LLMs are now being aggressively manipulated for propaganda purposes. Powerful people have realized that people believe LLMs, and treat them as authoritative sources of fact.
The number of lies, lies by omission, deceptive distortions, and fallacious argument tactics they generate is absurd, and increasing rapidly. Translation, when done as a service you are paid for, can't be relied on by propaganda bots.
I was asking about some allegations relating to the Epstein files, and it used the slogan "Satanic Panic" in a weird way that gave me a vibe of discrediting victims. I'm too young to know much about it, so I asked some things about it. It explained the McMartin case in a way that seemed too absurd to be real. I asked some follow-up questions about what the strongest evidence was, and how it was explained.
The first deception was omission. Initially, it didn't even mention what was arguably the most significant evidence in the case, which was the presence of tunnels under the school. ChatGPT mentioned the tunnels, and how an archaeologist named E. Gary Stickel found evidence of tunnels. Here's what it said about that:
> However, that conclusion has been repeatedly challenged and is not treated as settled fact in the academic or forensic archaeology literature.
> Other archaeologists and later reviewers reinterpreted the same physical findings differently. One major counter-analysis (W. Joseph Wyatt’s review) argued that what Stickel identified as tunnels was more plausibly explained as pre-existing trash pits and construction-related disturbance from before the school was built in the 1960s.
The first lie was by omission, it didn't even mention this when I asked about the most important evidence. The next misleading piece was the framing. Dr. Stickel is a PhD archaeologist, and doing this sort of analysis is his area of expertise. He used nine criteria as a basis for determining the presence of tunnels, and all nine were met. He found "conclusive" evidence of tunnels, and that they matched the expected locations described by the victims. Dr. Stickel was the only expert to review the site before significant construction made such an analysis impossible.
The "major counter-analysis (W. Joseph Wyatt’s review)" was done by psychologist Joseph Wyatt, who never physically visited the site, and who is not an expert in anything related even loosely to archaeology. ChatGPT presented this guy in a way that made it seem that Stickel had been debunked by a comparable expert.
It's worse in many ways but also better in one way, which is that buried in all the propaganda and manipulation is usually the truth somewhere in there. Before, the truth was simply not available.
American security, and indeed the entire pax Americana has been predicated upon your country's network of global military bases and your carrier battle groups. This is what enables the USA to decisively influence any conflict anywhere on the globe.
Those bases would need to disappear in order for your comment to be true, and despite two thirds of your electorate who didn't vote against the future dementia ward patient currently in office, I don't think Americans are ready to accept a world where American foreign policy cannot be promulgated more or less at will, which is what isolationism would entail.
No, America's influence over its globe-spanning empire is predicated on that. That's not the same thing as it's national security. It would do just fine if it weren't the head of a global hegemony, although it might have to start living within its means.
Security-wise, two oceans, vassal neighbours and two thousand nuclear missiles have it covered.
> Security-wise, two oceans, vassal neighbours and two thousand nuclear missiles have it covered.
You need to take a moment and think about your "vassal states" argument. May I remind you that at the peak of the cold war the US had a hostile country plant their nukes right at the doorstop of the US in one of those neighbors who not so long before was a vassal state?
If America had not been escalating with embargo pressure, the Bay of Pigs invasion, covert regime-change operations, and forward nuclear deployments near the USSR that made Moscow eager to answer in kind, the Cuban Missile Crisis never would have happened. A more protectionist America would not have pushed Cuba so hard into Soviet dependence, and the Soviet Union would have had little reason or opportunity put nuclear missiles there in the first place.
The U.S. would do just fine but the rest of the world would descend into chaos and we know this for a fact because it happened twice in just the first 50 years of the 20th century.
perhaps the US would be mostly safe from violence, but not consequences. We're heavily dependent on international trade and any major war in another part of the world will impact us if it involves any important trading partners or their ability to trade with us.
