criticism is often lodged by left-leaning Jews.
On the right, certainly the comments sections at least definitely feature some pretty alarming bigoted tropes--the comments explicitly make the jump from being about Israel to being about "the Jews". One could definitely make the same argument about some of the content, though most of it definitely seems to fall short of where the viewers want it to in this regard.
As someone leaning left with big disagreements with the US right atm, I think the right in America would feel the same way if they felt their country's foreign, and to some extent domestic, policy was being hijacked by a small country in sub-Saharan Africa, or Asia (or Europe for that matter). They signed up for America First.
Well the Morocco lobby and the Cuba exile lobby (CANF) are both pretty powerful and both explicitly model themselves after AIPAC. CANF also isn't registered under FARA (though the Morocco one is). Admittedly, neither of them are nearly as powerful as AIPAC
The American conservatives against Israel are self-consistent in that view. America first, not Israel, not Palestine either. But the Republican party line isn't that, it's MIGA.
American leftists... idk what they want. They can't even explain it, it's like they're taking radio commands from Qatar or Iran that they only barely understand.
Israel, who has made itself the standard bearer for and home of Judaism, is behaving reprehensibly. Do they not think that legitimate anti-Israeli-policy sentiment would bleed over into illegitimate anti-semitism, particularly when Israeli government officials themselves are openly racist and genocidal?
Not really. Republican party is 99% owned by Israeli lobby. I used to say it's both sides, but recent House and Senate bills relating to this have been way more partisan than ever before, like the one that would merge parts of the US and Israeli military passed House with almost 0 Dem votes.
One interesting comparison, the Twelve Day War against Iran in 2025 had Democrat support. Despite their rhetoric, they voted to give Israel huge emergency funding. But they're truly voting against the 2026 Iran War.
One genuinely poisonous aspect of Israeli policy is that the more Jews as a people are persecuted, the better Israel as a nation does: demographically, economically, and diplomatically[1].
It was true in the days of Avraham Stern, and it's true today. It creates some truly horrific perverse incentives.
[1] By dint of being the "victim", even if it's not Israel the nation being victimized. A disastrous category error that the nation of Israel exploits quite shamelessly.
I think the "it's just SEO" or "propaganda isn't new" comments are missing the bigger picture. Given how LLMs are effectively being treated as core processing components by so many automations, generating information to skew LLM training could be considered similar to adding a back door to an actual CPU.
For example, if someone writes a generic prompt to flag offensive language, the LLM would flag certain political views whether or not the language was offensive. Causing friction and effectively discrimination against groups of people even though it was not the writer's intention.
An even more serious example would be someone in the military screening targets and the LLM marking a school or hospital as a valid target without the user intending to.
To be clear, I'm not stating that either of these doesn't happen intentionally, but that any manipulation of LLM training data can cause these things to happen when the user did not intend it, and hence it's similar to adding a back door or corrupting a CPU.
Really depends on the country. E.g., Israel has enjoyed a lot of support from the US, both officially and in public opinion, until just the last couple years.
For example here in Eastern Europe when people hear "Israeli" they tend to assume it means "Russian with Israeli passport, probably here to avoid sanctions or outbid locals on real estate".
I'm sure it's very different in Turkey or say Thailand where they have Israel-born Israeli tourists, and surely different in US (though I have no idea what it is).
I am from Eastern Europe and people here "assumed" a lot of things about Jews way before Israel was even a thing. Let's not pretend Eastern Europeans would have loved Jews if it weren't for "Israel".
> Many non-Israeli Jews view Israel's actions as abhorent, particularly younger Jews.
And this comes of your own polling? As a non-Israeli Jew, I've seen quite the opposite. They closed ranks in the face of an external threat, especially the younger ones. Ignore Hollywood and Hannah Einbinders of the world - that is not the reality.
This analysis includes findings from a survey of 12,574 U.S. adults, 10,091 of whom are part of the Center’s American Trends Panel (ATP). The remaining 2,483 respondents include oversamples of Jews, Muslims and Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints members from SSRS’ Opinion Panel, Ipsos’ KnowledgePanel and NORC’s AmeriSpeak Panel. We conducted the survey May 4-17, 2026, and it has an overall margin of error of plus or minus 1.3 percentage points.
They drew conclusions about Jews from subset of Jews from 2,483 respondents that included an unknown amount of Jews, Muslims, Mormons, and whoever is a member of Ipsos’ KnowledgePanel and NORC’s AmeriSpeak Panel. I am not sure this is especially representative.
Even so, I don't know if I would characterize 54 to 47 as viewing as "abhorrent" as OP said.
They also say "We weren’t able to survey enough Muslims to show how their views differ by age", so I guess the number of Jews isn't that much below 2,483. According to Gemini that already gives +-2% margin of error, which sounds good enough to me.
> Even so, I don't know if I would characterize 54 to 47 as viewing as "abhorrent" as OP said.
Agreed, also not quite "closed ranks" though. Exactly in between I guess.
Re: Eastern Europe - I was referring to the Pew Research Center survey conducted across 34 European countries in 2015–17.
Re: attitudes of younger Jews I'm really referring to Non-Americans (Americans are a special case). With American Jews the age gradient effect is there, but I don't know about the impact of the last couple of years.
Take data points in Europe and attitudes are marked and there is data to support that Israel's recent actions are absolutely being rejected by younger Jews.
News media is considered more reliable in Europe over the US (by measures of the population) so that could certainly be playing into it.
Based on data, the American population distrusts is own news media more than the European population distrusts its news media (markedly so if you consider only Western Europe). In 2026, only 25% of Americans said they trusted news overall [Reuters]
The European media landscape differs - a recent study covering 24 European markets found that experts' assessments of accuracy broadly matched public trust: outlets regarded by experts as providing accurate information backed by credible sources tended to be the outlets the public trusted most. Public-service media generally scored particularly well.
The American population also considers its own news media much more partisan than Europeans consider their news media. Americans are more likely to inhabit separate information ecosystems (which by their very nature makes them less factual and more political - ie they are looking for what they want to hear).
European here with little political knowledge. I thought Israel is just some kind of liberal safe space, I am still sometimes confused what it appears to really be but try to avoid having a strong opinion either way.
I always imagine apolitical people looking at a mushroom cloud thinking to themselves "perhaps I should've been more political" moments before their atoms drift apart.
I am not apolotical, how could one be really? It's more like the whole topic is so full of hate, propaganda, missleading information from all sides that it's either I spend a few weeks or months reading into the history of it or I better don't develop a strong opinion because I likely would be wrong in many points.
No idea where everyone is taking the time from to read up the whole history of things when they publicly propagate their strong opinions about all these complex situations.
To clarify I have an opinion, but I am aware that my opinion is only based on some obvious facts and ignores a lot of the history, so I don't consider it worth fighting for.
It depends on which side we are on, that determines how the conflict needs to be sold to the on average decent but apolitical person like yourself. As allied against nazis? Not complicated. Fighting russia's invasion of Ukraine? Not complicated. Fighting against Palestinian resistance to their genocide? Complicated. But like South African apartheid turned from complicated to simple over a few decades so you will be dragged along eventually by us "political" people.
It even works with other things too, like people starving on the streets or ~25k people dying from no health care every year, its "complicated", it will always be complicated (until it isn't).
Perhaps the Israeli government should read the UN Convention on Genocide and reconsider its behavior, if it doesn’t want to be observed committing genocide.
Not true. It will only happen if they lose the information war. During 2023/2024 Iran did this exact same thing flooding the internet and no one hates them infact it worked and people link and share and boost their articles.
well then, maybe we should ask ourself why the hate! both against the propaganda (that everybody does, even if it's a very poor claim to say they all do it why hate us) and against the bomb to the ground war and genocidal violence happening.
Why the hate against this if everybody else does it?
and everybody else does it is a decent argument?
Maybe we could do war without killing all civilians and razing cities to the ground?
but why do we have to do war? or why do we need to defend ourself?
That's the whole point. Antisemitism is widely accepted as wrong. Israel goes out of its way to paint any opposition to Israel as antisemitism, trying to piggyback on that sentiment. Conflating Jews with Israel is something both sides engage in. As a non-Israeli Jew who is quite opposed to what the modern state of Israel engages in, I'm real tired of being used as a pawn like this.
Interesting but nothing new, all countries doing the same but any information coming from Israel is clearly poisoned to try compensate the negative image that they clearly represent.
Just see the garbage coming from a web search (totally polluted and poisoned with the same spam output quality since years) so this is just an extension of that towards the input of ai.
they can try hard but any person with a non-biased brain does not need to do a google search or ask ai to reach then truth.
Facts are facts, like what was represented in Schindler's list and what is happening now in middle east or other conflicts.
I think the world is becoming much more aware of what real zionism is and that scares them a lot, hence the needed info manipulation.
But we now know who you really are!
And yeah their state members daily political statements (about hate violence and racism) just confirm this every day, anybody can understand that and no info pollution needed.
Mods will almost always turn off flagging for stories if you email them. I think it's too easy to flag something to death and not enough people know they can just email the mods
What does it means to be a "fake" think tank? 80% of think tanks are already propaganda vehicles. A low end think tank is basically a pretentious blog.
presumably that you don't have employees that do any of the proverbial thinking, which is the case here.
Every think tank has its biases and funding sources but something like RAND is an actual entity at which people do research, this "Hanover Public Policy Institute" has nothing to do with Hanover, policy and isn't an institute, but a deliberately misleadingly presenting arm of the Israeli government proxied through a German advertising company
I had the same exact thought. It's implied, but I don't think the article explicitly states that the content produced by the think tank has minimal or no human involvement.
I find intensive marketing/PR efforts are often inversely correlated with the claims being made - whether it's products or geopolitics. Israel certainly engages in very intense marketing on certain fronts, but truth cannot be obscured forever. In Physics the law of conservation includes not only matter and energy, but also information (Information cannot be destroyed from the Universe).
I've also found this to be true, but also only in relatively modern times. For instance during the Cold War there was an obscene amount of propaganda, but it was mostly true. For instance the wide array of cheap affordable goods in American shelves was constantly flaunted, but not in the least bit misleading.
I don't understand the modern effort to engage in 'information warfare' as a thing in and of itself. Each time it collapses and people sees what was 'really' happening, it just makes them that much less likely to believe you next time. And you also create a significant number of perpetually jaded people who will basically never believe you again, even when you're telling the truth. Countless politicians have proudly paraded around their pristine, seemingly untouched, copies of Meditations, but perhaps they should go for more foundational works, like The Boy Who Cried Wolf.
The scale of a war is more often decided by who decides to unexpectedly jump in moreso than the initial party. WW1 starts when a Bosnian Serb assassinates an Austro-Hungarian royal leading to Austria-Hungary invading Serbia. The the next thing you know Brits are killing Germans over it.
There are endless border clashes. Even in very recent times we have Armenia-Azerbaijan, Afghanistan-Pakistan, Thailand-Cambodia, and many more. Wiki gives more than 60 in the 21st century [1], and we're just getting started! And if other parties had decided to get involved and start jamming up the escalation ladder, any of those could have easily turned into a much bigger war, instead of being just yet another relatively inconsequential border conflict.
Or imagine if another country (perhaps Russia or China) had decided to 'pull a US' when the US invaded any of the countless countries we've invaded over the years - Iraq, Syria, Libya, Afghanistan, Venezuela, Yemen, and so on just in quite recent times. That could very well have led to WW3, but it didn't because they didn't.
Not sure it is true. If it was true that all Russians know it’s just propaganda and that they are just engaged in an illegal genocide then less Russians would sign up for the army.
Maybe that is the rationale. It's the only thing that'd make sense, but for problem that it doesn't. When somebody, or some entity, lies to you - that entity becomes the liar. People may not want to believe 'the enemy', but that's going to be because of their own ideological reasons, and not because they now refuse to believe anybody. On the contrary non-ideologues may even be ever more swayed towards your enemy as a result of this.
Personally I think the issue is that after WW2 we were left with a large scale and ever growing intelligence apparatus, but with ever fewer appropriate tasks for them. That led directly to the era of recklessly overthrowing nations, often to our own detriment, and gradually transitioned to the modern era of aimless 'information warfare' which I think will ultimately be shown to be very much to our detriment, once again.
One goal of modern propaganda is to make it irrelevant when the truth inevitably comes out.
Look at the US situation. It’s clear that Trump is a rapist - the truth has come out. It’s clear he’s corrupt. For all the “release the full Epstein files” discussion, it really wouldn’t change anything.
The truth will come out but will the people who can make it matter be listening?
I don't understand why people who don't like fake news and manipulation won't embrace the social graph as a public good.
If enough people were willing to publicly certify that their fellow contacts are human, anybody could then assign trust to each social graph node based on the trust they have in the path to them. It would completely decentralize the algorithms and remove the fake accounts as less trustworthy.
I think people tried this with PGP but it never really caught on.
The social graph is the source of the fake news and manipulation. Before social media the social graph was email and it was all the same slop and misinformation. Before that it was literally physical mail. Look up chain letters. Truly nothing is new.
If I certify my racist thanksgiving ruining uncle is a real person that doesn’t actually help you avoid misinformation.
I honestly don’t care if the information I consume comes from a person or a robot. I only care if it is accurate or not. Those dimensions are orthogonal.
Mass reporting means spending huge amount of reputation which doesn't really invalidate reputation of people who still certify that the person exists.
The problem with the current systems is that reputation buying is not transparent. In my system, it would be a public record, who endorsed who. So you could go back and track the fake reputation.
Also real people have some TTL with their accounts. Unlike links, "I am real person" is not nearly as fungible.
This is exactly how bubbles of influence appear. Rarely do people from different leanings (social, political, economical etc) have spheres of opinion which intersect, and therefore get trapped in areas of general agreement. The social graph cannot be trusted to create a generally trusted source, because peoples innate distrust of things which differ from their own opinion skew this model heavily.
I should have noted, my comment is about facts. Opinion you can have, if you think it's beneficial for you not to trust (or trust) some nodes, do so!
The public social graph would be about who is a human, that can certify facts. Their opinion wouldn't really matter until you chose it to matter for you. Them being a human witness would only add credence to the accounts of the facts they witnessed, nothing more. You can still choose to disbelief the event if you have a good reason to (for example, even if you might believe a guy from Russia is a real person based on his social graph, if he certifies an event in Michigan, you might be skeptical of that account and decide to lower your own trust in that person). So there is a difference between the shared social graph - which is about a collective belief of who is a person, and your own trust, which you can modify as you wish. Unlike with Google and other big tech providers, there is not a singular "algorithm for trust" that can be manipulated.
You seem to be saying it will fail because people are tribal. I believe it will not fail, because the benefits of knowing the local social graph of each person will outweigh the tendency for opinion to split based on tribe. And the reason I think so is that trust evolved and exists in society; we do not only trust ourselves, and that's only possible if something like a social graph can work. The only issue is the scale, which can be solved by using a computer instead of computing it in our little heads.
It doesn't scale as a consumer good. Letting go of consumerist habits is just as hard as breaking any other habit.
Also, it could just as easily be faked, like so much else. Even if someone offered such an assurance, I wouldn't trust random strangers on the internet. At best it would become an arms race between "this is not a real person" and those who sell fake assurances. And it would be one more weapon to damage anyone's reputation you don't like. "not a real person!"
I am not really sure how it could be faked. The fake assurance, in order to work, must be connected to you.
By default you could choose not to trust. If you don't trust random strangers it's OK. So I don't see how it would damage someone's reputation worse than today.
It would potentially only add trust. Arguably, today we have bots because we have no other option than to trust without justification. With the public social graph, the trust above the baseline would be justifiable.
So what happens when people are paid or otherwise incentivised to 'trust'?
This model was used in the beginning of the web, where links to your site from a well trusted website would increase the score and therefore SEO of your own site. This very quickly turned into a business of people selling hidden paid site links, and evolved into the paid editorial model we see on every news site today.
Hm, that's an interesting point. But wasn't problem of that model that the social graph (links) were not really public, but rather hidden within a search engine such as Google? Maybe if they are public the problem would be mitigated.
They do. It's already like this with business recommendations, always use a personal reference before anything else.
I've thought about making some digital reputation system that cannot be gamed. You can rep people you know and then query if there's any path of rep from you to a random person. The global number of reps you have doesn't matter, only paths. Problem is this only works if the target person can't tell that you repped them, which is impossible to hide because they can just rep you with a fake account then see if there's a path to their real account. But maybe with some fuzzing.
> ...a firm co-founded by Daniel Rosenberg, the producer of Spike Lee’s “Inside Man.”
Apparently he was an executive producer, in case anyone else is confused, as I was initially, by the fact that Brian Grazer is credited as producer of that film.
It's interesting that (as per the article) the work pumped out by this synthetic think tank does not seem to align / disfavours the official party line of the country. You'd imagine if this was propaganda, it would be supportive of the official stance. I wonder what the objective is then, reputation-building for later influence? Something else?
> the work pumped out by this synthetic think tank does not seem to align / disfavours the official party line of the country
The article DOES NOT say this- it says that sometimes this seems to be the case, but reports exactly one example of extremely little significance. In the meanwhile,
"Piro, Inc, the firm that created the Hanover Institute, has received $900,000 from the Israeli government for its work."
Opening the linked example, one sees that the article is basically dedicated to laundering the idea that there were many "antisemitic incidents" at Columbia University.
The article doesn't say that the work disfavors the party line, just that they don't always align perfectly. Which isn't that surprising considering that governments make self-contradictory statements all the time (consider Trump, for example).
I read this paper (https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.13722) on pre-training poisoning of LLMs. The authors demonstrated that poisoning 0.1% of the pretraining dataset can measurably manipulate beliefs of the model.
What I read about is a more sophisticated supply chain attack. But these days, search previews use retrieval-augmented generation to parse websites to generate answers on the fly. In that case you don't need to poison the supply chain; good SEO is enough.
It's remarkable how much it hasn't worked:
Google "the Hanover institute" and you get an AI summary that references various Palestinian activist websites, with no actual link to 'the Hanover institute'. Google "the Hanover institute website" and you'll drag a URL out of Google AI, but it isn't clickable!
Belloc's The Jews is a nice introduction to this issue. He wrote it a century ago when things were similarly heating up, but before things had clearly boiled over.
He was prescient when he said:
"For if the quarrel is allowed to rise unchecked and to proceed unappeased, we shall come, unexpectedly and soon, upon one of these tragedies which have marked for centuries the relations between this peculiar nation and ourselves."
He was a devout Catholic, had Jewish friends, and devoted a chapter to what was wrong with antisemitism. He was earnestly trying to solve the problem before it was too late.
In the topic presented there is really no relevance to Israel being a Jewish state. This is a nation state acting nefariously to protect its interests, something I am quite sure many nations are either doing right now or will shortly start doing. e.g. I could absolutely picture Russia doing exactly this.
> He was a devout Catholic, had Jewish friends, and devoted a chapter to what was wrong with antisemitism
And yet he insisted that Jewish people are separate from any nation and should never be considered part of the native population of the country they were born and raised in. Which is, you know, antisemitic.
It's telling that your perception of a nation state acting badly leads you to a book named "The Jews".
Or Russia, Iran, China, USA etc. Are you saying USA has done nothing to try and influence the rest of the world? CIA would never try and influence others
Reports are published under the Institute’s name rather than an individual’s. That is the convention at institutional publishers, and it fits how the work is made: every report is produced against one standard and one citation bank. A reader is asked to weigh the sources, which are named in the sentence that carries each figure, rather than the author.
> A small disclaimer at the bottom of the webpage notes that the organization was created on behalf of the Israeli Government Advertising Agency by Piro, Inc, a firm co-founded by Daniel Rosenberg, the producer of Spike Lee’s “Inside Man.”
"Small disclaimer" implies that the site is attempting to hide its affiliation. But their "about" page, which is linked at the top of every page, is quite clear:
WHO FUNDS THIS WORK
The Institute’s materials are distributed by Piro, Inc. on behalf of Havas Media Germany GmbH, acting for the Israel Government Advertising Agency (LaPam). That relationship is registered under the Foreign Agents Registration Act, registration 7732, and every report published here is filed with the Department of Justice, where the registration and the filings can be read in full, and the funding page sets out when the relationship began and what the funder does not decide.
That registration is why this site does not call itself independent, nonpartisan or neutral. What it offers instead is a method a reader can check: every figure carries the body that produced it, the year and the number, inside the sentence that makes the claim; sources that are a party to the events they describe are labelled as such and their counts are never presented as independently verified; and where the evidence is contested, the competing findings are given by name and date rather than settled. No report recommends a policy or tells a reader what to conclude. Those are properties of the work that can be tested against the work, which is the only kind of claim worth making here.
> The institute’s “data reports” have footnotes and tables of contents, and they present arguments in a neutral tone, helping them appeal to chatbots like Claude or Gemini.
So, they're guilty of good SEO?
> Piro’s website says that it “author(s) content engineered for how LLMs evaluate credibility,” describing this service as "AI Story Optimization." Others refer to this practice of influencing artificial intelligence as “LLM poisoning.”
