> LLM marketers have succeeded at inducing collective delusion

That's the real trick & one I desperately wish I knew how to copy.

I know there's a connection to Dunning Kruger & I know that there's a dopamine effect of having a responsive artificial minion & there seems to be some of that "secret knowledge" sauce that makes cults & conspiracies so popular (there's also the promise of less effort for the same or greater productivity).

Add the list grows, I see the popularity, but I doubt I could easily apply all these qualities to anything else.

▲

jennyholzer4 14 hours ago | parent [-]

IMO algorithmically generated "social" media feeds combined with the lack of adequate mass-media alternatives have supercharged cult recruitment in the last approximately 10 years.

Stupid people in my life have been continually and recklessly joining harebrained cults for the last 5 years.

Really I think it's probably much, much easier to start a cult these days than it has ever been. Good news for tech company founders I guess, bad news for American culture, American society, and the American people.

	▲	codyb 13 hours ago \| parent [-]
		One way to help stop it is to get off social media and stop giving these tech billionaires so much money. The less people on social media, the less real the network effect is, the less people who join in the first place, the less money the billionaires have to throw hundreds of millions into politics, the less inadvertent cult members. I've gotten to the point where I just leave my phone at home at this point, and it has been incredibly nice. Before that I deleted most apps that I found to be time wastes, deleted all social media (HN and two small discords are my exception). It's very nice, I'm less stressed, I feel more in the moment, I respond to my friends when I check my phone every few hours on the speaker in the other room. I encourage others to try it, add it to your dry January. And ya know what I ain't doing a lick of? Sending money and reams of data to these billionaires I think are really lame individuals with corrupted moral compasses. Now it ain't perfect, I'm sure Google's still getting reams of info about me from my old Gmail account that I still use sometimes, and Apple too from a few sources. But... getting closer! So many folk sit here and recognize the same problems I do, the way it warps your attention, the addictiveness of the handheld devices, the social media echo chambers, the rising influence of misinformation, the lack of clarity between real and fake... Seems like there's a solution in front of us :-)