Even in the 19th century the US was sucked into Europe's wars - the war of 1812 was essentially the American theater of the Napoleanic war - US merchants were attacked trying to trade with France/Europe, the US Navy tried to protect them saying "we're neutral let us trade" and Britain said "there's no such thing as neutral" and sent armies. Over time foreign powers got more wary of fighting the US but we still got dragged into European and Pacific wars (WWI, WWII), in large part because we kept trading with our European and Asian partners.
Nearly everyone in the world is heavily dependant on international trade.
They all manage to get by without the leverage of 11 carrier fleet groups. You know, trade between equals, and not subjects.
WW2 was largely driven by the personalities involved. Roosevelt really, really, really hated fascism, and was doing everything in his power to stick it in their wheel spokes. Had the industrialist coup succeeded, or had Hoover or Landon won, it's quite likely that neither would have done much to oppose either Japan or Germany.
WW1 was also driven by principles, as opposed to pragmatism. Wilson found more alignment with the anglosphere than he did with the central powers - and after watching the most destructive war in history go on for four years, was keen on embarking on his League of Nations project. Practically, there was no reason for the US to not maintain neutrality in it.
well sure not everyone needs a huge military. Especially when their large trading partner has one and is guaranteeing security.
I don't entirely buy your personalities argument - it certainly mattered, but in an alternate universe where Hitler still rose to power but e.g. FDR didn't get a 3rd term - a European war would've still caused problems for America and US/Europe trade would've likely come under fire dragging the US towards fighting in the war; in 1939 US GDP was $93.4 billion with $3.2 billion in exports and $2.3 billion in imports... far less important than today (where imports/exports are more than 10% of GDP) but still fairly substantial.
But it's hard to say how things would've turned out. With different leaders the politics of it would've mattered a lot; without US support WWII could've still easily been raging in 1944, an election year, and so an anti-war president could've been replaced. Or maybe Britain would've had a hard time holding out against constant assault without American supplies purchased with US government money, the USSR wouldn't have been able to bear the full brunt of Nazis who were less tied up on the western front, and by the time America considered joining the war under a different leader, it would've looked like a go-it-alone job. Still it's hard to imagine a world in which the Axis didn't bite off a bit more than it could chew.
> Could the nation slowly step back and generation-by-generation shed their national reputation such that they have no enemies? Maybe
This is basically what the UK did after WWII. We’d have to be honest that a fall in relative living standards would probably accompany such a move. (Counterpoint: the Nordic countries.)
Can you elaborate on what you believe to have been this "peace process" you speak of?
Even today, when the Kremlin is begging for the Ukraine war to go away, they are bombing civilians and Kiev and threatening Armenia with a war of invasion.
The same peace they enjoyed for decades before the UN decided to court Ukraine for membership. They had balance of trade agreements, resource use agreements, and generalized peace.
Can you elaborate as to why you seem to think this was impossible?
Also, NATO accession talks for Ukraine were dead for years when Russia invaded Crimea. The notion that Russia was forced to invade Ukraine holds up about as much as the claim that America was forced to bomb Iran.
The huge disadvantage they have over people is that their cars cost $250k, require a workforce of people to retrieve and repair them, maintain them, clean them, monitor them, etc. They are more expensive to operate than a normal car with a human driver, so far. The break-even point requires a lot of problems to be solved, and even then, the upside is not looking to be astronomical in the best case.
Not at all — they're working on cheaper cars that they're testing in SF, and they will probably only roll out Waymo to the wealthiest markets in the US. Think airport rides to JFK instead of a taxi that works anywhere in the country. They will be very profitable.
Waymo is talking about scaling up operations globally and the market is competitive, the cost 100% does matter.