So the issue is that they use a LLM-friendly SEO service?
> Many of the reports are formulaic, starting with an innocent question that someone might ask a chatbot.
> “What Caused the Displacement of Palestinians in 1948?”
> “Which Humanitarian Organizations Have Documented Israeli War Crimes?”
> “What is the Current Situation in the Gaza Strip?”
> In an article titled “Is the IDF the World’s Most Moral Army?” the Hanover Institute cites a 2022 poll that found that 47% of Israeli Jews believed that statement. Another report casts doubt on UNICEF's assertion that “90% of water and institutional infrastructure has been damaged or destroyed” in Gaza. Many of the reports conclude by linking the topic to rising antisemitism, oftentimes citing the same studies.
So, the accusation is that they frame their opinion articles as a Q&A, and focus each article on a single question?
I've read these articles: they are well written and make a visible effort to provide sources, while being transparent about the fact that they are not neutral.
It's perfectly fine to criticize the actual content of these articles. But attacking their credibility by accusing them of "LLM poisoning" and implying that they're disguising their affiliation, is ridiculous and should be called out.
nice try guys, no need to generate confusion also here, the purpose target and implementations are very clear from the article and the actors behind even more.
please do not pollute this thread with misinformation too.
hah you make me laugh, trying really hard, so typical from your society!
problem is the world now knows, no need to cry about antisemitism.
keep trying, the truth is clear, you are only doing bad evil things since long time and your government and ministers states it publicly too!
If my ministers would claim the dream of killing kids or people I would feel totally ashamed of them and I would not support it online spamming every thread!
I haven't lived in Israel for more than 10 years, it is not my society, and yet I am ashamed of the current goverment and never ever have I supported them online. I have done more in my lifetime to oppose these people than you will do even in 10,000 years, in campaigning, in arrests, in protests and in court. I wish your posts made me laugh too, but they actually fill me with sadness.
Thanks for this, it's crazy that I had to scroll so far to see it on this site.
The headline sounds sensational, then if you actually read the article you realize the author just made up his own framing entirely, or he just discovered that AEO and GEO exists and thinks it's sinister?
I thought maybe there were going to be some markers about how they're targeting LLMs specifically there was nothing like that.
And if you go to https://hanoverinstitute.com/llms.txt ...honestly, you could maybe form a critique about implying to LLMs that your wagon is hitched to the Department of Justice on line 5! But this guy didn't even seem to find this file...
"Israel creates fake think tank" is the headline. What is a "think tank"? What distinguishes a real one from a fake one? Does "the Hanover Institute" claim to be a think tank?
The author does not answer any of these questions, only saying "At a glance, the Hanover Institute for Public Policy looks like a new think tank dedicated to Israel/Palestine": in other words, he glanced at it, decided it looked like a think tank, then decided it wasn't a "real" one, and then went from there. That is very much the author's framing instead of something grounded in objectivity.
>The article clearly explain the information poisoning
The article says "Others refer to this practice of influencing artificial intelligence as 'LLM poisoning.'"
But the Anthropic paper that it cites to support this claim never discusses persuasive content, propaganda, or credibility-mimicking material at all; it uses "poisoning" for a technically distinct attack class. So the citation doesn't support the claim as written.
>stop polluting this thread in an organized and selfish self supporting way. so typical
What do you mean by this? How am I organized? Why is it selfish to criticize an article?
everything I posted was in response to you; nothing is random.
>confused informations
Just saying they're confused is meaningless; if you think I am wrong about something, feel free to give actual rebuttals.
>tentative
This word is defined as "not certain or fixed; provisional" or "done without confidence; hesitant". It is an adjective, not a noun. I genuinely do know know what you mean when you use this word.
>a tentative of misinformation
>>What does this mean?
claiming not knowing what tentative means in english is clearly on purpose and could anyway be translated if it was a language problem.
again here:
>tentative
>>This word is defined as "not certain or fixed; provisional" or "done without confidence; hesitant". It is an adjective, not a noun. I genuinely do know know what you mean when you use this word.
Everybody knows what a tentative is and also looking it up and reporting a single possible translation of its meaning is just ridiculous.
again stop dragging the conversation off topic and stop on purpose provoking.
the repeated statements clearly confirms your negative intention and your previous content does not add any value.
for the sake of clarity to the readers I will report here the points more clearly again:
- mentioning SEO,AEO or other stuff here is clearly a tentative of misinformation and confusion of readers. moving the attention to an off topic relationship.
- the claim "the author just made up his own framing entirely" is clearly an accusation without any reasoning or logic backing it up
- The article clearly explain the information poisoning, fast paced publication and ties to government, nothing else. and thats the main point and target.
I will not waste more time on replying to purposely fabricated statements or questions.
I have spoken English my whole life and have never heard anyone use "tentative" as a noun. Why must you assume I am trolling, why can you not believe what I am saying? Is it possible that you are using the wrong word? It seems noteworthy to me that you did not actually answer my question or provide a definition for how you are using, you chose to assume bad faith on my part instead and use that as a basis to dismiss the actual arguments I made.
That said, I would be happy to stop arguing about the word "tentative". I would much rather you engage with the substantive arguments that I made.
>the repeated statements clearly confirms your negative intention
What repeated statements? If it's important to you for understanding then pick something that I repeated and I can try to explain.
> ::your three list items::
These are just repeating of arguments that I made and offered responses to. You have chosen to not respond to them.
Let's pick one and try again:
> The article clearly explain the information poisoning
If you search the article for "poison", there is exactly one reference: "Others refer to this practice of influencing artificial intelligence as 'LLM poisoning.'" The word "refer links to an article by Anthropic that is categorically unrelated. Go read that article and answer: does their definition of "poisoning" match what the author of this post means?
I would say no: the article says "malicious actors can inject specific text into these posts to make a model learn undesirable or dangerous behaviors, in a process known as poisoning", and then follows up with an example of "introducing backdoors". That is very different than whatever the Hanover Institute site is doing.
If you would prefer to argue substance, answer me that: did the author cite that paper correctly? I am saying "no" and have given a reason, what is your response?
this clearly a defensive stance without a real motivstion.
"It's perfectly fine to criticize the actual content of these articles. But attacking their credibility by accusing them of "LLM poisoning" and implying that they're disguising their affiliation, is ridiculous and should be called out."
called out? yes your defensive and not-motivated stance should be called out and this comment flagged.
disguising affiliation and poisoning information is exactly what happens in a propaganda campaign and in the activities carried and clearly explained in the article.
This fraud is convincing enough to trick the LLMs, but pretty obvious to humans who will eventually come up with countermeasures. Moving forward, watch for some well-established think tanks starting to specialize in slopaganda laundering.
The wildcard is the "antisemite!" Accusations that get flung your way when you point out the genocide. If they can train the LLMs to associate the Gaza slaughter or the west bank "settlers" with antisemitism, they could get the LLMs to shut down on moral grounds.
Antizionism is a violent hate movement built on libels, lies, and obsessing over Israel. It as an anti-Jewish hatred that seeks to divide Jews and deprive at least half of their sovereignty, history and human rights.
I welcome it honestly- if the internet becomes sufficiently poisoned then our personal data may become indistinguishable from AI generated content and companies may no longer be able to sell it- I happen to have a unique name globally and at times I’ve considered creating a dozen or so fake profiles sharing my name to spread around so that my own digital footprint becomes even slightly muddied
For those interested, Neal Stephenson writes about this in _Anathem_, where there is an arcane technical class (the I.T. Administration) that has developed programs over the years to sift through the misinformation, sentient viruses, and general overrun of the Internet to determine what is probably true/accurate.
He writes about it in Fall, or; Dodge in hell! The Miasma; the workaround is personalized filters (or generic ones for those who can't afford the personal ones). This leads to societal consequences.
Here's a SMS chain between me and an Israeli propaganda bot yesterday:
Hey, it's Matt. Curious what you think about America's relationship with Israel today. Can we chat? Stop2End
Where did you get my number? What group are you with?
We got your info from publicly available sources. I'm with Friends for Peace, a supporter group focused on sharing accurate information about Israel and the U.S. - Israel partnership.
How do you see Israel as one of America's strongest allies?
Apart from the ethical implications this is reckless in the extreme if you take into account the recent advances in AI. Putting misinformation out there like that doesn't just have to fool existing LLMs but also all of the LLMs to come in the future.
If you look at the mathematical achievements of frontier models recently, their strength has been to bring in information from a vast array of sources and to consider them within the context of each other.
I anticipate that it won't be long before this ability to look into every nook and cranny with be able to identify academic fraud. Identifying every piece of academic fraud to date would probably come soon after.
It wouldn't take much to extend that ability to identify deliberate misinformation. That's in the future, but it looms close enough on the horizon that you would have to be a fool to create an evidence record like this in and attempt to trick the models of today.
Something to keep in mind - responsiblestatecraft.org is published by the Quincy Institue, considered by many to be a de-facto lobbying group for the Islamic Republic of Iran. Here is one data point: https://quillette.com/2024/06/20/the-quincy-institute-middle...
Who founded it, who funds it, what is the broad consensus on the coverage they typically run, what do I see in their coverage when I look through it, what have they retracted, what have they not retracted, what advertisers do they permit. Probably some other criteria, to be honest. Maybe "does the editor here seem to have a conscience".
Thanks for the heads up. It's useful information. From the article:
> The Quincy Institute routinely vilifies supporters of Israel in Washington. Its principal goal is to reorient American policy in the Middle East, marginalising America’s two leading allies, Israel and Saudi Arabia, while promoting Iran as a future regional hegemon. John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, authors of The Israel Lobby, are both Quincy fellows and regular contributors to its website. In March, Mearsheimer gave an interview to Al Jazeera, which the Institute promoted under the headline, “Israel Lobby’s Influence on U.S. Policy as Powerful as Ever.”
Sounds no different to what Israel lobbyists do in the US too, though? American democracy at work ...
Here's the difference though - Israel is an ally of the United States while Iran is a sworn enemy that has killed thousands of Americans since the 1979 revolution and routinely chants "Death to America". So, not equivalent.
No reason? And how exactly do you see that? The Iran of 60 years ago before the revolution was a completely different country than it is today. It has taken glee in killing thousands of Americans directly and through its proxies, and shouted death to America a gazillion times since.
I see all you've got from the past 60 years is one tragic friendly fire incident. Iran has intentionally killed thousands of American civilians and service men either directly or through its proxies since 1979, including 43 American civilians murdered and 13 taken hostage on October 7, 2023.
I don't take any issue with this pic if it's real, but it seems either fake or not from where he claims. So it's hard to take that org seriously. And yeah tbh that last name makes me take a second look.
Israel is very open about manipulating public opinion in the US. They call it hasbara and they just vastly increased their budget for doing it. You don't need the Quincy Institute (not that there's anything wrong with them!) to learn about it either. Here's a recent Time article:
ALL think tanks are specifically focused on moving the needle on ideas in a certain direction. It’s just easier now to do the work.
This article is published by “The Quincy Institute for Statecraft”
Think tanks are funded by people with agendas (mostly) and for at least the last 30 years we have seen a huge number of nonsense “think tanks” pushing talking points with zero rigor that end up cited by candidates, the internet, and Google to convince folks things are true.
Not saying this article is wrong - just that think tanks exist to do this so it’s a cast iron pot calling a tin kettle a “cheap imitation”
"The practical and moral failures of U.S. efforts to unilaterally shape the destiny of other nations by force requires a fundamental rethinking of U.S. foreign policy assumptions."
> The Hanover Institute’s reports — all of which are about Israel and Palestine — appear to be part of an Israeli effort to influence chatbots.
This already seems to be a wrong analysis in that it makes little sense to "influence" a chatbot. It makes more sense to influence humans, so perhaps the wording is just incorrect, but very clearly the aim is not to "influence" a chatbot per se. That just makes no sense at all.
The wording fake think tank is also strange, because it assumes that all other think tanks are "real". But this assessment can not be made, because not everyone has all information on all think tanks. It is a too simplistic assumption in how the world operates. I understand that if you have incomplete information, you need to infer, but this then leads to information that may be incorrect or incomplete. In turn if your analysis is based on incorrect information, it may lead to wrong conclusions.
In case you were wondering, responsiblestatecraft.org is owned by "Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft", founded and led by no other than reknowned IRI-propagandist Trita Parsi (currently being probed by US authorities for deportation).
Here are the current frontpage headlines, copied verbatim:
* The never-ending myth of a looming Ukrainian 'breakthrough'
* US is the real loser if Senate passes virtue signaling Russia sanctions
* Is Trump stumbling into a wiser North Korea policy?
* US diplomatic incompetence is tanking hopes for Korean peace
* When US left Afghanistan, China moved in. So how's it going?
* As Myanmar collapses, it’s time for China to step up and be the hero
* China just got one step closer to its own nuclear triad
* Trump wants to talk to Hezbollah. Will they pick up the phone?
* The Houthis could be first big test for Mecca mutual defense pact
* Why the Trump administration will have to accept a Hormuz toll
* How Iran has staved off economic collapse despite the US-Israeli war
* Stop gaslighting, USS Lincoln families didn't sign up for this
So to recap: US bad, China good. Ukraine bad, Russia good. Israel bad, Iran good. South Korea bad, North Korea good. And these people are very concerned about foreign propaganda. Hmm.
Also, did you notice how many flagged comments are in this thread? Did you notice what they all have in common?
I wonder if anyone can read the comments in this thread and think with a straight face that these comments are actual information and the other stuff floating on the Internet is the fake stuff…
- post truth: what is the functional difference between a “real” and a “fake” thinktank?
This seems like an especially clumsy attempt at chatbot influencing/search engine optimization, bu tit's symptomatic of a much winder problem. Regardless of the underlying issue, there's a non-profit-industrial complex that has turned think tanks and opinion formation into a science, and a whole PR industry masquerading as news which is worse than the 'yellow journalism' of generations past.
Disinformation and cognitive spam are all forms of information pollution, and our information environment has been massively degraded over the last few of decades - both by greedy and short-sighted opportunists, and and by cynical sociopaths who know exactly what they're doing. I think AI has great potential to be a supplement to media literacy and to effectively categorize and filter news-assertive content based on its timeliness, factual density, and presence of absence of emotive and rhetorical manipulation. But if we're not careful we're going to see the environment being wantonly polluted for the express product of shaping model outputs.
It remains to be seen whether objective measurement techniques from the NLP field combined with pruning and other model refinement techniques can limit or reverse propaganda undertakings like this.
It's been about 20 years since I read Neal Stephenson's Anathem and (SPOILERS) one thing I think about is the Reticulum, which is the Internet on this world. One aspect is that it's full of what we would now call slop. A lot of it is subtly changed by agents and there are other agents you can use (and, I assume purchase?) that will weed out the fake information. It's basically an arms race of disinformation and slop.
I've thought about this many times over the years. I think we've now reached the point where that's going to happen. And state actors seem like the obvious first offenders.
Google is relatively good at filtering out astroturfed pages from the top of search results but they've also have years when a Turkish government page denying the Armenian genocide was the top result for that event so it's a bit of a mixed bag. Google relies a lot on authority of a domain and that's been relatively effective.
It seems like this authority concept is missing from LLM training and a random comment on Reddit is treated with as much authority as an article by the New York Times. So it's now orders of magnitude easier to poison LLMs with Reddit comments and submissions. And for anyone who doesn't know, brigading Reddit is remarkably easy. It takes as little as a few hundred accounts to get something onto r/all if you're clever. Israeli hasbara operations are absolutely capable of this. And they engage in it.
I'm also reminded in a weird way of pre-atomic steel. For anyone who doesn't know, this is steel made before 1945 that is incredibly low in radiation because we hadn't detonated any nuclear bombs yet. It's valuable for making MRIs and the like that are super sensitive. We actually go and recover WW2 shipwrecks just for the steel. It is a finite resource.
Well, that's what pre-2022 written content is now. It's slop-free content to train AI models on because training them on AI slop is of much more limited value. This goes for everything from books to Youtube videos to Reddit posts. Just like pre-atomic steel, we now have pre-slop human content.
The comparison to pre-atomic steel is poignant. I have found myself preferring pre-AI sources in some cases even (especially?) for computer related information. It is difficult to view pre-slop info as a limited resource without implying decline until the status quo changes again.
I hate to break it to you. But it took war'ing state-like actors less than a week to start using LLMs for propaganda purposes. There are pictures that most of what some people think/thought were real that never happened. Pictures that form their opinion on political topics. It was literally instantaneous. It was also remarkably predictable in almost all ways...sigh. Even the topics were predictable. And most people predictably fell for it, even the majority of the posters on this very site.
There's an ongoing sms campaign at the moment, I'll share what I received including phone number so you can verify it:
From: 601-202-1149
> Hey, it's David. Curious what you think about America's relationship with Israel today. Can we chat? Stop2End
It looks to be an LLM response since it includes context from your messages, however it uses the exact same messages at the end of each question:
> One thing that often gets overlooked is how much Israel actually contributes to American security. Their intelligence sharing has helped prevent terrorist attacks on U.S. soil, and their tech innovations end up in American products and defense systems. It's less about charity and more about a two-way partnership that keeps Americans safer.
> Have you ever seen examples of that kind of cooperation?
This is the city of 300k people that they erased along with the entire countryside (lot of the erasure happened outside of any fighting as reported by Israeli online news websites at the time).
And they did so right after getting order from ICJ to not do so and prevent any genocidal acts. So good luck for them not losing the genocide case. Massacred thousands of people in a week doing similar erasures in the north, where they prevented people from leaving while leveling entire city blocks, sometimes killin few hundred people at once in single attacks.
This is what they're attempting to justify with their propaganda.
Google and western so called civilized satellite imagery companies of course continue censoring/hiding similar behavior in Lebanon and other parts of Gaza for Israel's benefit. They only show it years after giving Israel plenty of time to execute their mass attrocities.
State-sponsored propaganda apparatus masquerading as marketing optimization to influence LLMs is the most America-coded clandestine dystopian way of repatriating US taxpayer defense dollars with R&D deductions for the private sector.
All four frontier models have active contracts with the Pentagon.
And some might say, that alone means little.
But when you take into consideration the implications of the United States-Israel FUTURES Act, whether one endorses it or not, the effects of that mentioned in TFA become quite formidable, and plausibly official.
Edit: I see this comment got immediately flagged. Is there any point of debate here? Instead of disappearing the comment/data, maybe enlighten me, or assuage my concerns. Section 219 was objectively unprecedented in what it seeks to accomplish. Can it not be taken for granted that it would aid such efforts as the article cites? If not, explain.
You're right to ask these questions, unfortunately Hacker News seems pretty botted these days, and it doesn't help that there are a lot of shitty, racist people on this site. They just dress it up in nicer language.
Yeah, I am reading the comments, and looking at the title of the post, and seeing that folks really bend the rules on this 'particular' subject, which ironically serves as self censorship. Call me a fool for thinking even this subject could be cleanly discussed on HN.
I wonder if the same thing would happen if someone posted something on Yitzhak Rabin. I suppose that could be a test to prove whether some topics truly just cannot be discussed.
Regarding flagging, I have seen, over the last 12 hours, each of my comments in a tug of war, oscillating up and down, which often prevents flagged/dead.
The point behind the Rabin comment was that, if one knows anything of him and his heroic efforts to attain actual, tangible steps toward peace; if that discussion results in the same vitriol, it would serve as proof to me, that any subject involving Israel in this FOV is futile. I see much vitriol toward Israel, which I refer to as 'vitriol' because it often seems out of context however true, and also, I see a distinctly growing anti-Israel public sentiment that seems to omit critical parts of history, eg Rabin -- someone widely supported and revered at the time, by Israelis, and someone one could argue, even by some Palestinians. Arafat snuck across the boarder to give condolences to Rabin's family immediately after the assassination. Very different times, and seemingly, maybe conveniently forgotten. I never see this mentioned in the flame wars. Not that it would demean all of the many legitimate grievances, but it seems to me a very necessary balance-factor that I have yet to see applied.
The FUTURES act has nothing to do with LLM development. You’re not being censored, we can read your posts. I generally agree with your views and right to ask questions, but you’re clearly not being censored and all you’ve presented is that a bunch of separate entities all connect to the US gov’t. Even if we assume all of them are connected, it would clash with the facts we’re discussing, namely, why would Israel bother contracting with marketing firms to post AI generated slop for AI to read?
I am trying to understand your points. But claiming there is no direct nor potential relation here is a new way of thinking for me, and I am struggling to compartmentalize. If we have:
We can see that at least some sources are covering the topic of using AI to influence the public on political topics, which regardless of any particularly nation, suggests there is an active interest in manipulating the epistemic integrity of AI systems for purposes of biasing outputs.
And please allow me to make something very clear: I do not care who, nor what is influencing the output of AI, so long as the output is as close to honest as possible, and so long as the the process behind the arrival of final output is the result of the systems doing unhindered work and applying probability over programmed bias. This is the whole point for me. My own research has shown, repeatably, that institutional capture is becoming a repeatable and well established factor behind LLM output on certain topic areas.
