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Comment by NitpickLawyer | Hacker News Reader

I'd argue the only new development is that now it's cheaper / easier to do. But the same concept has been used previously with human-augmented bot farms.

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I'm often a little bewildered at why we so consistently label "cheaper/easier" as less significant than "new". "Cheaper/easier" is what creates consequences, not "new".

> "Cheaper/easier" is what creates consequences, not "new".

Nuclear bomb?

Imagine if they were cheaper and easier to manufacture

I think it remains a useful distinction. framing this as an evolution ("cheaper") helps understand the problem space. for example, the motivations, capabilities and effectiveness of existing players

Yes exactly. In the past we had privacy/anonymity in public because it simply wasn't feasible to follow everyone, everywhere, all the time. The technology did not exist, and while you could follow selected individuals around, that quickly broke down at numbers greater than "a few." Some regimes did it more than others (the old DDR/Stasi for example) but even they could only keep a close eye on targeted individuals, places, and events.

Now we have cameras on every major road and intersection, most places of business, most transportation facilities, and most public gathering places. We have facial recognition and license plate readers, and cheap storage that is easily searched and correlated. Almost all communications are logged if not recorded. Even the postal service is now imaging the outside of every envelope.

All because it's cheaper and easier.

New developments in AI are used here to push the usual "solutions" - more privacy invasion, more centralized control, for the sake of democracy. Disinformation campaigns arent just used to influence elections but thats like the most common theme. The reality is that humans need to be upgraded with "mental antivirus". We're seeing the beginning of something like that with people being able to tell when text theyre reading is LLM-generated. Everyone probably gets psyopped every time they start scrolling a social media feed - We just need to be aware of that

There is an element that when it becomes cheaper/easier it cancels each other out. Spam became cheaper/easier but that just meant people were less trusting of random emails.

It probably is true that some populations are more vulnerable to AI produced propaganda/slop, but ultimately I have 50 more pressing AI concerns.

Some GenAI manufactured consent for the Iran war should do the trick

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