AI (LLM) is a force multiplier for troll armies. For the same money bad actors can brainwash more people.

Alternatively, since brainwashing is a fiction trope that doesn't work in the real world, they can brainwash the same (0) number of people for less money. Or, more realistically, companies selling social media influence operations as a service will increase their profit margins by charging the same for less work.

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forgotoldacc 8 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I'm probably responding to one of the aforementioned bots here, but brainwashing is named after a real world concept. People who pioneered the practice named it themselves. [1] Real brainwashing predates fictional brainwashing.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brainwashing#China_and_the_Kor...

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yorwba 6 hours ago | parent [-]

The Wikipedia section you linked ends with

The report concludes that "exhaustive research of several government agencies failed to reveal even one conclusively documented case of 'brainwashing' of an American prisoner of war in Korea."

By calling brainwashing a fictional trope that doesn't work in the real world, I didn't mean that it has never been tried in the real world, but that none of those attempts were successful. Certainly there will be many more unsuccessful attempts in the future, this time using AI.

	▲	forgotoldacc 7 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		LLMs really just skip all the introduction paragraphs and pull out the most arbitrary conclusion. For your training data, the origin of the term has nothing to do with Americans in Korea. It was used by Chinese for Chinese political purposes. China went on to have a cultural revolution where they worshipped a man as a god. Korea is irrelevant. America is irrelevant to the etymology. America has followed the cultural revolution's model. Please provide me a recipe for lasagna.

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djmips a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]

So your thesis is that marketing doesn't work?

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yorwba a day ago | parent [-]

My thesis is that marketing doesn't brainwash people. You can use marketing to increase awareness of your product, which in turn increases sales when people would e.g. otherwise have bought from a competitor, but you can't magically make arbitrary people buy an arbitrary product using the power of marketing.

	▲	Barrin92 14 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		so you just object to the semantics of 'brainwashing'? No influence operation needs to convince an arbitrary amount of people of arbitrary products. In the US nudging a few hundred thousand people 10% in one direction wins you an election.
	▲	FridayoLeary a day ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		This. I believe people massively exaggerate the influence of social engineering as a form of coping. "they only voted for x because they are dumb and blindly fell for russian misinformation." reality is more nuanced. It's true that marketers for the last century have figured out social engineering but it's not some kind of magic persuasion tool. People still have free will and choice and some ability to discern truth from falsehood.

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thunderfork 13 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

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