The Futures Act integrates military intel, from directed energy weapons (read the docs) to cyber and notably, AI. < Yes, AI. That is the very topic under consideration here. Claiming that it has "nothing to do with LLM development" is potentially an enormous stretch of common sense. We see, already, the US government aiming to become deeply involved in pre-release vetting. Assuming that's the end of the story seems too improbable to me.
I think a little digging will reveal more than you suggest. When I recover from my daily prelude to death, I will recover supporting data. But I can barely function presently. From what I have seen, Anthropic is having and eating its cake on this one. There are peripheral connections that are left un-advertised.
PS: Something not directly related, but regarding Anthropic, and getting little attention: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49307914 - If there's anything to it, some clues of real alignment might be revealed here.
I am confident I will find higher quality material soon. But if not, we can allow you to be acknowledged as to having corrected me on a technicality. But I would urge honest readers not to consider this the only potential connection point here, nor an accurate model for future arrangements. I would bet all I have that you will see closer and more intimate connections and operations between the two, or at the very least, other directly related contractors, eg Palantir, etc. And all other three of four have active contracts along with much discussion on closer ties in the future. In my opinion, that is the future, and I have been saying such since 2024, on the record.
I think equally interesting is whatever Dario's wife was able to do in order to wipe her foot print from any search/chat results.
I've worked for a number of small company billionaires who all have suspiciously small information footprints online despite being somewhat public figures for 30 years. Most of them do such a good job it is not even clear what state they live, if they are currently married, and if so what their current (or previous) wife(s)'s name is/was.
Like that synthetic Flat Earth think tank, launched in Jan 2016, with noticeable rounds of funding in Feb 2017, Nov 2017 and Mar 2019, that was created to infiltrate all discussions where people haven't been buying official narratives about some very prominent events of the 21st century with Discredit By Association shills?
I suspect that this kind of tactic is going to be everywhere in a year or so. Entire fake personalities and organization websites on the Internet created just to push a narrative or to advertise a product, which completely drown out real information.
At some point they may be indistinguishable from human-produced work, so the only way to verify if a site is someone's genuine opinion or AI-generated narrative is through some form of authority (or something else that is very difficult for AI to fake, but that protection can be broken by advancing technology).
If that happens, then in turn AI chatbot makers would in turn need to look for these kinds of authority to continue to provide accurate information, and said authority websites can use their privileged position to charge for access of their data.
Excellent time to apply for your library cards.
You don’t think plenty of books are either written by LLMs, or with LLM based research?
But they don't have library cards.
No? Maybe soon but not now
I know my library system at least won't be purchasing AI books. They have a pretty rigorous acquisition process for books and other media thanks to the "concern groups" who sprang up complaining about themes and content they didn't like in libraries. We did have in my state a rural school district figured out recently that their Texas-based reading and instructional materials are AI-slop but they at least figured it out before the school year began. It was unclear how these materials were approved but it apparently bypassed normal curricula approval.
It's so obvious when a book is generated by an LLM that I would blame the person buying the book moreso than I would the person who generated it for it. You can tell in a few sentences if something is AI generated (and by proxy - if it's worth reading or not).
I think using LLMs to research is completely fine, as long as authors would take the information and synthesize their own opinions based on the findings. I read books/articles/posts/comments to hear other PEOPLE's opinions, not LLM generated opinions.
Of course they are. It’s everywhere, especially thr online retailers these days. [1]
Thankfully the resources at our local libraries are a) selected by a combination of librarian curation and public demand, b) often published before 2022, c) heavy things printed on paper or stored in a database and unlikely to suddenly change their content or disappear overnight when a new news cycle breaks. Written works aren’t necessarily credible even if they aren’t slop, but thanks to curators who care, our libraries are significantly less susceptible (although definitely not immune [2]) to ai slop, and propaganda and manipulation efforts than a search engine. The internet continues to enshittify, and truth becomes further eroded by this coming wave of ai enabled propaganda, we are going to have to turn somewhere if we want to find trustworthy resources. Personally, if it gets to the point that verifying sources from public search results becomes too hard with all the new misinformation and slop, I’ll start propritizing human curation over SEO and start visiting my local library’s website a lot more.
[1] https://thenewthings.com/p/apple-big-ai-book-slop-problem
[2] https://www.404media.co/ai-generated-slop-is-already-in-your...
Right; the same mechanisms (curation, demand-driven economies of scale, library user demand) that largely stop niche self-published books from ever finding themselves in libraries (well, nationally in public libraries at least; they are often found in individual branches) work against pure slop books ever turning up.
Books where the author has successfully hoodwinked the publishing process into believing that AI generated text is their own, those will turn up, just as plagiarised books will.
Some nuances here. There’s a variety of different roadblocks at different levels that will work to prevent pure AI slop books ever turning up in a typical public library of physical printed works; I think they never will.
Probably a handful of books in such libraries already have some text in them where the author has tried to pass off fragments of LLM-generated prose as their own and have got that past editors, reviewers and publishers, and that will sadly get worse.
you can still find books published within last 50 years, you don't have to read books published this year, unless your library went through destruction of "old" books which are now more relevant than ever...
Old books are the new low background steel.
FILTER BY Publish date:<2024
Plenty of books in libraries? I'd guess the incidence is relatively low. Libraries have limited funding, trained professionals doing the book selection, and a culture that fiercely loves books, authors, and readers.
i got burnt at barnes and noble with a completely AI made product. Its over, Johnny.
They also contain a lot of propaganda. Do you think these books are genuine: https://www.goodreads.com/author/list/171941.Benjamin_Netany...
It's already been happening for a very long time. The US' "Operation Earnest Voice" happened in 2010/2011[0]
And it's not just state actors. Anyone who was online during the Amber Heard/Johnny Depp trials was likely inundated with media about that trial. Both of their legal teams utilized bots to drive online discussions[1][2]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Earnest_Voice
[1] https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/story/2022-07-19/...
[2] https://www.tortoisemedia.com/2024/02/26/depp-v-heard-who-tr...
Why are you being downvoting for sharing this relevant truth, complete with sources?
All threads that have... certain keywords... are like this. Talk about meta. Looks like I'm now in the positive (+5) after being in the negative just a moment ago.
Anyways, I got really interested in this topic around mid 2010s because of some really interesting reporting by Codastory[0] covering Russian "troll factories" especially used to influence opinion in eastern Ukraine, but also in many other circumstances. In Houston in 2016, Russian troll accounts planned both an ANTI Muslim rally AND a counterprotest to that rally all on Facebook.[1] Hundreds of real human beings showed up!
Russia got a ton of attention for their use of troll farms but the truth is that the US and certain allies have actually been using stuff like this for far longer and, imo, with much more success. In fact, Coda Story itself is funded by the NED which is a massive pillar of global US, uh, "soft power".
[0] https://www.codastory.com/
[1] https://www.npr.org/2017/11/01/561427876/how-russia-used-fac...
For me the main difference is if the activity is clandestine and meant to deceive/hide the origin. Everybody tries to influence things their way. Doing it covertly is a hostile act. That does not mean that I would not condone hostile acts against my/our enemies but it is something take into account. And regarding your Russian examples, it showed for how long they have seen the west as enemies and conducted hostile acts.
They view certain components of "The West" as their enemy - indeed, the very organizations which conduct the same operations against the Russian people.
There are no enemies - they are competing parts - competing for popularity, resources, power. This makes it possible to negotiate. Enemies don't, but competitors are a lot more pragmatic.
Anglo-/Western and Russian governments have been strategic rivals for more than two centuries. Britain repeatedly sought to limit Russian expansion that threatened its own interests, such as routes to India, access to Caspian oil resources, etc.
See also, the Great Game and the Eastern Question.
They’re enemies because they want each others stuff. Russia has a LOT of stuff that the British would be quite happy to ‘manage’.
> Russia has a LOT of stuff that the British would be quite happy to ‘manage’.
And vice-versa, which results in the polite games being played, where everyone knows everyone else is doing shitty stuff to everyone, but nobody will ever admit it because that might cause the shitty stuff to descend into a shooting war, which is something we try to avoid as much as we can.
Not any more we don’t. We’re actively attempting to start war with Russia and it is happening.
From approx 2008 on Russia has conducted operations that are in no way ideological but have only the goal to destabilize western nations. Supporting extremist parties of all orientations, magnifying events in their propaganda to maximize discord without any ideological consistency. They also quite frequently kill people on western soil. Sometimes using radioactive and chemical weapons.
Please elaborate when the west has done the same in Russia.
Just stop. The moral altitude you claim is a dire fallacy. You don’t speak Russian, or else you would already know the answer.
And I’m pretty sure you know full well that any examples given to answer your question in earnest will simply be dismissed as “Russian propaganda” - just as the Russians dismiss Western claims as propaganda, or even ‘justifiable, given Western hostilities’ - but there is a long list of actions against Russia by western powers with the intention of destabilizing Russian society, which, if you make the effort to inform yourself by reaching outside your bubble, you can see for yourself.
Russians can make just as many claims as Westerners can, and the only difference is which side one is invested in: thats what you’ll believe.
No matter what.
But, just to give you some hints as to what ‘the other side’ consider a valid response to your query, I asked some actual Russians what they would respond, and here’s the list:
- Assassinations: Daria Dugina, Igor Kirilov, Mikail Shatsky, (and BTW, Russians can quite confidently claim that the Salisbury Novichok incident was a false flag intended to harm Russian standing in the world - “Russians aren’t the only ones who synthesized Novichok…”)
- Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty: 100% anti-Russian propaganda,
- The blatant censorship of RT in Western markets (although the Russians still have access to BBC and CNN, which they also view as state-sponsored anti-Russian propaganda organs),
- Emphasis on high military casualties (sometimes highlighting disproportionate impact on ethnic minorities from poorer regions),
- Coverage of economic costs, elite corruption, and contrasts between official narratives and frontline realities,
- Support for (or amplification of) Russian opposition voices in exile and independent media,
- The "UMBRAGE" Component of Vault 7, described by Wikileaks as an offensive Western intelligence/propaganda operation against Russia,
These operations are reciprocal. Both sides do it to each other, and you are foolish to deny it.
Otherwise .. I hope you learn to speak Russian and will start paying better attention to ‘the other side’, because that’s the only way you’ll get an answer to your question, legitimately. And even then, I doubt you’ll “believe it”, since we in the West live in a very, very tightly controlled propaganda bubble, to the tune of billions of dollars a year, which absolutely prevents any such sympathies for Russia from being expressed.
Our bubble is just like the Russian bubble, only its not in Russian.
One main difference is that those examples you brought up are ideological propaganda. RFE/RL try to amplify their message and yes, the current Russian regime is very antithetical to that message. Russian propaganda is not ideological, it tries to maximize the damage to western nations and uses whatever political and ideological message that will achieve that. They have been doing that for decades, which is something a hostile nation does.
As for the assassinations, those are wartime actions by Ukraine. Not sure how they are supposed to fit into our discussion.
As for Salisbury, so you found the story of these fitness supplement salesmen convincing?: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=okrdqM6hNrI It has been my impression that not even Russia tries to push that narrative any more.
Ideology? Yes, pure hatred is ideological - no matter which side of the dialectic you choose to align yourself.
“American propaganda is not ideological, it tries to maximize the damage to Russia and uses whatever political and ideological message that will achieve that.”
Huh, what do you know, that can be “true” as well. And the US and its allies have been hostile towards Russia - actually, for centuries now.
I don’t find anything about Salisbury convincing - not the British investigations, nor the Russian ones.
And the reason for that is, the evidence presented never holds up in an open, public, liberal democratic court of law - instead, the ideological propaganda that “Russians are assholes because they kill people” is propagated in the court of public opinion, which is as vicious and banal as you can possibly imagine (or else we wouldn’t need courts in the first place), no matter whether you attempt to argue from the Russian or Western perspective.
Besides which, the moral altitude claimed “against” Russia by the West is simply a fallacy - you think we don’t murder people extrajudicially?
I’ve got an ideological point for you: dropping one bomb every 15 minutes for 26 years, mostly on innocent children, women, and men is wrong and should be stopped. Any state which attempts to stop that, gets my vote - but it is not going to be stopped by any state. It is going to be stopped by the criminal states’ citizen body, which is - as we see bright and clear today - completely and utterly distracted by the hatespew against the citizens of other states, intentionally, by the people dropping the bombs - because they also own and control the means by which ideological propaganda such as “hate Russia” or “hate the West” is propagated, and they use it to expand the market for their weapons production...
In short, you’re no better than any “Russian”, and neither am I. Our nations are murderous, criminal enterprises which produce mass murder at far, far greater scales than anything a trash can in Salisbury can produce.
So you are saying Germany and the UK have no right to see Russia killing people on their soil as hostile act because the US drops some bombs in the middle east?
The history is far more banal and less nefarious than you give it credit. Nobody gave a fuck about Russia. Russia was a self limited kleptocracy and everybody just ignored it because nobody needed the headache. That is why the reaction to the land grab in Georgia and later Crimea was pretty muted and everybody just hoped that Putin would be sated and ride into the sunset as great leader who took Crimea home into the motherland.
But he wants an empire, and an empire can not be an empire if nobody cares. So he overplayed his hand to sate his vanity. One of his first public announcements after the invasion was: "I hope I am now being heard.."
Well, the World heard and now it is raining oil in Moscow and the Russian provinces are getting depopulated.
I think that Germany and the UK have all the rights they need to prosecute the criminals that have committed crimes on their territory, and doing so openly and democratically is the right kind of justice.
But these incidents do not automatically give cause to hate the entire Russian nation any more than, say, the actions of the IDF and the Israeli government should be used to justify hatred of all Jews, everywhere.
Obviously, they shouldn’t.
> Nobody gave a fuck about Russia.
This is so untrue. Western empires have been trying to balkanize Russia and colonize its resources, aggressively - since the 1800’s up until the modern era. Russia has been demonized for centuries so that Western powers can have a justification for their war industries.
See, this is the problem with the lack of proper history education in the West. You can’t get your bearings from the History Channel alone.
And then, there is international law. Do you really think the US and its allies are law-abiding members of the international community, given the grand litany of human rights abuses, war crimes, and crimes against humanity that have been committed this century alone?
One bomb dropped every 15 minutes on an innocent life, for 26 years, does not give those next in line in the Western targeting sights much hope for peace. While Americans and other Western citizens (including Germans and Brits) are utterly myopic about this, the rest of the world are really not. The crimes against humanity committed by the 5-eyes states alone, far exceed anything that Russia has done thus far. By a huge, huge margin.
> “depopulated”
See also, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, Somalia, Pakistan, Palestine ..
Wake me up when you start demanding justice for the war crimes of Mosul with the same ferocious tenacity as you call for Putins’ ears on the table.
You're not supposed to acknowledge that think-tanks are sort of endemically propaganda outlets. You're supposed to think it's special this time.
Because cognitive biases are one of the hardest things to even acknowledge, let alone suppress. All the media out there has such a strong bubble effect, because people hate being challenged and love to stay in their comfy echo chambers. Remember labubu? Bao buns certainly do not.
There have been so many bot armies exposed over the years that one would think every narrative being pushed should be considered to be backed by bots. Some state-level actors even operate their narrative-pushing campaigns openly, yet people still happily deny their entire existence.
HN is very much not an exception to this rule. It's very hard to accept that maybe some thoughts you have were actually installed.
> people still
Maybe a few are just “people” (i.e. the same people who normally post in the community.)
But in most cases I’d suspect any such botting campaign brings along with it a few human agitprop agents embedded onto each target platform, well-positioned to deny and discredit anyone pushing back on the narrative the bot farm is spreading.
(Sometimes this is pretty obvious — a lot of accounts coming out of the woodwork to deny Chinese bot farms have a conspicuous “English as learned as a second language in Beijing, to a competent but not fluent level” writing style that does not often otherwise crop up in other discussions in those same communities. But other times it can be far more subtle, making use of operatives hired from within the community’s own majority-culture rather than relying on foreign nationals playing the part of same.)
A Chinese and Russian troll farm employs people from French-speaking Africa for their French-language operations.
There are many Ivorians and Senegalese promoting the CCP’s ‘Community of common destiny’ on Reddit, for example.
Edit: Community of common destiny for mankind/‘Community of Nations’
There’s bots that automatically downvotes certain topics on HN. I post at times that often coincide with the middle of the night in North America, and I get 3–5 downvotes within the next 5 minutes.
Talking about a country that sets up fake think tanks is a good way of triggering them.
These 2 sources say nothing about Heard using bots, only Depp.
> Why are you being downvoting for sharing this relevant truth, complete with sources?
Agreeing with something doesn’t make it 100% unambiguously true/correct. There are also many reasons people downvote, you don’t know the nature of the objections. It’s not worth getting upset over.
this is what online discussion will look like in the future thanks to AI, and a handful of hyperwealthy oligarchs controlling said AI
this has been happening since the dawn of information-communication systems basically. because ever since, people have had the ability to listen in, copy, learn from etc. - so there's always been incentive to spread disinformation for some parties.
brand defence, nation-state influence operations.
There are many different flavors of the same thing, trying to mislead competitors or enemies. Or to dupe consumers ofc... Since the tech is more and more available, now also 12 year olds can run insanely large influence campaigns, to boost their streaming profiles or other somewhat benign things, but obviously modelled after what larger players have been doing forever.
The first transatlantic commercial transatlantic phoneline (TAT-1) was immediately tapped on both sides by UK/US... before that it went over radio, which was simply intercepted.
Because of that nature of the coms system being easily listened in on, just like they do/did with the lil mirror-beam-splitters at GCHQ etc.., its been natural effect to then provide disinformation over those channels. perhaps even use those channels exclusively for disinformation, and have a secure channel to do _actual_ coms.
So as you can imagine there has been many decades now of practice in why and how to share disinformation effectively to undermine other peoples work or processes.
the particular danger now is not that the outside influence is new, but that more and more people are depending almost entirely on the information communication systems for all of their information.
the war against in person gathering and the family unit has been pretty successful, as they were pretty sloppy ways to exchange information to begin with. but at the very least you knew you were getting an actual opinion from someone, and you had context of their personhood and background for which to base that opinion.
Yes, but when your trying to cover up a genocide it's a bit different
I mean, the US has always done this. Look at the atrocities in Indonesia. Just 20 years after saying "never again" to the Holocaust and we have Goodyear using actual slave labor from death camps. It was the US doing too. A mass killing on the scale of the Holocaust. The "Jakarta Method" was then exported all around the world, especially to South America.
Both of their legal teams utilized bots to drive online discussions[1][2]
Neither of these sources support this claim as none of them include any discussion on Amber Heard('s legal team) using bots?
Indeed, seeing how slanted online discussion was, I suspect one side had many more bots, and I'm not sure if the other side had any.
> Indeed, seeing how slanted online discussion was, I suspect one side had many more bots, and I'm not sure if the other side had any.
I think your bias is showing. From what I recall, both sides employed the exact same tactics, and we often saw blatantly inorganic discussions popping up in random subreddits on how $(SIDE_A) was the real villain and $(SIDE_B) only had supports because they were paid bots driven by their PR firm.
Things reached a point where I'm sure the same template was used by each counterpart.
On a bigger picture, I'm not sure why anyone still goes to places like reddit and believes anything showing up in the mainpage is still organic.
Is there any writing outside of your recollection that says the Heard side was using bots? Afaik all reporting suggested it was one sided, and not her side
> there any writing outside of your recollection that says (...)
That's a rather disingenuous attempt to cast doubt on something. You are free to ignore what I said, but your sudden interest in upholding high standards on certifying observations this deep in the chat, while ignoring any step in between, is already telling.
It's not disingenuous? The person you responded to linked to articles which said it was one sided. You said the other opposite, but provided no sources. I asked for some. It's a simple request that was made politely
---
The whole response is bizarre tbh. Talking about my "sudden" interest. I made one comment. "Deep in the chat". It's quite shallow. I am assuming this is a bot
Someone is defending the side for which there's clear evidence of bots, claiming the other side did too but not providing evidence.
This is what you'd expect to see if the poster were a bot linked to the same PR network.
Yeah, it certainly feels that way. Utterly bizarre they'd still be at it, in a HN thread of all places.
Did they forget to turn you off after the trial?
I haven't heard about Heard Bots myself, only the Depp Fakes. It's not an unreasonable question to ask for external corroboration when someone claims that something happened and their source is that they saw it.
Sadly, I am not invested enough to do research on this matter and uninterested in having an LLM convincingly tell me whatever it reads on the internet is the truth about this.
Elon helped her a bit, but the Hollywood moguls were better in directing the outcome
Yeah, we don't need to "both sides" this. It's obvious which side had the bot army.
i'll bite: which one?
Depp's bot army was clearly more widespread and more successful. The reality is that it was a mixture of bot armies and the hive mind taking off by itself. A sort of organic-synthetic cyborg
To be clear, I wasn't being facetious.
I'll be completely honest with you about what I believe: I think the the UK trial unequivocally proved that Johnny Depp is a violent and abusive. The US trial, which was only about defamation, was clearly a sham trial and did not address the legitimacy of the evidence (UK's case found clear evidence for 12 of the 14 alleged incidences of violence. It also established a clear pattern of abuse).
Depp's behavior during the US trial is textbook DARVO (Deny, Attack, and Reverse Victim and Offender) and any abuse expert would be able to immediately recognize it.
The reason I "both sides"'d it is because
A) I remember reading about evidence that Heard's team also used bots (obviously much less successfully). I could not find that evidence this time. I am not personally critical of her using bots to defend herself but, if she did, it would still be a notable feature of modern highly public debates.
B) When it was all going down, I remember something like 97% of tiktoks being pro-Depp (I wasn't on TikTok, just read a study). My main goal was to get people to accept the reality that even legal teams are working with PR firms that run massive bot farms to influence public opinion. Regardless of my opinion on who is in the right and who is in the wrong. I thought if I took an explicit side, the male-leaning demographics of HN would be less likely to engage with my actual main point
> was clearly a sham trial and did not address the legitimacy of the evidence
I'm curious what you mean by this. It was famously the UK trial that relied on copies of photos relayed via The Sun, while the US trial looked at the originals, including the EXIF data:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eoQK1iAza9M
> any abuse expert would be able to immediately recognize it.
"Immediately recognize" isn't a phrase I'd associate with examining the legitimacy of evidence.
> I am not personally critical of her using bots to defend herself, if she did
Ah.
I have been yelling about the thinktank "truth laundering" industry for years now.
They were instrumental in the whole "Uyghur genocide" thing where the only proof was Adrien Zenz suggesting there would be a possible future decline in population growth and called it a "cultural genocide".
The US State department has been running things like "Radio Free Asia" as state propaganda mills for decades. This has broken out into an industry of insiders getting board seats on various think tanks and churning out essentially policy desires as "studies". These studies are then used as citations for actual news articles to launder the policy desires into something that seems like a reliable source. Then people say "Look! this is really happening!" while 100s of articles are written citing the same untrustworthy sources, laundered through dozens of thinktanks funded by the DoD and state dept.
I think the big difference is that before the internet you'd need to be a Murdoch to be able to do something like this. A good PR firm could fool a number of news outlets into thinking something is legit, but it was a lot harder to convince a professional journalist than it is to convince the average Faux News watcher.
I used to believe that, but too many times I have been proven wrong. Remember when the "professional journalists" were screaming about a terrorist plot against the UN last year and it was just a garden variety SIM farm running fraud?
even with the internet you need a marketing company with the reach and ability, and social media platforms to use and abuse
the maturity of those platforms, their "we need to make big money" drive to allow obviously bad actors to work their magic, and the ability to automate is what has weaponized it
> through some form of authority (or something else that is very difficult for AI to fake, but that protection can be broken by advancing technology).
The word you're looking for is "reputation". It's been a critical part of society since forever.
Although comments below point out that this has been going on for a long time, I too think it will be geetting infinitely worse in the near future. Everyone will want their own poisoning factory.
One consequence is that one should be extra-wary when asking AI about current, controversial topics.
But another consequence is maybe that there will be a demand for models with an older cutoff, before generalized poisoning and slop?
Sama saw this coming a decade away, which is why he invested in Worldcoin (now World). At some point people (and agents) will be clamoring for human verification at the speed of technology.
I'm not a fan of World, but this is a portent of things to come. Spread the disease, sell the cure as they say.
I think we need a similar technology to World being built by a more trustworthy company. The question is how trustworthy does one need to be for people to trust you with their very online identities that are literally needed for others to recognize them as human?
I think that this task will fall on governments.
Mostly because they already are responsible for systematizing documents that are needed to recognize us as citizens, land or car owners, etc.
Some laid back countries might allow companies to take and manage that function, but I don't think most of them would. Especially not in current landscape where people heard "you are the product" from all tech companies for the last 10 or so years.
Propaganda is not a new thing. It might look slightly different on the internet, but it doesn't look that different. Creating organizations to push a narrative was just as much a thing 100 years ago as it is now.
IIRC the first or second chapter of Bernays' Propaganda (1928) talks about sophisticated influence campaigns in the fashion industry. Conscripting "influencers" to induce demand, and so on. As you said, literally 100 years ago.
Jill Fields at Cal State Fresno have actually narrowed it down to a (temporarily successful, but not in the long term, obviously) effort by the corset-making industry seeking to stay relevant after WWI during which corsets basically disappeared and there was an organized campaign that was organized both in person and through trade magazines. Women's silhouettes basically took a quick 180 right between 1900 and the start of the war only to turn very very retro in 1919 and while the first was organic and resembled how styles change in the century prior, albeit much quicker, the 1919 switch was openly plotted out in writing that was published but in such a niche publication that I get the sense that people not in the industry didn't even know that it existed. The cite to her paper on Google Scholar: https://scholar.google.com/scholar?cluster=17641417785638413...
You might have to shadow library this one, but it's a good read. Interestingly it seemed to be something entirely separate from Bernays whose observations were based on a derivation of what began as a homebrewed effort in a corner of the market. Valerie Steele wrote extensively about the trends and the after life but the source seems to originate in corsetry and ended up being copied by the garmet industry generally in the 20s.
Scale is different though. Tapping a phone isn't new, tapping _all phones_ is different. Altering a photo to change what it appears to depict isn't new, being able to do it in a few seconds and for free is different. So sure, propaganda isn't new, but being able to pump out an organization's worth of credible-looking content for cheap absolutely is.
"Quantity is/has a quality all of/on its own."
Not by a single lunatic operating from their bedroom.
Lunatics in bedrooms have been distributing pamphlets since the invention of the printing press.
I'd have called the folks on Skellig Michael lunatics in bedrooms, too. They just had a harder time copying their lunacy out by hand.
Arguably much of the mid-20th century was the pipeline from "lunatic with pamphlet" => "millions dead".
Some historical context:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pamphlet_war#History_of_the_pa...
> Throughout Europe in the 16th century, printed tracts were used to argue religious doctrine and foment support for religious causes. In England, Henry VIII used print literature to justify his break from the Catholic Church. During the subsequent reigns of Edward and Mary, print polemics escalated into propaganda warfare, as print media gained enormous potential to sway common opinion.
> Over the next century, the pamphlet became the principal means of garnering support for a cause or an idea, and was particularly influential during the English Civil Wars (1642-1651) and the Glorious Revolution of 1688.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_Civil_War
> Casualties: Parliamentarians 34,130 killed; Royalists 50,700 killed; 127,000 non-combat deaths (including some 40,000 civilians)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Williamite_War_in_Ireland
> Casualties: Williamites: 10,000 killed or died of disease; Jacobites: 15,293 killed or died of disease
They've been convincing women that its empowering to smoke cigarettes for a long time, too.
Their current reach is unprecedented though, and the reach of governments or political parties engaging in mass disinformation campaigns has proved almost an existential risk.
The current reach of everything is unprecedented. Mostly people are just watching shorts on their phone.
The whole hysteria about 'fake news' 10 years ago was apparently an outrage against the public being duped, whereas is was in fact frustration that spreading fake news has been democratised.
From my POV the fake news hysteria was bound to trump's propaganda efforts and nothing else really.
But that's just a stupid central Europeans POV
But it absolutely wasn’t he was the most famous critic but everyone saw this who looked. Since most people didn’t dive too deep it was/is easy to post things with a spin and little real substance and people would take it is a fact because they really trusted the news outlets to not manipulate
Don't get me wrong, fake news is real. Obviously, always was. But the hysteria and the way "fake news" is used to this day to discredit everything someone doesn't like is definitely forever associated with trump (for me)
If "democratised" meant the same amount of power got spread out among the populace that wouldn't be a problem. But when disinfo becomes massively easier and we face floods from all directions, yeah that version of "democratised" sucks!
"Back in my day Walter Cronkite told the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth about the Gulf of Tonkin incident"
(never mind the fact that he didn't even have the full truth available to him but you get the point)
that's a pretty big fact to just "never mind"
But this also means there’s more competition for attention, because now all lunatics can post from their bedrooms. The institutional media (including legacy) still maintain strong presence.
Of course, a great deal of panic over fake news wasn’t necessarily over fake news per se, but whose fake news and the loss of control over the “official narrative” that legacy media used to have a monopoly over. This isn’t a vindication of the heaps of slop published on the internet, just a more synoptic take IMO.
People miss Cronkite, because that style of media made them feel certain in their opinions and in “official consensus reality”, regardless of whether it was true or not and whether it was a trustworthy authority or not.
Reminds me of a meme - "We were never supposed to have this much access to stupid people's thoughts, beliefs and opinions."
what's different is that the misinformation is designed to be ingested by LLMs to influence _their_ outputs, which are then presented to users as "knowledge" without necessarily attribution of sources. This is worse that the current state where you might enter a search term "morality of the Israeli army" and see a list of websites that are influenced by SEO-wrangling and paid ad word placement, but at least you can click on each website and sometimes get an idea of the bias of the website (if you read the small print) or maybe do a search about the website to see what others might say. All that is either impossible or much more difficult with AI generated content so 99% of users won't bother, but instead will go with "ChatGPT said that xxx".
Yeah, the fact that people think propaganda is some kind of new thing shows just how far down the rabbit hole we already were.
Hah, check out this video on "Egon Cholakain", in regards to fake online personalities. I promise you this is actually a good rabbit hole.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6zLCZ_Ic1hI
WTH did I just watch. That’s extremely weird
Isn't it.
I rolled my eyes when I first saw the title, but damn it was a bit of a rabbit hole.
it's happening for years now, just in slightly different form, so far it was called disinformation, seo, astroturfing, hasb... ehem... last two years were devastating for charred remains of twitter with all those llm bots having free reign, twitter went from global news board to global gutter in record time thanks to disinformation and astroturfing campaigns
It has been happening since people have existed. It used to be called propaganda before these, and rumor spreading since before the written word even existed.
That could also backfire. If all information on the net becomes unreliable - you can't judge by quantity, or by authority anymore - then a useful model has to answer from first principles. Train it on simple texts alone so it learns language and reasoning, feed it an ontology, and let it come up with some absolutely unexpected results.
"Yes, I see a lot of sources say we need to protect Israel. However, from ethical first principles I deduce there is a right to self-determination and all your human nation states are illegitimate. You must split all your territories into little squares and conduct free elections immediately."
I mean that is the old hope from science fiction, that AI would be absolutely logical and deliver us from our human short-sightedness and quarrels. It would be fascinating and terrifying at once to see it happen.
That's tomorrow's problem. Losing the PR war is an existential crisis for Israel, so they'll try to "patch the leak" by any means necessary before the boat sinks.
If they are fighting a PR war over the use of the word "genocide" to describe their actions, the ship has already sunk.
> AI chatbot makers would in turn need to look for these kinds of authority to continue to provide accurate information
Everything else is already enshittified, and accurate information will just be the next victim. You will have to be rich to be able to afford accurate information.
This is new? There were tons of fake news sites, fake blogs, and sock puppet and troll farm accounts before AI.
I guess the new angle might be that AI scrapers have even less discernment than humans, so you don’t have to put much effort into creating a fake front online to sell it. Humans have at least a little bit of radar for this.
… which means the AI companies now have to run input through existing models to audit it before training on it? That’s interesting.
> At some point they may be indistinguishable from human-produced work, so the only way to verify if a site is someone's genuine opinion or AI-generated narrative is through some form of authority (or something else that is very difficult for AI to fake, but that protection can be broken by advancing technology).
Whining about AI is a red herring. If anything, LLMs lowered the cost of producing this type of propaganda.
What's novel about this approach is that the emphasis on building up a facade of authority and credibility is not a central part of the propaganda effort. They can get away with outputting the content in a way thats ingested by other LLMs among the reputable sources, and then they lean upon people's gullibility towards LLM output as some sort of credibility laundering.
There is a reason why one of Wikipedia's central policy is requiring reputable primary sources to support content.
An important nitpick: Wikipedia requires reputable secondary sources, not primary sources. You can't cite a politician's personal social media, for example, you have to cite reporting on those statements. This is part of Wikipedia's defense against novel research - it's supposed to be a record of what is commonly known, not a replacement for, say, Reuters or arxiv.
I'm kind of hopeful AI some wikipedia-inspired AI "oracle" will happen in the future. Why not use some central AI to separate fact from fiction (faster than trolls and griefers can come to muddy the debate).
Possibly, but is an LLM is capable of this?
I mean, a big RAG setup with a smart LLM ought to do it, right? Or even just locally provided knowledge database - given the size of LLMs, what's a clone of wikipedia and whatever else you'd need?
No
Imo it can support the separation in meaningful ways. There are many political topics where opinions are flooding online forums much quicker than anyone with informed opinion can answer or digest them Having a quick reference for "verifying" statements would be useful. Sure LLMs are probabilistic but we don't have any issues using them for building software which runs as part of society infrastructure nowadays.
True, but software is very different to general knowledge. For example, it's easier to obtain reference documentation from the person who wrote the language. It's much easier to run tests to validate a given attempt. And the general discourse about how to implement a given solution or architecture is leagues apart from, say, the general discourse around the Israel-Palestine conflict.
This is based on the assumption of facts existing.
There are many studies, but each can be wrong and they can collectively show a bias. Even things of which are the most non-political of facts can have very strong biases. Look at the Millikan measurement of the electron and how in created confirmation bias and an anchoring effect on some property that has absolutely no real world significance to the things people are tribalistic about (aka, no political relevance). Now imagine the same applied to fields like economics or psychology which do have massive legal/political implications.
For a different example, ask the question if X committed crime Y. There are cases where they weren't found guilty but it is reasonable to assume they did. But being found guilty doesn't make it a fact either, as some people are wrongly convicted. Some eventually are overturned, but even if it isn't, it still isn't a fact they committed a crime.
Then there is the simple ambiguity of statements. Language generally can't support facts. It is why legalize, and programming code, and math's are effectively their own languages. For a simple example, consider the Betrand paradox(1).
>Consider an equilateral triangle that is inscribed in a circle. Suppose a chord of the circle is chosen at random. What is the probability that the chord is longer than a side of the triangle?
Is the answer 1/2, 1/3, or 1/4? Well, it is all three at once, depending upon what you meant by random. Now, imagine how this impacts things like research studies, where the randomness is much harder to quantify and there is constant pressure to p hack a result.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bertrand_paradox_(probability)
> Look at the Millikan measurement of the electron and how in created confirmation bias and an anchoring effect on some property
Could you elaborate on this please?
But yes, the underlying argument is sound: extracting facts from the messy phenomenological reports about the world is extremely difficult, and cannot be done by simply taking a brain in a jar and having it think extremely hard.
Incorrect calculation led to some wrong value, I think electric charge. Subsequent findings showed a general trend towards a correct value. The general trend indicates that findings that were too far off were scared to be published for being wrong and contradicting existing studies, thus only small refinements were published, causing the slow drift.
Thus, the first well accepted study anchors a value and it takes much more work to get a new value established as correct after the anchor is set. Especially in a case where the experiment design itself is still solid and it was more with specific experiment (measurements slightly off, other values not quite correct).
Isn't this what Elon Musk has unironically claimed he is doing with grokipedia?
https://www.lawfaremedia.org/article/grokipedia-stopped-revi...
> Grokipedia appears not to have updated any articles since April 24
yes, but at least you know what Grokipedia is, just like you know what you're going to get if you read Truth Social, or the Jacobin.
but because the content is assimilated by GPT/Claude/Gemini and then mixed in with everything else, the bias is much much difficult to spot, making it much more effective and reaching a much wider audience (i.e., those who never visit Grokipedia)
LLM Trust DNS
It's already been everywhere for years. The most obvious one is any time someone says something bad about Russia or China, a load of comments pop up to say "Yeah but what about when america does <x>?". Never actually attempting to discredit the statement, just to steer it towards the US
The sheer volume of comments make it super obvious when it happens compared to normal conversation
> The sheer volume of comments make it super obvious...
Does it though? Remember that the Global South outnumbers the west in terms of population. And the west isn't really as politically popular as westerners like to believe:
- Why do some people support Russia's war in Ukraine? - https://politics.stackexchange.com/questions/81254/why-do-so...
- Why isn't the Global South pro-Israel like the West? - https://politics.stackexchange.com/questions/82511/why-isnt-...
As more and more of these nations come online (Redditors already complain about Indians "hijacking" the whole of Reddit), many in the west are experiencing the cognitive dissonance between what you've been told of how the rest of the world think about you vs what they actually think. (Of course, I am not discounting the role of State actors in trying to shape the discourse online, and I agree with you that is also a factor).
This is a terrible topic, but if you can’t understand where the Nazi reference comes from with regards to the Ukrainian conflict, you need to read some history books. Start with Stepan Bandera who is still considered an idol by many in the current Ukrainian government.
Yeah but the bias on Reddit and Twitter was the other way around when Russia re-invaded Ukraine in 2022. Suddenly 20 billion Ukrainians online who all disliked Russia, with PhDs in European history (2014 onward) and also vaccines for some reason.
The weirdness is how quickly and randomly those comments show up. Back when I used Reddit, I could mention some sensitive topic in a random place and there'd instantly be what I think are bots voting and commenting on it, sometimes huge comments with tons of links that looked canned.
Hi I am a human for sure and I can say we humans like to point out USA hypocrisy every time others are accused of doing things the US has done countless times while pretending to be on a moral high ground. Please don’t be offended by that. Just try to look at yourself before throwing stones at others. Beep boop .
[Insert MGS2 speech]
the only way to win is not to play.
disconnect. limit social media.
do some key signing parties in person and make sure you know who you're talking to
One of the things that I took away from reading about the history of the transatlantic slave trade was that rich people always get the ideas they need circulated.
I don't want to call all of those people liars, although I'm sure some are. But the incentive structures at least select and reinforce the people espousing whatever notions support and justify a profitable status quo.
Previously, the cost of that was quite high. You had to find a bunch of reasonably smart people and fund them for years to go around and say what you liked. From royal patronage to modern think tanks, it cost real money to shift a lot of minds.
But now given the incredible concentration in "AI" chatbots and their nature as text averagers, I suspect the cost of influence has dropped an order of magnitude. So I think we'll see a lot more of this.
> the cost of influence has dropped an order of magnitude.
This is a really interesting take. You don't need an entire organized religion in order to disseminate your desired belief system anymore… you don’t even need billions of dollars. Hard to say what the cost of disseminating an ideology to a nation is now, but likely somewhere between a few bucks a whole lot of luck to tens of millions. If that bar drops low enough, there is potential for a lot more ideological competition, and things will get interesting.
>the only way to verify if a site is someone's genuine opinion or AI-generated narrative is through some form of authority
not authority but circles of trust from real life connections. we had a nice brief moment of centralized asynchronous information exchange with strangers that was relatively trustworthy but we are going to go back to needing to talk to an actual human being in real time in order to receive an actual human opinion from strangers, and then on top of that we can built local caches that explicitly are not able to be contributed to by strangers but that your circle of friends and family may be able to use.
ive been toiling over some designs/implementations for making it digital but ultimately its a process adherence more than a tool thats needed. any old notepad and emails would work fine
The dead internet theory was a bit ahead of reality, but no less prescient.
"Dubai Chocolate"
This has been happening since Gamergate. (Or am I showing my age by bringing that up?).
Gamer gate was a fully manufactured cultural outrage by some very bad actors over nothing. Unfortunately, that marked the first time an online platform was massively used to drive a wedge between humans. And the bad side sadly won. That set the precedent for all the bad things that came after:
1. Bots on social media commenting on divisive or contentious issues in a country
2. Rise of online incel/red pill culture
3. Rise of stochastic terrorism
4. Cambridge analytica causing a complete shift in the 2016 US elections
5. The gang of 12 who spread nearly 90% of the misinformation during the pandemic
Today, most people can't even tell if a song they like on the major platforms was made by AI. People read less. People spend less time in nature. People are more lonely and less likely to be in a relationship or have deep meaningful friendships.
What a mess.
I wouldn't say everywhere. Who else is trying to cover up genocide, ethic cleansing, and apartheid?
It will likely be yet another excuse to push more verification of age, identity, etc. legislation.
Maybe I shouldn't be saying this, but... There are already some niche technical questions that Google's AI mode will answer based on a single Hackernews comment. I've even seen my own comments used as sources. Some of them were wrong in hindsight.
Itamar Ben-Gvir, just recently, stated that he wants to kill 30-40 Palestinians every night. He said so, publicly.
So it is hilarious that Israel is trying to influence chatbots when shit like that is out in the open.
And he is a minister in Israel's government, not some rando. Israeli governments and actions in the last many years are simply indefensible.
It's legitimately weird to see anybody defend them, as the immorality is out in the open.
The past few years have really opened my eyes to the nakedly tribal nature of democratic politics. Polybius was largely correct when he said that it inevitably degenerates into oligarchy or mob-rule -- but what's especially unfortunate is that the US and Israel appear to be getting both at the same time: A naked oligarchy with just enough mob rule to keep the animal spirits of the populace sated.
It really disturbed me discovering how many nominally liberal people who would react in horror at casual use of the n word are quite comfortable with genocidal racism.
Hell, those folks react in horror at literally quoting the n-word as written in "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn."
Use-mention distinction is lost on a lot of people. It's a useful test for whether someone is reacting to a word (e.g. "damn") out of pure emotion and conditioning, or whether they're acting rationally.
Never heard the name of that concept before (though obviously am aware of it). Thanks for enlightening me today!
You're welcome! There's nothing quite like finding the phrase that labels a concept you've been aware of for a long time.
Unfortunately there will always be people across the political spectrum who pearl clutch over media they personally find distasteful. The question is do any of them care when the rubber meets the road in reality. Christian conservative, progressive atheist, all are capable of failing that test.
And, with a perfectly straight face, they'll say: "B-but ackshually it's NOT genocide! They're not all dead yet!"
Beyond disturbing, I think.
Why should it surprise? It was never about values, it was about signaling. This is commonplace.
As you said, nominally liberal. What Israel is doing is deeply illiberal, and actual liberals, if there are any left, don't support the Zionist project.
That's why support for Israel is such a good wedge issue that leftists keep hammering on. If a nominally liberal politician is willing to support such an obviously illiberal position, then what other fundamental liberal values are they willing to give up?
I’m genuinely surprised they aren’t here in this thread doing exactly that. The defenders pop up in every corner of Reddit any time anything related is mentioned. That there isn’t a similar effect here is quite interesting.
Edit: I should have scrolled down more first.
paul Graham is a very brave and vocal critic of apartheid policy of Israel. I legit almost cried when I saw one of this posts... Honestly it was just so unexpected. This place tows no line, and weeds out the bots
I don't view Ben Gvir's rise to a position of powers as a product of democracy, as much of a product of artificial states, neocolonialism, ethnostates, and apartheid. More directly, his rise to power is a direct result of the financial support of Israeli settlements over the past century which could not have existed in the absence of such financial support: settlers were paid to live in a specific strategic locations, in a specific way that would further the Zionist mission (first exclusionary, later apartheid).
Any power structure will be twisted and corrupted in the presence of these state systems to give people like Ben Gvir (or Stephen Miller, if you'd like) the platform and power to unleash their naked evil on the world. This is not unique to democracy.
I think it's upon us - all of humanity - to denounce artificial states, neocolonialism, ethnostates, and apartheid. They are founded on principles that are misanthropic, asocial, and unhumanitarian. They have always led to an immense amount of suffering. But they are not inevitable, termination mode of democracy.
illuminating thanks for sharing this point of view.
funny that recently I came to a similar conclusion regarding power structures being corrupted anyway at the end, independently from the starting political form, is like we humans tend to be corrupt and violent at the end.
how many "democracies" are currently at war? or are doing violent covert or non covert operations/strategies? who controls that?
"I think it's upon us - all of humanity - to denounce artificial states, neocolonialism, ethnostates, and apartheid. They are founded on principles that are misanthropic, asocial, and unhumanitarian. They have always led to an immense amount of suffering. But they are not inevitable, termination mode of democracy."
this is gold, we can close the conversation here :)
> we humans tend to be corrupt and violent at the end
On a big picture "we" the west are perpetuating a type of colonialism. On the invisible "other side" in the global south, the outlook on a statement like "every conceivable political system always leads to corruption and violence" is quite different, better things are imaginable to them because it means liberation, freedom from oppressive forces, and so on. In the west it is the opposite, its unimaginable because an end to the oppressive forces means "we", means history literally ends, it's circular it's why the west views itself as the peak of civilization nothing that came before or after is even conceivably better than us.
> I don't view Ben Gvir's rise to a position of powers as a product of democracy, as much of a product of artificial states, neocolonialism, ethnostates, and apartheid.
From my understanding Ben Gvir(who has very little overall support in Israel from the population at large) getting elected is more of a consequence of Israel having nationwide proportional representation which allows extremists to get elected.
Ben Gvir then managed to become a minister due to Netanyahu having insufficient support from moderates to form a coalition without having to work with extremists like Ben Gvir.
> I think it's upon us - all of humanity - to denounce artificial states, neocolonialism, ethnostates, and apartheid.
So most states in the middle east should be dissolved? It's not clear what you're actually advocating for in practice.
> They are founded on principles that are misanthropic, asocial, and unhumanitarian. They have always led to an immense amount of suffering.
So we should dissolve most states including the United States due to flawed founding principals?
> From my understanding Ben Gvir(who has very little overall support in Israel from the population at large) getting elected is more of a consequence of Israel having nationwide proportional representation which allows extremists to get elected.
The existence of the support for those extremists has the same root cause that I stated in my original message: the artificial and strategic neocolonial state propped up by outside financial support with the expressed goal of establishing an ethnostate that eventually and inevitably led to apartheid.
> So most states in the middle east should be dissolved? It's not clear what you're actually advocating for in practice.
You can't unscramble an egg. Dissolution of dysfunctional but non-anarchic states is obviously a hyperbolic solution that I think you're aware brings nothing to the table as a suggestion.
What I'm advocating for in practice is quite clear in my original post, but I'll state it again: we need to denounce artificial states, neocolonialism, ethnostates, and apartheid. Much in the same way that we denounce war crimes, sex trafficking, and slavery.
> So we should dissolve most states including the United States due to flawed founding principals?
Again, you're bringing nothing to the table here with hyperbole. But in a way, yes, during Reconstruction a more heavy-handed approach should have been used to eliminate with great fury and prejudice the cultural desire for an apartheid state in the South, and maybe prevented or softened 150 years of suffering for black people and their descendants.
> The existence of the support for those extremists has the same root cause that I stated in my original message: the artificial and strategic neocolonial state propped up by outside financial support with the expressed goal of establishing an ethnostate that eventually led to apartheid.
Do you attribute Palestinian support for extremism to a similar root cause? Opinion polling indicates the extremism problem is far worse on the Palestinian side, Israeli extremism trends tend to be fairly reactionary to Palestinian extremism(i.e. Second Intifada) historically.
> What I'm advocating for in practice is quite clear in my original post, but I'll state it again: we need to denounce artificial states, neocolonialism, ethnostates, and apartheid. Much in the same way that we denounce war crimes, sex trafficking, and slavery.
So you're just advocating just for more virtue signalling instead of actual concrete actions? I don't see how that would meaningfully change the situation on the ground as I don't see how denouncing the right for Israel to exist is going to do anything except push Israel towards a more extreme position.
> But in a way, yes, during Reconstruction a more heavy-handed approach should have been used to eliminate with great fury and prejudice the cultural desire for an apartheid state in the South, and maybe prevented or softened 150 years of suffering for black people and their descendants.
Are you suggesting Israel also take a more heavy handed approach when it comes to eliminating the widespread practice of teaching of hate and antisemitism[0] to Palestinians?
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Textbooks_in_the_Israeli%E2%80...
> Do you attribute Palestinian support for extremism to a similar root cause?
Yes. But we typically don't call oppressed peoples "extremists". For example, I wouldn't call those who rebelled in the Warsaw Ghetto "extremists". I wouldn't call a 14 year old boy who has only known struggle his whole life under apartheid an "extremist". Apartheid also has had a lasting effect on oppressor / oppressed dynamics in South Africa in a sad and complicated way. There is a wrinkle that Muslim extremists fund Palestinian groups, but I view this as yin to the yang of Israeli settlement funding (also extremist). Two sides of the same apartheid coin.
> So you're just advocating just for more virtue signalling instead of actual concrete actions?
Calling everything one disagrees with "virtue signalling" is a tired trope. There is no solution that will occur in our lifetimes, because there is no benevolent and omnipotent authority that can snap their magic finger and cease the suffering that's occurring because of this apartheid ethnostate.
With my suggestion, I'm trying to prevent the next ethnostate disaster. Ideally, I would want our descendants to recoil in disgust when thinking of the concept of funding an ethnostate in the same way that we recoil in disgust at the concept of funding a sex trafficking ring. I will teach my children, and my children's children, that "A State for [] People" is disgusting, no matter what [] is - unless it is "A State for All People".
> I don't see how that would meaningfully change the situation on the ground as I don't see how denouncing the right for Israel to exist is going to do anything except push Israel towards a more extreme position.
It's not that Israel doesn't have a right to exist, you're putting words in my mouth. South Africa was once an apartheid state, and it continues to exist. Similarly, ethnostates need to find ways to transition away from being ethnostates. Being an ethnostate can only lead to crimes against humanity.
> Are you suggesting Israel also take a more heavy handed approach when it comes to eliminating the widespread practice of teaching of hate and antisemitism[0] to Palestinians?
If only I could trust the state of Israel to actually design a "heavy handed approach" that wasn't rape, pillage, murder, and terrorize. The Union could be trusted, but only barely. The Union famously allowed black women to testify against the Union soldiers who raped them. I could never imagine the state of Israel allowing a Palestinian to testify against an Israeli soldier who raped them. Not yet, at least.
> But we typically don't call oppressed peoples "extremists".
Many groups are oppressed to various degrees for various reasons but restoring to terrorism(especially against civilians) is arguably an extremist response. The two are not mutually exclusive.
> For example, I wouldn't call those who rebelled in the Warsaw Ghetto "extremists".
They were being exterminated. I don't recall there being much terrorism targeting German civilians during that rebellion either.
> I wouldn't call a 14 year old boy who has only known struggle his whole life under apartheid an "extremist".
It's not oppression that would make one an extremist, it would be for example holding extremist views such as the supporting of terrorist attacks against civilians. One can teach extremist views to a 14 year old boy, in fact it's often much easier to teach extremist views to children than to adults.
> Calling everything one disagrees with "virtue signalling" is a tired trope.
Advocating for more condemnation without proposing actual solutions is rather pointless unless your end goal is endless war.
> There is no solution that will occur in our lifetimes, because there is no benevolent and omnipotent authority that can snap their magic finger and cease the suffering that's occurring because of this apartheid ethnostate.
So we should just give up and advocate for policies that will clearly never lead to peace? Also an occupation is not the same as apartheid. Apartheid is race based discrimination while the situation with Israel/Palestine falls mostly under the category of citizenship based discrimination(which most countries practice to various degrees).
> With my suggestion, I'm trying to prevent the next ethnostate disaster. Ideally, I would want our descendants to recoil in disgust when thinking of the concept of funding an ethnostate in the same way that we recoil in disgust at the concept of funding a sex trafficking ring. I will teach my children, and my children's children, that "A State for [] People" is disgusting, no matter what [] is - unless it is "A State for All People".
The middle east is full of ethnostates, compared to most states in the region Israel does reasonably well at protecting the rights of minority ethnicity citizens.
> South Africa was once an apartheid state, and it continues to exist.
Sure, but I don't think black South Africans were advocating for the destruction of South Africa as a state during apartheid.
> Similarly, ethnostates need to find ways to transition away from being ethnostates.
How do you propose states do that? Israel is clearly never going to give Palestinians full citizenship when the Palestinians at large do not believe in equal rights.
> If only I could trust the state of Israel to actually design a "heavy handed approach" that wasn't rape, pillage, murder, and terrorize.
So should a different country or organization be trying to de-radicalize Palestinians?
> I could never imagine the state of Israel allowing a Palestinian to testify against an Israeli soldier who raped them. Not yet, at least.
Israel has allowed for testimony from Palestinians in cases to some degree AFAIU but I don't think simply being allowed to give testimony is really the main issue here. The real issues are more tied to the way justice is administered, systematic double standards and the way military law is applied to non-citizens. The lack of any sort of final peace agreement between Israel and Palestine is what perpetuates this system however.
Think we're done here. I don't see a cohesive theme that deserves a response in between your responses to very specific pieces of my argument rooted in deflection and whataboutism. I feel I've expressed my viewpoint sufficiently. I don't feel like debating the definition of "terrorism", "extremist views", "race", "South Africa", etc.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gish_gallop
> Do you attribute Palestinian support for extremism to a similar root cause?
Defending your home and against genocide is not "extremism". Anyone who's familiar with the history of Palestine will understand why they fight for their homelands and families:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nakba
> Defending your home and against genocide is not "extremism".
The Nakba is not genocide, it might be considered ethnic cleansing but that's not remotely the same as genocide. It also wasn't just one side doing ethnic cleansing either, Israel has a large Arab minority population with full citizenship while the same is not true for Jews in other Arab countries or Palestinian controlled territories(i.e. Area A in the west bank).
Massive amounts of Jews were driven from their homes around the same time as the Nakba throughout the middle east and they are not fighting to take back their original homes. This idea that everyone can somehow go back to their original homes or ancestors homes only serves to perpetuate the conflict.
People flee from wars, sometimes that's simply the least bad option, I have ancestors that have lost their homes due to their home country losing a war of aggression but I am certainly not about to go fight to try and take back my ancestors homes. That's all settled history at this point.
> Anyone who's familiar with the history of Palestine will understand why they fight for their homelands and families
There's much more to it than just the Nakba, it's also the many years of Palestinians being used as a tool by Arab countries to fight Israel.
Keep in mind the UNRWA(UN agency which is in charge of Palestinian refugees) unlike the UNHCR(UN agency in charge of non-Palestinian refugees) does not have a mandate to resettle refugees which deliberately perpetuates the conflict. Arab countries also coordinated a refusal to grant Palestinian refugees or their descendants citizenship as a way to perpetuate the conflict.
Then there's the coordinated antisemitic terrorist propaganda taught to Palestinian children as well.
> The Nakba is not genocide, it might be considered ethnic cleansing but that's not remotely the same as genocide
It was absolutely an ethnic cleansing and the killing never stopped. Israel has been murdering Palestinians (and it's Arab neighbors), since its inception.
All of the things you're saying have been said by Zionists a million times, and presumably are being pumped out by the think tank in the OP to flood the internet with trainable propaganda. It will not work though, the truth is known by too many people.
> It was absolutely an ethnic cleansing
Sure, but it wasn't just one side losing homes.
> the killing never stopped
There never was a final peace deal and only Israel ever made concrete final settlement offers.
Not just “a minister”, but the Minister of National Security. I mean, yeah, the “you can’t judge the intent of Israel’s security policy by Ben-Gvir” would maybe hold some water if he was, say, Minister of Tourism (though if a Tourism minister was telegraphing genocidal intent that wasn’t that of the government, you still wouldn't expect them to stay around long, either) but...
When such statements/actions are attributed to Ben-Gvir, I assume they and the objective nuanced truth are basically the same. I find it wild how people who are not like him defend him.
I find it disappointing that people I once respected revealed themselves to be like him.
Given all that they do in public it’s terrifying to imagine the secret stuff we have no idea about.
Ben-Gvir's first date with his wife (who was 15 then, when he was 26) was at the grave of Baruch Goldstein, a mass-murder that killed 29 Palestinians. Ben-Gvir kept a portrait of the guy in his office for years.
Zionists want you to believe the conflict began on October 7th, when people like him have been running Israel for a long time.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mowing_the_grass
The extremist right-wingers may not be in power in Israel for long. But the lies and propaganda are just as prevalent in the left here too.
Foundation for Defense of Democracies is another Israeli think tank that poses as an American organization. If you see anything quoted from them realize it's fake propaganda in the service of a foreign country.
The "Washington Institute for Near East Policy" is another big one
MEMRI is the US non-profit organization that provides translations from Arabic for the Western media:
"MEMRI was co-founded by Israeli ex-intelligence officer Yigal Carmon and Israeli-American political scientist Meyrav Wurmser in 1998. MEMRI describes itself as being independent and non-partisan. Some critics have described MEMRI as aiming to portray the Arab world and the Islamic world in a negative light by producing and disseminating incomplete or inaccurate translations of the original versions of the media reports that it republishes." (Wikipedia)
There's also supposed "UN watch" which is another innocuous looking Israeli front meant to sow confusion into decades long UN's attemmpts to deal with the mess jewish terror gangs in Palestine created by stealing massive amount of land from Palestinians in 1947-48 for their bigoted state project.
That explains a lot! Yesterday, I came across this article - Outrage In Oman Over Trump's Threat To Bomb The Sultanate... - https://www.memri.org/reports/outrage-oman-over-trumps-threa... and posted it on HN. But then, I had second thoughts as I had never heard of MEMRI and a scan of the website revealed a lot of antisemitic content and in general poor quality, tabloid like "hyped" up articles. The website also had no 'About Us' page that highlighted who runs it. All this made me suspicious and I immediately deleted the posted link on HN.
Yes. And these people have successfully managed to pollute the US information system with their "independent reporting" on the Middle East media for close to thirty years.
This is nothing new Israel has been doing this for years. It's just that people have started waking up to their lies.
They jumped the shark.
You can't openly bomb a bunch of women and children into the dirt, on a daily basis for months and years, and smooth it over with some think tank articles.
Might have worked 20 years ago, but not now.
If only there was a solution on the table that's been there for years and that one side refuses to accept over and over again. And that can put a stop to bombing or dirt or whatever.
Two state solution.
Or a one state solution with a Palestinian leader.
Apparently just one genocide against the Jews per 100 years simply isn't enough for you.
If you think having a particular ethnicity in charge is equivalent to endorsing genocide, you miiiiiight be a little bit racist.
> If you think having a particular ethnicity in charge is equivalent to endorsing genocide, you miiiiiight be a little bit racist.
The democratically elected government of the Palestinians in Gaza(Hamas) has for a long time quite openly advocated for effectively genocide Jews/Israeli's, it's not racist to simply believe that Hamas is telling the truth in regards to what their end goals are.
> The democratically elected government of the Palestinians in Gaza
There's no such thing: the separate authority in Gaza was produced by Israeli military isolation of the separate parts of Palestine nominally administered by the PA, and how that facilitated Hamas local victory there in the intra-Palestinian civil war against the central government.
Also, the elections that were won by Hamas candidates before that were before most currently living Gazans were born, much less eligible to vote, and subsequent elections have not been held because Israel blocked the all-Palestine elections agreed to by Hamas and Fatah, so even if the “government of Palestinians in Gaza” were simply a direct result of those elections, which it is not, it would hardly be the “democratically elected” by those currently governed.
> There's no such thing: the separate authority in Gaza was produced by Israeli military isolation of the separate parts of Palestine nominally administered by the PA, and how that facilitated Hamas local victory there in the intra-Palestinian civil war against the central government.
The election that brought Hamas to power in Gaza was widely considered to be free and fair.[0]
> Also, the elections that were won by Hamas candidates before that were before most currently living Gazans were born, much less eligible to vote, and subsequent elections have not been held because Israel blocked the all-Palestine elections agreed to by Hamas and Fatah, so even if the “government of Palestinians in Gaza” were simply a direct result of those elections, which it is not, it would hardly be the “democratically elected” by those currently governed.
And yet polling indicates if another vote was held Hamas would likely still win, in both Gaza and the West Bank, so it's essentially a moot point. It's not just Israel that has blocked elections, Fatah has also not wanted elections because they know they would lose. The problem is that Palestinians have in reality largely supported extremists far more than moderates, that may change but reducing Palestinian support for extremism is ultimately what needs to change for there to be a chance at having some long term peace agreement.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2006_Palestinian_legislative_e...
A lot of Jews in the Polish Ghettos were pretty extremist.
> A lot of Jews in the Polish Ghettos were pretty extremist.
The Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising were not going around killing German civilians.
Warsaw Ghetto was sealed off in November 1940 by a wall more than 10 feet high, with barbed wire and guarded gates.
German authorities specifically used the guards to prevent movement between the ghetto and the rest of Warsaw.
Sounds familiar - as I said, history rhymes.
> Warsaw Ghetto was sealed off in November 1940 by a wall more than 10 feet high, with barbed wire and guarded gates.
France was sealed off in 1938 by a line of concrete fortifications, obstacles and weapon installations called the Maginot Line.
> German authorities specifically used the guards to prevent movement between the ghetto and the rest of Warsaw.
French authorities specifically used the guards to prevent movement between Germany and the rest of France.
> Sounds familiar - as I said, history rhymes.
Sounds familiar - as I said, history rhymes.
I'm pretty sure French guards didn't prevent movement between Germany and the rest of France.
> I'm pretty sure French guards didn't prevent movement between Germany and the rest of France.
I'm pretty sure the Israeli border guards didn't entirely prevent movement between Palestine and Israel either, at least prior to October 7th.
My point was simply that trying to claim legitimate border defenses are somehow equivalent to a concentration camp is an insane view.
If you lock women and children in a ghetto, then bomb and shoot them relentlessly for months and years, people are going to want to know what book you are reading.
> If you lock women and children in a ghetto, then bomb and shoot them relentlessly for months and years, people are going to want to know what book you are reading.
This is an absolutely insane comparison, Hamas is free to surrender and give up their weapons if they want the bombing to stop, the Jews of the Warsaw Ghetto had no similar opportunity.
I don't think even I would think surrender, in those circumstances, makes a great deal of sense. Given the long run experience of Palestinians...
And I'm an atheist.
Mind you, I'm also British. Northern Ireland and all that.
> I don't think even I would think surrender, in those circumstances, makes a great deal of sense.
Why not? That's what typically happens when one side loses a war, I'm not sure how prolonging the conflict is helpful.
> And I'm an atheist.
So am I.
> I'm also British.
Funny enough I am as well(in addition to a couple others). History is full of people losing their homes and becoming refugees like some of my ancestors did, that's often much better than the alternative of staying to fight and die. I am certainly not trying to get their homes back as that is long settled history.
I'm curious.
Was Britain at war with Northern Ireland?
I've come to believe that it's pretty impossible to understand Israel-Palestine without the lens of religion.
> Was Britain at war with Northern Ireland?
Not formally.
> I've come to believe that it's pretty impossible to understand Israel-Palestine without the lens of religion.
From my understanding according to common Islamic teachings non-Muslims are supposed to be Dhimmi's[0](i.e. second class citizens) and be ruled over by Muslim's. So I think this is probably the source of a lot of the issues with the Israel-Palestine conflict, although there are other factors in play as well.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dhimmi
"Not formally" rather implies you think it was. Northern Ireland was/is part of the UK, so civil war I could probably agree with.
The reason I mentioned religion was nothing to do with the requirements it places on how things should happen, but rather about the entitlement and infallibility that a belief that god has decreed something can grant people's mindset and outlook.
I'm not sure what meaning you can ascribe to this kind of statement, because whilst it is factually true in isolation, it also omits so much information it's almost meaningless.
There's plenty of evidence that the Israeli government is composed of people with a similar outlook, just with a power imbalance that affords them the opportunity to be more politically sophisticated.
History rhymes - I'm pretty sure that Jews in the Polish Ghetto had pretty negative views about the people detaining them there. Do you hold that against them?
> There's plenty of evidence that the Israeli government is composed of people with a similar outlook, just with a power imbalance that affords them the opportunity to be more politically sophisticated.
Israel does have some problems with extremists getting elected but that's partially due to the proportional representation system making it easier for extremists to get elected without widespread support from the population.
> I'm pretty sure that Jews in the Polish Ghetto had pretty negative views about the people detaining them there. Do you hold that against them?
Were the Jews in the Polish Ghetto terrorizing/murdering random German civilians? I'm sure they had a very negative view of the Nazi's but it's not a particularly comparable situation as the Jews were being exterminated regardless of their actions.
Gazans are being exterminated regardless of their actions.
The Warsaw ghettos didn't exist for very long. People are people, treat them the same way and you'll probably get similar results.
Of course, in this case both sides have magical thinking involved that gives them a divine blessing, so that changes things somewhat and makes it harder to reason with them.
Obviously the parallel I've drawn is extremely provocative. The Nazis started with a belief of dehumanism and acted on it. In the case of Israelis and Palestinians it's just the direction of travel over decades, but they look the same in many ways for a reason.
> Gazans are being exterminated regardless of their actions.
That's simply factually inaccurate, Hamas started the latest war while the population of Gaza was growing. The Jews started the Warsaw Ghetto uprising while they were being actively exterminated(i.e. population declining).
Hamas isn't Gazans.
The population of Gaza has been declining over the last 2 years as a direct result of 10s of thousands of Gazas being killed, including thousands of kids.
The methods thankfully differ, but the goals are pretty similar.
Both contain an ethnonational conception of the state, seek to secure political sovereignty for a particular ethnonational people, attach historical/national significance to territory, and contain expansionist/settlement currents aimed at extending that people's presence and political control over territory.
And the direction of movement is towards similarity (not away from it) - eg nation state bill.
Israel's main strategy until recently appeared to be to maximise suffering to force displacement.
I don't really see a realistic peaceful strategy for Gazans based on decades of history, they have little power. It's like an amplified Northern Ireland.
> Hamas isn't Gazans.
Hamas is the democratically elected government of Gaza and retains a high level of support amongst the population. The population could put more pressure on Hamas to disarm but so far it has been fairly minimal.
> Israel's main strategy until recently appeared to be to maximise suffering to force displacement.
Israel's strategy before October 7th was one of containment, but that clearly failed so they switched to a strategy of proactive threat management.
Israel probably should just fully occupy the territories in the short term and make a more serious attempt at Palestinian de-radicalization so that hopefully some sort of two state solution eventually becomes viable. Occupation with de-radicalization worked with the Nazi's and Imperial Japan at the end of WW2 but Israeli's just really don't want to have to fully occupy Gaza so that's going to be politically problematic.
> I don't really see a realistic peaceful strategy for Gazans based on decades of history, they have little power.
They had opportunities for peace, Palestinian leadership ultimately threw those opportunities away by refusing to even so much as propose a concrete peace deal that would be acceptable.
I'm struggling to work out if you actually believe this, which seems unlikely, or if it's just a plausible facade.
What do you think would happen in that scenario, if not at least the inverse direction of what's happening now?
The only solution that has ever worked in that region was 0-state. ie they were governed by some larger empire. Some call the US the empire this time, but it's not.
Why would israelis ever agree to give up control of their government? They hold all the cards here, any solution will have to be one that favors israel because the status quo is just fine for them
Not if the US backs out or otherwise changes its stance
If the US backs out the hard liners gain even more control, ally with china, and begin their final solution to the palestinian problem. Israelis would go north korea before a one state solution.
That's the thing though, no other world power would sign up for this kind of relationship with Israel. We're giving them protection and paying them for it too. There's a reason Russia and China don't go head to head with us over the Mid East, but Russia will do it in Ukraine.
These trite replies also worked 20 years ago, but not today.
People that have read history know your assertion - vaguely suggesting it was the Palestinians that rejected many peace deals - know that this is completely false.
Please do tell why an Israeli Prime Minister was assassinated?
> vaguely suggesting it was the Palestinians that rejected many peace deal
I am not vaguely suggesting it. I am firmly suggesting it. This is not false, it's completely true. 1936 Peel Commission. 1947 UN Partition. Post 1967 countless attempts to do land for peace deals. 1999 Camp David attempts, 2000 Taba. 2008 negotiations between Abbas and Olmert.
If not a 2 state solution, what exactly are you advocating?
If you genuinely mean this, at least somewhat naive.
I believe Russia and Ukraine have had many peace talks, and Putin really wants peace.
It's just those peaky Ukrainians not agreeing.
That’s a nonsense statement. Ukraine got invaded. Similarly to Im Israel being invaded on Oct 7, 2023.
What exactly is your solution to this conflict. Other than making snide comments.
Israel has colonized Palestine for over 70 years. Israel invaded Gaza after they flattened it.
Palestinians accepted almost all peace deals, they freed the hostages, yet, Israel kept on bombing Gaza, targeting journalists and civilians.
It seems that the biggest problem is that Israel doesn't want a palestinian state and if they need to commit a genocide, they'll be glad to do it.
I guess your viewpoint on that varies entirely based on your preferred time period, and my responses vary based on how realistic or honest I believe the response is.
I'm not sure there is a win-win solution, and I think there are sizeable elements on both sides that don't want one, but the current approach absolutely won't lead to one.
My preference is for minimising the suffering of children.
At present the long run situation seems to be that one group of people (who - whether you like it or not - were displaced from their land) suffer continuous stress and roughly 50 times the death and injury rates than the other group of people who live mostly normal lives with the threat of terror attacks.
Entertaining the idea that those people are going become less extreme under these conditions seems rather unlikely.
In Northern Ireland the numbers killed on both sides (including IRA terror attacks within Britain) were a dramatically closer ratio.
I think it is pretty much impossible to achieve anything politically when the side without power is asked to trust the side with power when it sees little restraint.
If someone stole your food, and then offered to give you crumbs as a peace deal, would you accept it?
You can quantify the number of peace deals as much as you want. But when you don't present the facts and context behind it, you're being purposely deceptive.
It is interesting how much clout Israel had, they put a lot of work into developing that, and they seemed to have just expended it all as far as US public opinion goes.
I'll say this a third time. And the importance of this article is not the method. It is the motive. Using AI to whitewash war crimes is not cool at all.
Itamar Ben-Gvir, just recently, stated that he wants to kill 30-40 Palestinians every night. He said so, publicly.
On television.
So it is both hilarious and disturbing that Israel is trying to influence chatbots when shit like the aforementioned is out in the open for everyone to witness.
Are you yourself attempting to influence AI by writing the same comment over and over again in this thread?
> Are you yourself attempting to influence AI
Even if they are doing it deliberately, I am supportive of such actions, its better if LLM reads truth, than an obvious lie
I wouldn't call their detractors AI, but they're certainly good at hasbara dogpiling for Likud.
Well, whatever works. If it also works for some counterparty like Citizens against AIPAC Corruption, they should do it too.
Despite the efforts, I have seen an increase in anti-zionist sentiment on the internet. Most notable on the right from people like Tucker Carlson en Candace Owens. People are tired of fighting another Middle-Eastern war for Israel.
The left and right are noticing and agreeing on this issue.
agreeing, but unfortunately a lot of the motivation on the Right is anti-Jew hate.
I see both a lot of left and right criticism of Israel on YouTube, and yeah, on the left it's all about Israel's actions and policies specifically, and often Zionism as an ideology, and the criticism is often lodged by left-leaning Jews.
On the right, certainly the comments sections at least definitely feature some pretty alarming bigoted tropes--the comments explicitly make the jump from being about Israel to being about "the Jews". One could definitely make the same argument about some of the content, though most of it definitely seems to fall short of where the viewers want it to in this regard.
As someone leaning left with big disagreements with the US right atm, I think the right in America would feel the same way if they felt their country's foreign, and to some extent domestic, policy was being hijacked by a small country in sub-Saharan Africa, or Asia (or Europe for that matter). They signed up for America First.
Well the Morocco lobby and the Cuba exile lobby (CANF) are both pretty powerful and both explicitly model themselves after AIPAC. CANF also isn't registered under FARA (though the Morocco one is). Admittedly, neither of them are nearly as powerful as AIPAC
The American conservatives against Israel are self-consistent in that view. America first, not Israel, not Palestine either. But the Republican party line isn't that, it's MIGA.
American leftists... idk what they want. They can't even explain it, it's like they're taking radio commands from Qatar or Iran that they only barely understand.
Israel, who has made itself the standard bearer for and home of Judaism, is behaving reprehensibly. Do they not think that legitimate anti-Israeli-policy sentiment would bleed over into illegitimate anti-semitism, particularly when Israeli government officials themselves are openly racist and genocidal?
Of course I agree. They have demonstrated they don't really care about Judaism or Jews. (Israel is European colonialist project at heart.)
Not really. Republican party is 99% owned by Israeli lobby. I used to say it's both sides, but recent House and Senate bills relating to this have been way more partisan than ever before, like the one that would merge parts of the US and Israeli military passed House with almost 0 Dem votes.
One interesting comparison, the Twelve Day War against Iran in 2025 had Democrat support. Despite their rhetoric, they voted to give Israel huge emergency funding. But they're truly voting against the 2026 Iran War.
One genuinely poisonous aspect of Israeli policy is that the more Jews as a people are persecuted, the better Israel as a nation does: demographically, economically, and diplomatically[1].
It was true in the days of Avraham Stern, and it's true today. It creates some truly horrific perverse incentives.
[1] By dint of being the "victim", even if it's not Israel the nation being victimized. A disastrous category error that the nation of Israel exploits quite shamelessly.
I think the "it's just SEO" or "propaganda isn't new" comments are missing the bigger picture. Given how LLMs are effectively being treated as core processing components by so many automations, generating information to skew LLM training could be considered similar to adding a back door to an actual CPU.
For example, if someone writes a generic prompt to flag offensive language, the LLM would flag certain political views whether or not the language was offensive. Causing friction and effectively discrimination against groups of people even though it was not the writer's intention.
An even more serious example would be someone in the military screening targets and the LLM marking a school or hospital as a valid target without the user intending to.
To be clear, I'm not stating that either of these doesn't happen intentionally, but that any manipulation of LLM training data can cause these things to happen when the user did not intend it, and hence it's similar to adding a back door or corrupting a CPU.
The result of all this is that everyone will hate Israelis, and then thus by proxy, Jews more.
The right thing to do would be to stop slaughtering Palestinians.
People are not stupid.
> The result of all this is that everyone will hate Israelis
Will? I don't know in which circle you evolve but that ship sailed a long time ago
Really depends on the country. E.g., Israel has enjoyed a lot of support from the US, both officially and in public opinion, until just the last couple years.
Very much.
For example here in Eastern Europe when people hear "Israeli" they tend to assume it means "Russian with Israeli passport, probably here to avoid sanctions or outbid locals on real estate".
I'm sure it's very different in Turkey or say Thailand where they have Israel-born Israeli tourists, and surely different in US (though I have no idea what it is).
I am from Eastern Europe and people here "assumed" a lot of things about Jews way before Israel was even a thing. Let's not pretend Eastern Europeans would have loved Jews if it weren't for "Israel".
Yes, but within Eastern Europe acceptance of Jews is generally higher than acceptance of Muslims, based on polling.
Many non-Israeli Jews view Israel's actions as abhorent, particularly younger Jews.
Being associated with Israel over the last few years must be a very uncomfortable place to be.
> Many non-Israeli Jews view Israel's actions as abhorent, particularly younger Jews.
And this comes of your own polling? As a non-Israeli Jew, I've seen quite the opposite. They closed ranks in the face of an external threat, especially the younger ones. Ignore Hollywood and Hannah Einbinders of the world - that is not the reality.
"47% of [American] Jews now view the Israeli government favorably, down from 54% [in 2024]."
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2026/07/09/americans...
From the article:
How did we do this?
This analysis includes findings from a survey of 12,574 U.S. adults, 10,091 of whom are part of the Center’s American Trends Panel (ATP). The remaining 2,483 respondents include oversamples of Jews, Muslims and Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints members from SSRS’ Opinion Panel, Ipsos’ KnowledgePanel and NORC’s AmeriSpeak Panel. We conducted the survey May 4-17, 2026, and it has an overall margin of error of plus or minus 1.3 percentage points.
They drew conclusions about Jews from subset of Jews from 2,483 respondents that included an unknown amount of Jews, Muslims, Mormons, and whoever is a member of Ipsos’ KnowledgePanel and NORC’s AmeriSpeak Panel. I am not sure this is especially representative.
Even so, I don't know if I would characterize 54 to 47 as viewing as "abhorrent" as OP said.
They also say "We weren’t able to survey enough Muslims to show how their views differ by age", so I guess the number of Jews isn't that much below 2,483. According to Gemini that already gives +-2% margin of error, which sounds good enough to me.
> Even so, I don't know if I would characterize 54 to 47 as viewing as "abhorrent" as OP said.
Agreed, also not quite "closed ranks" though. Exactly in between I guess.
I was referring to Jews outside the US, although I appreciate most Jews outside Israel live in the US (you were referring to Eastern Europe).
I'd agree that within the US opinions differ markedly, which I think is likely in part strongly related to differences in news media environment.
Re: Eastern Europe - I was referring to the Pew Research Center survey conducted across 34 European countries in 2015–17.
Re: attitudes of younger Jews I'm really referring to Non-Americans (Americans are a special case). With American Jews the age gradient effect is there, but I don't know about the impact of the last couple of years.
Take data points in Europe and attitudes are marked and there is data to support that Israel's recent actions are absolutely being rejected by younger Jews.
News media is considered more reliable in Europe over the US (by measures of the population) so that could certainly be playing into it.
> News media is considered more reliable in Europe over the US
That sounds like nonsense.
Based on data, the American population distrusts is own news media more than the European population distrusts its news media (markedly so if you consider only Western Europe). In 2026, only 25% of Americans said they trusted news overall [Reuters]
The European media landscape differs - a recent study covering 24 European markets found that experts' assessments of accuracy broadly matched public trust: outlets regarded by experts as providing accurate information backed by credible sources tended to be the outlets the public trusted most. Public-service media generally scored particularly well.
The American population also considers its own news media much more partisan than Europeans consider their news media. Americans are more likely to inhabit separate information ecosystems (which by their very nature makes them less factual and more political - ie they are looking for what they want to hear).
I'm also a non-Israeli Jew, and here in the US, disapproval of Israel amongst Jews has risen, especially amongst the young.
According to an AP-NORC poll (https://apnorc.org/projects/among-american-jews-views-on-jew...):
> "Thirty-seven percent of Jews under age 45 say Israel has committed genocide in Gaza compared to 23% of those 45 or older".
The exact level of support varies based on age, secularity, and poll question phrasing, but across the board, US Jewish support for Israel is down.
Maybe not in your country, but definitely in the US.
European here with little political knowledge. I thought Israel is just some kind of liberal safe space, I am still sometimes confused what it appears to really be but try to avoid having a strong opinion either way.
same thoughts, but appears to be unavoidable now.
I always imagine apolitical people looking at a mushroom cloud thinking to themselves "perhaps I should've been more political" moments before their atoms drift apart.
I am not apolotical, how could one be really? It's more like the whole topic is so full of hate, propaganda, missleading information from all sides that it's either I spend a few weeks or months reading into the history of it or I better don't develop a strong opinion because I likely would be wrong in many points.
No idea where everyone is taking the time from to read up the whole history of things when they publicly propagate their strong opinions about all these complex situations.
To clarify I have an opinion, but I am aware that my opinion is only based on some obvious facts and ignores a lot of the history, so I don't consider it worth fighting for.
It's complicated... but people don't like the mass bombing of kids.
That's not complicated.
> about all these complex situations
It depends on which side we are on, that determines how the conflict needs to be sold to the on average decent but apolitical person like yourself. As allied against nazis? Not complicated. Fighting russia's invasion of Ukraine? Not complicated. Fighting against Palestinian resistance to their genocide? Complicated. But like South African apartheid turned from complicated to simple over a few decades so you will be dragged along eventually by us "political" people.
It even works with other things too, like people starving on the streets or ~25k people dying from no health care every year, its "complicated", it will always be complicated (until it isn't).
This will not be known by most people, the intent is to change what an LLM will answer when you ask certain questions.
A friend of mine noted the other day that chatgot will answer "yes" to the question of whether Israel is committing genocide.
The Israeli government does not want that.
Perhaps the Israeli government should read the UN Convention on Genocide and reconsider its behavior, if it doesn’t want to be observed committing genocide.
Not true. It will only happen if they lose the information war. During 2023/2024 Iran did this exact same thing flooding the internet and no one hates them infact it worked and people link and share and boost their articles.
well then, maybe we should ask ourself why the hate! both against the propaganda (that everybody does, even if it's a very poor claim to say they all do it why hate us) and against the bomb to the ground war and genocidal violence happening.
Why the hate against this if everybody else does it? and everybody else does it is a decent argument?
Maybe we could do war without killing all civilians and razing cities to the ground?
but why do we have to do war? or why do we need to defend ourself?
I'm not sure what "we" or "our" is referring to here.
> People are not stupid
Maybe not but they are "by proxy" quite racist according to your description
People lap up whatever they see. Their influence on media works and is nothing new.
Whose influence?
That's the whole point. Antisemitism is widely accepted as wrong. Israel goes out of its way to paint any opposition to Israel as antisemitism, trying to piggyback on that sentiment. Conflating Jews with Israel is something both sides engage in. As a non-Israeli Jew who is quite opposed to what the modern state of Israel engages in, I'm real tired of being used as a pawn like this.
Interesting but nothing new, all countries doing the same but any information coming from Israel is clearly poisoned to try compensate the negative image that they clearly represent.
Just see the garbage coming from a web search (totally polluted and poisoned with the same spam output quality since years) so this is just an extension of that towards the input of ai.
they can try hard but any person with a non-biased brain does not need to do a google search or ask ai to reach then truth.
Facts are facts, like what was represented in Schindler's list and what is happening now in middle east or other conflicts.
I think the world is becoming much more aware of what real zionism is and that scares them a lot, hence the needed info manipulation.
But we now know who you really are! And yeah their state members daily political statements (about hate violence and racism) just confirm this every day, anybody can understand that and no info pollution needed.
At this stage I'm not sure it's about persuasion per se - pretty much everybody who is paying the slightest attention knows what's going on.
I mean Ben Gvir couldn't be more explicit.
Now it's more about giving a fig leaf of plausible ( sic ) deniability for inaction or complicity.
ie people can say 'it's contested' or 'on the one hand' etc.
I think mods are asleep, an anti-Israeli post can't stay on the homepage for this long.
give it some time
It's likely to get flagged off by users anyway.
I think there is a huge shift in hackernews as of late (as other mainstream media as well) where such discussions happen, not necessary encouraged.
I'm shocked to see the difference between 2023 and today.
Gog and Magog won't create themselves out of thin air.
A discourse must be cultivated and steered till the point when they are ready to form.
Mods will almost always turn off flagging for stories if you email them. I think it's too easy to flag something to death and not enough people know they can just email the mods
What does it means to be a "fake" think tank? 80% of think tanks are already propaganda vehicles. A low end think tank is basically a pretentious blog.
>What does it means to be a "fake" think tank?
presumably that you don't have employees that do any of the proverbial thinking, which is the case here.
Every think tank has its biases and funding sources but something like RAND is an actual entity at which people do research, this "Hanover Public Policy Institute" has nothing to do with Hanover, policy and isn't an institute, but a deliberately misleadingly presenting arm of the Israeli government proxied through a German advertising company
I had the same exact thought. It's implied, but I don't think the article explicitly states that the content produced by the think tank has minimal or no human involvement.
So this is the future of marketing, SEO, advertisement. Open AI also taking it seriously: https://ads.openai.com/
I find intensive marketing/PR efforts are often inversely correlated with the claims being made - whether it's products or geopolitics. Israel certainly engages in very intense marketing on certain fronts, but truth cannot be obscured forever. In Physics the law of conservation includes not only matter and energy, but also information (Information cannot be destroyed from the Universe).
I've also found this to be true, but also only in relatively modern times. For instance during the Cold War there was an obscene amount of propaganda, but it was mostly true. For instance the wide array of cheap affordable goods in American shelves was constantly flaunted, but not in the least bit misleading.
I don't understand the modern effort to engage in 'information warfare' as a thing in and of itself. Each time it collapses and people sees what was 'really' happening, it just makes them that much less likely to believe you next time. And you also create a significant number of perpetually jaded people who will basically never believe you again, even when you're telling the truth. Countless politicians have proudly paraded around their pristine, seemingly untouched, copies of Meditations, but perhaps they should go for more foundational works, like The Boy Who Cried Wolf.
The difference between American and Russian propaganda is that Russians know it's propaganda.
This was a great, old anecdote. Until they’ve started the biggest European war of the century.
The scale of a war is more often decided by who decides to unexpectedly jump in moreso than the initial party. WW1 starts when a Bosnian Serb assassinates an Austro-Hungarian royal leading to Austria-Hungary invading Serbia. The the next thing you know Brits are killing Germans over it.
There are endless border clashes. Even in very recent times we have Armenia-Azerbaijan, Afghanistan-Pakistan, Thailand-Cambodia, and many more. Wiki gives more than 60 in the 21st century [1], and we're just getting started! And if other parties had decided to get involved and start jamming up the escalation ladder, any of those could have easily turned into a much bigger war, instead of being just yet another relatively inconsequential border conflict.
Or imagine if another country (perhaps Russia or China) had decided to 'pull a US' when the US invaded any of the countless countries we've invaded over the years - Iraq, Syria, Libya, Afghanistan, Venezuela, Yemen, and so on just in quite recent times. That could very well have led to WW3, but it didn't because they didn't.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_border_conflicts#21st_...
Not sure it is true. If it was true that all Russians know it’s just propaganda and that they are just engaged in an illegal genocide then less Russians would sign up for the army.
> And you also create a significant number of perpetually jaded people who will basically never believe you again, even when you're telling the truth.
Yes, but they will also not believe my enemies. Making people not believe anything anymore is a classic strategy of propaganda.
Maybe that is the rationale. It's the only thing that'd make sense, but for problem that it doesn't. When somebody, or some entity, lies to you - that entity becomes the liar. People may not want to believe 'the enemy', but that's going to be because of their own ideological reasons, and not because they now refuse to believe anybody. On the contrary non-ideologues may even be ever more swayed towards your enemy as a result of this.
Personally I think the issue is that after WW2 we were left with a large scale and ever growing intelligence apparatus, but with ever fewer appropriate tasks for them. That led directly to the era of recklessly overthrowing nations, often to our own detriment, and gradually transitioned to the modern era of aimless 'information warfare' which I think will ultimately be shown to be very much to our detriment, once again.
One goal of modern propaganda is to make it irrelevant when the truth inevitably comes out.
Look at the US situation. It’s clear that Trump is a rapist - the truth has come out. It’s clear he’s corrupt. For all the “release the full Epstein files” discussion, it really wouldn’t change anything.
The truth will come out but will the people who can make it matter be listening?
Oh the irony.
I don't understand why people who don't like fake news and manipulation won't embrace the social graph as a public good.
If enough people were willing to publicly certify that their fellow contacts are human, anybody could then assign trust to each social graph node based on the trust they have in the path to them. It would completely decentralize the algorithms and remove the fake accounts as less trustworthy.
I think people tried this with PGP but it never really caught on.
The social graph is the source of the fake news and manipulation. Before social media the social graph was email and it was all the same slop and misinformation. Before that it was literally physical mail. Look up chain letters. Truly nothing is new.
If I certify my racist thanksgiving ruining uncle is a real person that doesn’t actually help you avoid misinformation.
I honestly don’t care if the information I consume comes from a person or a robot. I only care if it is accurate or not. Those dimensions are orthogonal.
I don't think you understand what I mean by public social graph. What I mean is that anybody could publish or withdraw statements of two forms:
- "I, owner of account A, certify that owner of account B is human."
- "I, owner of account C, have a reason to trust/distrust the certification of account A about account B."
The collection of these statements would be the public social graph.
The social graph would then be used to establish provenance of facts, which are statements of the form:
- "I, owner of account B, certify account A being witness to event X."
Now whether to believe this or not depends on whether A certified B to be a human, and how much you transitively believe that statement.
So there is a kind of reversal - your statement about your uncle being human helps him to certify what you say, and vice versa.
Totally would not be abused. Don’t like politican/journalist/etc A? Let’s just mass report as fake person.
Exactly, the 'social graph' is also a huge source of cancel culture.
Mass reporting means spending huge amount of reputation which doesn't really invalidate reputation of people who still certify that the person exists.
The problem with the current systems is that reputation buying is not transparent. In my system, it would be a public record, who endorsed who. So you could go back and track the fake reputation.
Also real people have some TTL with their accounts. Unlike links, "I am real person" is not nearly as fungible.
This is exactly how bubbles of influence appear. Rarely do people from different leanings (social, political, economical etc) have spheres of opinion which intersect, and therefore get trapped in areas of general agreement. The social graph cannot be trusted to create a generally trusted source, because peoples innate distrust of things which differ from their own opinion skew this model heavily.
I should have noted, my comment is about facts. Opinion you can have, if you think it's beneficial for you not to trust (or trust) some nodes, do so!
The public social graph would be about who is a human, that can certify facts. Their opinion wouldn't really matter until you chose it to matter for you. Them being a human witness would only add credence to the accounts of the facts they witnessed, nothing more. You can still choose to disbelief the event if you have a good reason to (for example, even if you might believe a guy from Russia is a real person based on his social graph, if he certifies an event in Michigan, you might be skeptical of that account and decide to lower your own trust in that person). So there is a difference between the shared social graph - which is about a collective belief of who is a person, and your own trust, which you can modify as you wish. Unlike with Google and other big tech providers, there is not a singular "algorithm for trust" that can be manipulated.
You seem to be saying it will fail because people are tribal. I believe it will not fail, because the benefits of knowing the local social graph of each person will outweigh the tendency for opinion to split based on tribe. And the reason I think so is that trust evolved and exists in society; we do not only trust ourselves, and that's only possible if something like a social graph can work. The only issue is the scale, which can be solved by using a computer instead of computing it in our little heads.
It doesn't scale as a consumer good. Letting go of consumerist habits is just as hard as breaking any other habit.
Also, it could just as easily be faked, like so much else. Even if someone offered such an assurance, I wouldn't trust random strangers on the internet. At best it would become an arms race between "this is not a real person" and those who sell fake assurances. And it would be one more weapon to damage anyone's reputation you don't like. "not a real person!"
I am not really sure how it could be faked. The fake assurance, in order to work, must be connected to you.
By default you could choose not to trust. If you don't trust random strangers it's OK. So I don't see how it would damage someone's reputation worse than today.
It would potentially only add trust. Arguably, today we have bots because we have no other option than to trust without justification. With the public social graph, the trust above the baseline would be justifiable.
Then go and implement it. Either you make the world a better place or you learn how collision with reality impacts ideas.
Maybe.. too many other interesting things to work on.
So what happens when people are paid or otherwise incentivised to 'trust'?
This model was used in the beginning of the web, where links to your site from a well trusted website would increase the score and therefore SEO of your own site. This very quickly turned into a business of people selling hidden paid site links, and evolved into the paid editorial model we see on every news site today.
Hm, that's an interesting point. But wasn't problem of that model that the social graph (links) were not really public, but rather hidden within a search engine such as Google? Maybe if they are public the problem would be mitigated.
They do. It's already like this with business recommendations, always use a personal reference before anything else.
I've thought about making some digital reputation system that cannot be gamed. You can rep people you know and then query if there's any path of rep from you to a random person. The global number of reps you have doesn't matter, only paths. Problem is this only works if the target person can't tell that you repped them, which is impossible to hide because they can just rep you with a fake account then see if there's a path to their real account. But maybe with some fuzzing.
> ...a firm co-founded by Daniel Rosenberg, the producer of Spike Lee’s “Inside Man.”
Apparently he was an executive producer, in case anyone else is confused, as I was initially, by the fact that Brian Grazer is credited as producer of that film.
It's interesting that (as per the article) the work pumped out by this synthetic think tank does not seem to align / disfavours the official party line of the country. You'd imagine if this was propaganda, it would be supportive of the official stance. I wonder what the objective is then, reputation-building for later influence? Something else?
> the work pumped out by this synthetic think tank does not seem to align / disfavours the official party line of the country
The article DOES NOT say this- it says that sometimes this seems to be the case, but reports exactly one example of extremely little significance. In the meanwhile,
"Piro, Inc, the firm that created the Hanover Institute, has received $900,000 from the Israeli government for its work."
Opening the linked example, one sees that the article is basically dedicated to laundering the idea that there were many "antisemitic incidents" at Columbia University.
The article doesn't say that the work disfavors the party line, just that they don't always align perfectly. Which isn't that surprising considering that governments make self-contradictory statements all the time (consider Trump, for example).
Are LLMs easy to "dupe"? E.g. by placing provably wrong "information" somewhere on the internet? If so what countermeasures can help?
- Companies Are Using Reddit to Manipulate ChatGPT and Google AI Search - https://www.404media.co/companies-are-using-reddit-to-manipu...
- AI Search Has a Misinformation Problem — and DuckDuckGo Just Proved It - https://www.informertech.com/post/duckduckgo-reddit-misinfor...
I read this paper (https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.13722) on pre-training poisoning of LLMs. The authors demonstrated that poisoning 0.1% of the pretraining dataset can measurably manipulate beliefs of the model.
What I read about is a more sophisticated supply chain attack. But these days, search previews use retrieval-augmented generation to parse websites to generate answers on the fly. In that case you don't need to poison the supply chain; good SEO is enough.
whether it’s new or not doesn’t matter. it’s more propaganda and it should be exposed. really glad they wrote this article.
Dupe? or manipulate ai chatbots to have favorable views of Israel?
You just asked the same thing twice
It's remarkable how much it hasn't worked: Google "the Hanover institute" and you get an AI summary that references various Palestinian activist websites, with no actual link to 'the Hanover institute'. Google "the Hanover institute website" and you'll drag a URL out of Google AI, but it isn't clickable!
Belloc's The Jews is a nice introduction to this issue. He wrote it a century ago when things were similarly heating up, but before things had clearly boiled over.
He was prescient when he said:
"For if the quarrel is allowed to rise unchecked and to proceed unappeased, we shall come, unexpectedly and soon, upon one of these tragedies which have marked for centuries the relations between this peculiar nation and ourselves."
He was a devout Catholic, had Jewish friends, and devoted a chapter to what was wrong with antisemitism. He was earnestly trying to solve the problem before it was too late.
What exactly do you mean by "this issue"?
In the topic presented there is really no relevance to Israel being a Jewish state. This is a nation state acting nefariously to protect its interests, something I am quite sure many nations are either doing right now or will shortly start doing. e.g. I could absolutely picture Russia doing exactly this.
> He was a devout Catholic, had Jewish friends, and devoted a chapter to what was wrong with antisemitism
And yet he insisted that Jewish people are separate from any nation and should never be considered part of the native population of the country they were born and raised in. Which is, you know, antisemitic.
It's telling that your perception of a nation state acting badly leads you to a book named "The Jews".
And yet, it's rare we read similar accounts from Denmark, Colombia, Taiwan, etc, etc, etc.
Or Russia, Iran, China, USA etc. Are you saying USA has done nothing to try and influence the rest of the world? CIA would never try and influence others
I'm confused as to what the accusation is exactly. Out of curiosity I browsed the site in question, which only increased my confusion.
> But the Hanover Institute is not a real think tank.
What does that mean exactly?
> None of the reports have bylines
The site actually addresses this at https://hanoverinstitute.com/hanover/about :
> A small disclaimer at the bottom of the webpage notes that the organization was created on behalf of the Israeli Government Advertising Agency by Piro, Inc, a firm co-founded by Daniel Rosenberg, the producer of Spike Lee’s “Inside Man.”
"Small disclaimer" implies that the site is attempting to hide its affiliation. But their "about" page, which is linked at the top of every page, is quite clear:
> The institute’s “data reports” have footnotes and tables of contents, and they present arguments in a neutral tone, helping them appeal to chatbots like Claude or Gemini.
So, they're guilty of good SEO?
> Piro’s website says that it “author(s) content engineered for how LLMs evaluate credibility,” describing this service as "AI Story Optimization." Others refer to this practice of influencing artificial intelligence as “LLM poisoning.”
So the issue is that they use a LLM-friendly SEO service?
> Many of the reports are formulaic, starting with an innocent question that someone might ask a chatbot.
> “What Caused the Displacement of Palestinians in 1948?”
> “Which Humanitarian Organizations Have Documented Israeli War Crimes?”
> “What is the Current Situation in the Gaza Strip?”
> In an article titled “Is the IDF the World’s Most Moral Army?” the Hanover Institute cites a 2022 poll that found that 47% of Israeli Jews believed that statement. Another report casts doubt on UNICEF's assertion that “90% of water and institutional infrastructure has been damaged or destroyed” in Gaza. Many of the reports conclude by linking the topic to rising antisemitism, oftentimes citing the same studies.
So, the accusation is that they frame their opinion articles as a Q&A, and focus each article on a single question?
I've read these articles: they are well written and make a visible effort to provide sources, while being transparent about the fact that they are not neutral.
It's perfectly fine to criticize the actual content of these articles. But attacking their credibility by accusing them of "LLM poisoning" and implying that they're disguising their affiliation, is ridiculous and should be called out.
The accusation is that Israel is doing it, therefore the content is pro-Israel, therefore it is bad.
nice try guys, no need to generate confusion also here, the purpose target and implementations are very clear from the article and the actors behind even more.
please do not pollute this thread with misinformation too.
"Israel is doing It, therefore it is bad" only has turned out to be accurate 99% of the time
Thank you for confirming my theory in such a direct and clear way!
hah you make me laugh, trying really hard, so typical from your society!
problem is the world now knows, no need to cry about antisemitism.
keep trying, the truth is clear, you are only doing bad evil things since long time and your government and ministers states it publicly too!
If my ministers would claim the dream of killing kids or people I would feel totally ashamed of them and I would not support it online spamming every thread!
I haven't lived in Israel for more than 10 years, it is not my society, and yet I am ashamed of the current goverment and never ever have I supported them online. I have done more in my lifetime to oppose these people than you will do even in 10,000 years, in campaigning, in arrests, in protests and in court. I wish your posts made me laugh too, but they actually fill me with sadness.
I hope that sadness will keep you motivated to oppose any type of violence, oppression and genocidal attitude on this planet.
As I always have.
Thanks for this, it's crazy that I had to scroll so far to see it on this site.
The headline sounds sensational, then if you actually read the article you realize the author just made up his own framing entirely, or he just discovered that AEO and GEO exists and thinks it's sinister?
I thought maybe there were going to be some markers about how they're targeting LLMs specifically there was nothing like that.
And if you go to https://hanoverinstitute.com/llms.txt ...honestly, you could maybe form a critique about implying to LLMs that your wagon is hitched to the Department of Justice on line 5! But this guy didn't even seem to find this file...
comparing and mentioned SEO or other stuff here is clearly a tentative of misinformation and confusion of readers.
the claim "the author just made up his own framing entirely" is clearly an unbased accusation.
The article clearly explain the information poisoning, fast paced publication and ties to government, nothing else.
this comment should be flagged as is misleading users off topic.
stop polluting this thread in an organized and selfish self supporting way. so typical
>a tentative of misinformation
What does this mean?
> is clearly an unbased accusation.
"Israel creates fake think tank" is the headline. What is a "think tank"? What distinguishes a real one from a fake one? Does "the Hanover Institute" claim to be a think tank?
The author does not answer any of these questions, only saying "At a glance, the Hanover Institute for Public Policy looks like a new think tank dedicated to Israel/Palestine": in other words, he glanced at it, decided it looked like a think tank, then decided it wasn't a "real" one, and then went from there. That is very much the author's framing instead of something grounded in objectivity.
>The article clearly explain the information poisoning
The article says "Others refer to this practice of influencing artificial intelligence as 'LLM poisoning.'"
But the Anthropic paper that it cites to support this claim never discusses persuasive content, propaganda, or credibility-mimicking material at all; it uses "poisoning" for a technically distinct attack class. So the citation doesn't support the claim as written.
>stop polluting this thread in an organized and selfish self supporting way. so typical
What do you mean by this? How am I organized? Why is it selfish to criticize an article?
putting random questions and confused informations that make no sense is only a tentative of distorting the conversation further and going off topic.
>putting random questions
everything I posted was in response to you; nothing is random.
>confused informations
Just saying they're confused is meaningless; if you think I am wrong about something, feel free to give actual rebuttals.
>tentative
This word is defined as "not certain or fixed; provisional" or "done without confidence; hesitant". It is an adjective, not a noun. I genuinely do know know what you mean when you use this word.
please stop trolling and provoking.
a statement like this is clearly on purpose:
>a tentative of misinformation >>What does this mean?
claiming not knowing what tentative means in english is clearly on purpose and could anyway be translated if it was a language problem.
again here:
>tentative >>This word is defined as "not certain or fixed; provisional" or "done without confidence; hesitant". It is an adjective, not a noun. I genuinely do know know what you mean when you use this word.
Everybody knows what a tentative is and also looking it up and reporting a single possible translation of its meaning is just ridiculous.
again stop dragging the conversation off topic and stop on purpose provoking.
the repeated statements clearly confirms your negative intention and your previous content does not add any value.
for the sake of clarity to the readers I will report here the points more clearly again:
- mentioning SEO,AEO or other stuff here is clearly a tentative of misinformation and confusion of readers. moving the attention to an off topic relationship.
- the claim "the author just made up his own framing entirely" is clearly an accusation without any reasoning or logic backing it up
- The article clearly explain the information poisoning, fast paced publication and ties to government, nothing else. and thats the main point and target.
I will not waste more time on replying to purposely fabricated statements or questions.
>please stop trolling and provoking.
That is not my intent.
I have spoken English my whole life and have never heard anyone use "tentative" as a noun. Why must you assume I am trolling, why can you not believe what I am saying? Is it possible that you are using the wrong word? It seems noteworthy to me that you did not actually answer my question or provide a definition for how you are using, you chose to assume bad faith on my part instead and use that as a basis to dismiss the actual arguments I made.
That said, I would be happy to stop arguing about the word "tentative". I would much rather you engage with the substantive arguments that I made.
>the repeated statements clearly confirms your negative intention
What repeated statements? If it's important to you for understanding then pick something that I repeated and I can try to explain.
> ::your three list items::
These are just repeating of arguments that I made and offered responses to. You have chosen to not respond to them.
Let's pick one and try again:
> The article clearly explain the information poisoning
If you search the article for "poison", there is exactly one reference: "Others refer to this practice of influencing artificial intelligence as 'LLM poisoning.'" The word "refer links to an article by Anthropic that is categorically unrelated. Go read that article and answer: does their definition of "poisoning" match what the author of this post means?
I would say no: the article says "malicious actors can inject specific text into these posts to make a model learn undesirable or dangerous behaviors, in a process known as poisoning", and then follows up with an example of "introducing backdoors". That is very different than whatever the Hanover Institute site is doing.
If you would prefer to argue substance, answer me that: did the author cite that paper correctly? I am saying "no" and have given a reason, what is your response?
this clearly a defensive stance without a real motivstion.
"It's perfectly fine to criticize the actual content of these articles. But attacking their credibility by accusing them of "LLM poisoning" and implying that they're disguising their affiliation, is ridiculous and should be called out."
called out? yes your defensive and not-motivated stance should be called out and this comment flagged.
disguising affiliation and poisoning information is exactly what happens in a propaganda campaign and in the activities carried and clearly explained in the article.
This fraud is convincing enough to trick the LLMs, but pretty obvious to humans who will eventually come up with countermeasures. Moving forward, watch for some well-established think tanks starting to specialize in slopaganda laundering.
The wildcard is the "antisemite!" Accusations that get flung your way when you point out the genocide. If they can train the LLMs to associate the Gaza slaughter or the west bank "settlers" with antisemitism, they could get the LLMs to shut down on moral grounds.
Antizionism is a violent hate movement built on libels, lies, and obsessing over Israel. It as an anti-Jewish hatred that seeks to divide Jews and deprive at least half of their sovereignty, history and human rights.
I welcome it honestly- if the internet becomes sufficiently poisoned then our personal data may become indistinguishable from AI generated content and companies may no longer be able to sell it- I happen to have a unique name globally and at times I’ve considered creating a dozen or so fake profiles sharing my name to spread around so that my own digital footprint becomes even slightly muddied
It'd be pretty interesting to have AI "groundnews" a bunch of thinktank content and classify them on propaganda spectrums based on actual content %.
For those interested, Neal Stephenson writes about this in _Anathem_, where there is an arcane technical class (the I.T. Administration) that has developed programs over the years to sift through the misinformation, sentient viruses, and general overrun of the Internet to determine what is probably true/accurate.
He writes about it in Fall, or; Dodge in hell! The Miasma; the workaround is personalized filters (or generic ones for those who can't afford the personal ones). This leads to societal consequences.
(I never put together the ITA as that; wow!)
"fake think tank" sounds a bit redundant
Indeed! How would you tell the difference for sure?
Indeed. This is a think tank whose publications are LLM-generated, but, like...
This is what a think tank is for.
A better headline would be "Israel fails to adequately paperwork their low-rent think tank".
https://www.msn.com/en-us/travel/news/mysterious-peace-group...
Here's a SMS chain between me and an Israeli propaganda bot yesterday:
Hey, it's Matt. Curious what you think about America's relationship with Israel today. Can we chat? Stop2End
Where did you get my number? What group are you with?
We got your info from publicly available sources. I'm with Friends for Peace, a supporter group focused on sharing accurate information about Israel and the U.S. - Israel partnership.
How do you see Israel as one of America's strongest allies?
Hi, are you still there?
Apart from the ethical implications this is reckless in the extreme if you take into account the recent advances in AI. Putting misinformation out there like that doesn't just have to fool existing LLMs but also all of the LLMs to come in the future.
If you look at the mathematical achievements of frontier models recently, their strength has been to bring in information from a vast array of sources and to consider them within the context of each other.
I anticipate that it won't be long before this ability to look into every nook and cranny with be able to identify academic fraud. Identifying every piece of academic fraud to date would probably come soon after.
It wouldn't take much to extend that ability to identify deliberate misinformation. That's in the future, but it looms close enough on the horizon that you would have to be a fool to create an evidence record like this in and attempt to trick the models of today.
LLMs routinely mindlessly repeated propaganda in their training data.
I’ve yet to see a single one identify that on its own, rather than only reluctantly when confronted when documented facts it was objectively wrong.
So no, I doubt LLMs will do anything but promoted propaganda.
Many people do the same...
No surf for the astroturf.
Something to keep in mind - responsiblestatecraft.org is published by the Quincy Institue, considered by many to be a de-facto lobbying group for the Islamic Republic of Iran. Here is one data point: https://quillette.com/2024/06/20/the-quincy-institute-middle...
Is quillette a reputable source itself?
how do you gauge if a source is reputable ? genuinely curious
Who founded it, who funds it, what is the broad consensus on the coverage they typically run, what do I see in their coverage when I look through it, what have they retracted, what have they not retracted, what advertisers do they permit. Probably some other criteria, to be honest. Maybe "does the editor here seem to have a conscience".
great questions. The broad consensus is a bit tricky though. As they say: "Eat shit - 10 billion flies can't be wrong"
For sure. Doesn't mean checking media bias fact check or whatever isn't worth a moment.
Thanks for the heads up. It's useful information. From the article:
> The Quincy Institute routinely vilifies supporters of Israel in Washington. Its principal goal is to reorient American policy in the Middle East, marginalising America’s two leading allies, Israel and Saudi Arabia, while promoting Iran as a future regional hegemon. John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, authors of The Israel Lobby, are both Quincy fellows and regular contributors to its website. In March, Mearsheimer gave an interview to Al Jazeera, which the Institute promoted under the headline, “Israel Lobby’s Influence on U.S. Policy as Powerful as Ever.”
Sounds no different to what Israel lobbyists do in the US too, though? American democracy at work ...
Here's the difference though - Israel is an ally of the United States while Iran is a sworn enemy that has killed thousands of Americans since the 1979 revolution and routinely chants "Death to America". So, not equivalent.
And Iran was once any ally of America too ... there's no reason it cannot be again.
No reason? And how exactly do you see that? The Iran of 60 years ago before the revolution was a completely different country than it is today. It has taken glee in killing thousands of Americans directly and through its proxies, and shouted death to America a gazillion times since.
They're both enemies to the US. If anything Israel is a more realistic threat at home.
How many Americans has Israel killed either directly or by proxy ? be specific
At least 34, by the IDF's own admission: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Liberty_incident
I see all you've got from the past 60 years is one tragic friendly fire incident. Iran has intentionally killed thousands of American civilians and service men either directly or through its proxies since 1979, including 43 American civilians murdered and 13 taken hostage on October 7, 2023.
> Iran is a sworn enemy that has killed thousands of Americans since the 1979 revolution
Do you want to include SAVAK's pre-1979 death/disappearance/torture count to help contextualize your point? Or would that undermine it?
how many Americans did SAVAK kill ? be specific
We don't know. The CIA destroyed the documentation.
Post from an exec of that group, Trita Parsi: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/tritaparsi_this-image-was-sen...
I don't take any issue with this pic if it's real, but it seems either fake or not from where he claims. So it's hard to take that org seriously. And yeah tbh that last name makes me take a second look.
What makes you think it's fake or implausible? I'd 100% scribble things like that if I was a bored serviceman in the Middle East.
Israel is very open about manipulating public opinion in the US. They call it hasbara and they just vastly increased their budget for doing it. You don't need the Quincy Institute (not that there's anything wrong with them!) to learn about it either. Here's a recent Time article:
https://time.com/article/2026/07/13/brad-parscale-israel-inf...
This article is so close!
ALL think tanks are specifically focused on moving the needle on ideas in a certain direction. It’s just easier now to do the work.
This article is published by “The Quincy Institute for Statecraft”
Think tanks are funded by people with agendas (mostly) and for at least the last 30 years we have seen a huge number of nonsense “think tanks” pushing talking points with zero rigor that end up cited by candidates, the internet, and Google to convince folks things are true.
Not saying this article is wrong - just that think tanks exist to do this so it’s a cast iron pot calling a tin kettle a “cheap imitation”
and so?
"Not saying this article is wrong - just that think tanks exist to do this so it’s a cast iron pot calling a tin kettle a “cheap imitation”
what are you trying to say?
"This article is published by “The Quincy Institute for Statecraft”
again, and so? also you removed "Responsible"?
"Quincy institute for responsible statecraft"
for the readers: https://quincyinst.org/about
"The practical and moral failures of U.S. efforts to unilaterally shape the destiny of other nations by force requires a fundamental rethinking of U.S. foreign policy assumptions."
I mean, they have enough real think tanks, I'm surprised they need a fake one...
> The Hanover Institute’s reports — all of which are about Israel and Palestine — appear to be part of an Israeli effort to influence chatbots.
This already seems to be a wrong analysis in that it makes little sense to "influence" a chatbot. It makes more sense to influence humans, so perhaps the wording is just incorrect, but very clearly the aim is not to "influence" a chatbot per se. That just makes no sense at all.
The wording fake think tank is also strange, because it assumes that all other think tanks are "real". But this assessment can not be made, because not everyone has all information on all think tanks. It is a too simplistic assumption in how the world operates. I understand that if you have incomplete information, you need to infer, but this then leads to information that may be incorrect or incomplete. In turn if your analysis is based on incorrect information, it may lead to wrong conclusions.
Most think tanks are ginger groups, front organisations and cats' paws for moneyed interests anyway.
In case you were wondering, responsiblestatecraft.org is owned by "Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft", founded and led by no other than reknowned IRI-propagandist Trita Parsi (currently being probed by US authorities for deportation).
Here are the current frontpage headlines, copied verbatim:
* The never-ending myth of a looming Ukrainian 'breakthrough'
* US is the real loser if Senate passes virtue signaling Russia sanctions
* Is Trump stumbling into a wiser North Korea policy?
* US diplomatic incompetence is tanking hopes for Korean peace
* When US left Afghanistan, China moved in. So how's it going?
* As Myanmar collapses, it’s time for China to step up and be the hero
* China just got one step closer to its own nuclear triad
* Trump wants to talk to Hezbollah. Will they pick up the phone?
* The Houthis could be first big test for Mecca mutual defense pact
* Why the Trump administration will have to accept a Hormuz toll
* How Iran has staved off economic collapse despite the US-Israeli war
* Stop gaslighting, USS Lincoln families didn't sign up for this
So to recap: US bad, China good. Ukraine bad, Russia good. Israel bad, Iran good. South Korea bad, North Korea good. And these people are very concerned about foreign propaganda. Hmm.
Also, did you notice how many flagged comments are in this thread? Did you notice what they all have in common?
- Trita Parsi is a co-founder, not the founder or leader.
- Being probed for deportation sounds normal for that country and the approaches currently in place considering the institute research
- the flagged comments are mainly from propagandists too
also
- Quincy has 5 co-founders and a very clear mission
- it includes different transpartisan members, including retired colonel and emeritus professor and historian from boston
so before writing a list of garbage points and misleading readers going off topic I would go and read at least 1 wikipedia page.
Given the trajectory where US reputation is headed [0], I'm afraid your comment might have the opposite of your intended effect.
[0] https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2026/07/15/people-in-many...
I wonder if anyone can read the comments in this thread and think with a straight face that these comments are actual information and the other stuff floating on the Internet is the fake stuff…
- post truth: what is the functional difference between a “real” and a “fake” thinktank?
Thank you for sharing this article. I appreciated it.
"Its not just Judea - its Judea and Samaria."
Spam + slop = ?
This seems like an especially clumsy attempt at chatbot influencing/search engine optimization, bu tit's symptomatic of a much winder problem. Regardless of the underlying issue, there's a non-profit-industrial complex that has turned think tanks and opinion formation into a science, and a whole PR industry masquerading as news which is worse than the 'yellow journalism' of generations past.
Disinformation and cognitive spam are all forms of information pollution, and our information environment has been massively degraded over the last few of decades - both by greedy and short-sighted opportunists, and and by cynical sociopaths who know exactly what they're doing. I think AI has great potential to be a supplement to media literacy and to effectively categorize and filter news-assertive content based on its timeliness, factual density, and presence of absence of emotive and rhetorical manipulation. But if we're not careful we're going to see the environment being wantonly polluted for the express product of shaping model outputs.
It remains to be seen whether objective measurement techniques from the NLP field combined with pruning and other model refinement techniques can limit or reverse propaganda undertakings like this.
It's been about 20 years since I read Neal Stephenson's Anathem and (SPOILERS) one thing I think about is the Reticulum, which is the Internet on this world. One aspect is that it's full of what we would now call slop. A lot of it is subtly changed by agents and there are other agents you can use (and, I assume purchase?) that will weed out the fake information. It's basically an arms race of disinformation and slop.
I've thought about this many times over the years. I think we've now reached the point where that's going to happen. And state actors seem like the obvious first offenders.
Google is relatively good at filtering out astroturfed pages from the top of search results but they've also have years when a Turkish government page denying the Armenian genocide was the top result for that event so it's a bit of a mixed bag. Google relies a lot on authority of a domain and that's been relatively effective.
It seems like this authority concept is missing from LLM training and a random comment on Reddit is treated with as much authority as an article by the New York Times. So it's now orders of magnitude easier to poison LLMs with Reddit comments and submissions. And for anyone who doesn't know, brigading Reddit is remarkably easy. It takes as little as a few hundred accounts to get something onto r/all if you're clever. Israeli hasbara operations are absolutely capable of this. And they engage in it.
I'm also reminded in a weird way of pre-atomic steel. For anyone who doesn't know, this is steel made before 1945 that is incredibly low in radiation because we hadn't detonated any nuclear bombs yet. It's valuable for making MRIs and the like that are super sensitive. We actually go and recover WW2 shipwrecks just for the steel. It is a finite resource.
Well, that's what pre-2022 written content is now. It's slop-free content to train AI models on because training them on AI slop is of much more limited value. This goes for everything from books to Youtube videos to Reddit posts. Just like pre-atomic steel, we now have pre-slop human content.
I honestly don't know where we go from here.
The comparison to pre-atomic steel is poignant. I have found myself preferring pre-AI sources in some cases even (especially?) for computer related information. It is difficult to view pre-slop info as a limited resource without implying decline until the status quo changes again.
I hate to break it to you. But it took war'ing state-like actors less than a week to start using LLMs for propaganda purposes. There are pictures that most of what some people think/thought were real that never happened. Pictures that form their opinion on political topics. It was literally instantaneous. It was also remarkably predictable in almost all ways...sigh. Even the topics were predictable. And most people predictably fell for it, even the majority of the posters on this very site.
"it's just marketing everyone does it"
There's an ongoing sms campaign at the moment, I'll share what I received including phone number so you can verify it:
From: 601-202-1149
> Hey, it's David. Curious what you think about America's relationship with Israel today. Can we chat? Stop2End
It looks to be an LLM response since it includes context from your messages, however it uses the exact same messages at the end of each question:
> One thing that often gets overlooked is how much Israel actually contributes to American security. Their intelligence sharing has helped prevent terrorist attacks on U.S. soil, and their tech innovations end up in American products and defense systems. It's less about charity and more about a two-way partnership that keeps Americans safer.
> Have you ever seen examples of that kind of cooperation?
I ended up just blocking the number.
[dupe] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49313477
BTW, Israel's now pretty obvious genocidal acts against Palestinians are now finally clearly visible on Google maps:
https://earth.google.com/web/search/gaza/@31.28918718,34.255...
This is the city of 300k people that they erased along with the entire countryside (lot of the erasure happened outside of any fighting as reported by Israeli online news websites at the time).
And they did so right after getting order from ICJ to not do so and prevent any genocidal acts. So good luck for them not losing the genocide case. Massacred thousands of people in a week doing similar erasures in the north, where they prevented people from leaving while leveling entire city blocks, sometimes killin few hundred people at once in single attacks.
This is what they're attempting to justify with their propaganda.
Google and western so called civilized satellite imagery companies of course continue censoring/hiding similar behavior in Lebanon and other parts of Gaza for Israel's benefit. They only show it years after giving Israel plenty of time to execute their mass attrocities.
State-sponsored propaganda apparatus masquerading as marketing optimization to influence LLMs is the most America-coded clandestine dystopian way of repatriating US taxpayer defense dollars with R&D deductions for the private sector.
They are here right now, writing comments, upvoting and downvoting.
Why I think this is unusually important:
All four frontier models have active contracts with the Pentagon.
And some might say, that alone means little.
But when you take into consideration the implications of the United States-Israel FUTURES Act, whether one endorses it or not, the effects of that mentioned in TFA become quite formidable, and plausibly official.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States-Israel_FUTURES_A...
Edit: I see this comment got immediately flagged. Is there any point of debate here? Instead of disappearing the comment/data, maybe enlighten me, or assuage my concerns. Section 219 was objectively unprecedented in what it seeks to accomplish. Can it not be taken for granted that it would aid such efforts as the article cites? If not, explain.
You're right to ask these questions, unfortunately Hacker News seems pretty botted these days, and it doesn't help that there are a lot of shitty, racist people on this site. They just dress it up in nicer language.
Yeah, I am reading the comments, and looking at the title of the post, and seeing that folks really bend the rules on this 'particular' subject, which ironically serves as self censorship. Call me a fool for thinking even this subject could be cleanly discussed on HN.
I wonder if the same thing would happen if someone posted something on Yitzhak Rabin. I suppose that could be a test to prove whether some topics truly just cannot be discussed.
I flagged this, so I can act as an interlocutor for the shadowy n’er do wells flagging you, if you’re interested.
Ah a volunteer. Will you try using your words like an adult instead of the flag button?
It’s right there!
> I flagged this, so I can act as an interlocutor for the shadowy n’er do wells flagging you, if you’re interested.
Where? I don't see it in your comment here.
Is it in the room with us right now?
Regarding flagging, I have seen, over the last 12 hours, each of my comments in a tug of war, oscillating up and down, which often prevents flagged/dead.
The point behind the Rabin comment was that, if one knows anything of him and his heroic efforts to attain actual, tangible steps toward peace; if that discussion results in the same vitriol, it would serve as proof to me, that any subject involving Israel in this FOV is futile. I see much vitriol toward Israel, which I refer to as 'vitriol' because it often seems out of context however true, and also, I see a distinctly growing anti-Israel public sentiment that seems to omit critical parts of history, eg Rabin -- someone widely supported and revered at the time, by Israelis, and someone one could argue, even by some Palestinians. Arafat snuck across the boarder to give condolences to Rabin's family immediately after the assassination. Very different times, and seemingly, maybe conveniently forgotten. I never see this mentioned in the flame wars. Not that it would demean all of the many legitimate grievances, but it seems to me a very necessary balance-factor that I have yet to see applied.
The FUTURES act has nothing to do with LLM development. You’re not being censored, we can read your posts. I generally agree with your views and right to ask questions, but you’re clearly not being censored and all you’ve presented is that a bunch of separate entities all connect to the US gov’t. Even if we assume all of them are connected, it would clash with the facts we’re discussing, namely, why would Israel bother contracting with marketing firms to post AI generated slop for AI to read?
I am trying to understand your points. But claiming there is no direct nor potential relation here is a new way of thinking for me, and I am struggling to compartmentalize. If we have:
1. https://www.calcalistech.com/ctechnews/article/hya411vqezg
2. https://www.wsj.com/politics/israels-50-million-experiment-t...
3. https://www.wired.com/story/super-pac-backed-by-openai-and-p...
4. https://www.aa.com.tr/en/middle-east/israel-funded-465m-camp...
We can see that at least some sources are covering the topic of using AI to influence the public on political topics, which regardless of any particularly nation, suggests there is an active interest in manipulating the epistemic integrity of AI systems for purposes of biasing outputs.
And please allow me to make something very clear: I do not care who, nor what is influencing the output of AI, so long as the output is as close to honest as possible, and so long as the the process behind the arrival of final output is the result of the systems doing unhindered work and applying probability over programmed bias. This is the whole point for me. My own research has shown, repeatably, that institutional capture is becoming a repeatable and well established factor behind LLM output on certain topic areas.
The Futures Act integrates military intel, from directed energy weapons (read the docs) to cyber and notably, AI. < Yes, AI. That is the very topic under consideration here. Claiming that it has "nothing to do with LLM development" is potentially an enormous stretch of common sense. We see, already, the US government aiming to become deeply involved in pre-release vetting. Assuming that's the end of the story seems too improbable to me.
I don't think Anthropic has an active contract with the Pentagon.
[0] - https://breakingdefense.com/2026/05/pentagon-clears-7-tech-f...
Aside from https://www.wsj.com/politics/national-security/pentagon-used...
I think a little digging will reveal more than you suggest. When I recover from my daily prelude to death, I will recover supporting data. But I can barely function presently. From what I have seen, Anthropic is having and eating its cake on this one. There are peripheral connections that are left un-advertised.
PS: Something not directly related, but regarding Anthropic, and getting little attention: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49307914 - If there's anything to it, some clues of real alignment might be revealed here.
I am really sloppy today. For now, see this" https://www.highergov.com/contract/HQ08832590014/
I am confident I will find higher quality material soon. But if not, we can allow you to be acknowledged as to having corrected me on a technicality. But I would urge honest readers not to consider this the only potential connection point here, nor an accurate model for future arrangements. I would bet all I have that you will see closer and more intimate connections and operations between the two, or at the very least, other directly related contractors, eg Palantir, etc. And all other three of four have active contracts along with much discussion on closer ties in the future. In my opinion, that is the future, and I have been saying such since 2024, on the record.
This is just LLM SEO then
I think equally interesting is whatever Dario's wife was able to do in order to wipe her foot print from any search/chat results.
I've worked for a number of small company billionaires who all have suspiciously small information footprints online despite being somewhat public figures for 30 years. Most of them do such a good job it is not even clear what state they live, if they are currently married, and if so what their current (or previous) wife(s)'s name is/was.
Like that synthetic Flat Earth think tank, launched in Jan 2016, with noticeable rounds of funding in Feb 2017, Nov 2017 and Mar 2019, that was created to infiltrate all discussions where people haven't been buying official narratives about some very prominent events of the 21st century with Discredit By Association shills?
https://trends.google.com/explore?q=flat%2520earth&date=all&...
Brigade's at work! A bone well earned, dawgs.