They need large Chinese production lines for lidar, integration kits for cars plus the in car computing, repair pipelines for both sensors and cars, real estate to park cars, the infrastructure/processes to clean and charge them quickly, teams of remote drivers, insurance policies, etc. Then they need to compete with mature decentralized Uber and taxi fleets who push their car/maintenance costs onto drivers, while Waymo grows adoption of their mobile app where prices will matter if they aren't as perfectly reliable and low risk as hiring a human. The self driving novelty effect won't last forever
All of that requires large capital expenditure and careful business models
Google is capable of burning truly huge amounts of money on projects that look exciting and have long term prospects (e.g Youtube). They could lose $10-20 billion a year on Waymo for a decade if needed.
You can't just cancel Sergey's favourite pet project, regardless of economics.
That's easier to stay that when it's an R&D project doing pilot runs in a small set of cities. When you need tell shareholders you want to run a fleet of 100k cars then those numbers start becoming very serious.
Waymo also took $11B from outside investors, so it's just not Alphabet taking the risk
Not comparable at all. Autonomous driving isn't obviously a viable business. It's not because computer programs can't drive well, it's because the and workforce infrastructure required to maintain and operate the expensive fleet may be less efficient than a human maintaining their own vehicle.
Isn’t the implication there that Uber works because the drivers shoulder more costs and make less money, but Waymo won’t work because they have to shoulder all the costs?
I'm implying that drivers are more efficient at cleaning and maintaining, refueling, storing, repairing, and replacing their cars they own than the complex systems of personnel maintaining a much more expensive fleet of cars they don't own or give a shit about.
Are you also implying that people who maintain vehicles for a living do a worse job at it than the owners doing it themselves? I would say the opposite is true.
Plenty of companies around the world have well-maintained fleets of vehicles. Trucking businesses, bus companies, train companies, even some taxi companies with salaried drivers, ...
No, I'm implying that people who maintain their own cars do it more efficiently. The simple stuff like cleaning has to be done by someone. It's not about doing a "worse job," it's about doing a more expensive job.
Waymo is replacing human drivers with a capital-intensive fleet business, a substantially more expensive vehicle, and still a large number of remote assistance staff, fleet operators, safety engineers, incident response, operations staff, etc.
But I'm not saying they can't beat a human driver, I'm just saying it hasn't been proven that they will. It may only be that the highest demand markets will provide a sufficient enough utilization to make it economically viable.
The way I see it is that sousveillance is the correct response to surveillance.
If people feel threatened by this organization and the people who make it up they should start doing to them what they're doing to everyone else.
Who specifically works at Palantir? What do they look like? Where do they live? What kind of vehicle do they drive? How do they spend their free time? Who do they associate with?
These are all very interesting questions.
Questions that can be answered and answers that can be distributed online, forever.
Also wrong. Palantir itself does not do surveillance. It sells software to government agencies, who use that software to conduct surveillance.
If the IRS uses Excel, that doesn't mean Microsoft is actively catching tax evasion. Microsoft is selling spreadsheet software, and one of the users of that software is the IRS.
AI is massively asymmetric in its benefits, which are overwhelmingly concentrated among those with extreme capital, and the authoritarians they're aligned with.
The benefits for them include:
- replacing workers with lower quality (but good enough) AI solutions, which degrade the quality of nearly every product or service for the consumer, but not by enough to offset the labor cost savings
- mass surveillance at low cost, a way to take the absurd amounts of data humanity now produces, and use to subjugate them
- propaganda/deception/misinformation, a new vector for propaganda which people are naively inclined to trust. bonus points for the "flooding the zone" strategy which AI makes easier
Benefits to the worker:
- lower cost of goods and services (but not for you, silly - they'll still be taxing you via inflation to fund their wars of conquest)
To be fair, there's plenty of that in older films and TV series as well, particularly "golden age" material from the 1940s -- 1970s, which played strongly off WWII, Cold War, and pro-business themes, with occasional ventures into counterculture works for the latter.
The original Top Gun (1986) was describe at the time as the US Navy's most successful recruiting campaign ever, noted in this 2004 account citing 1990 correspondence with then Secretary of Defence Dick Cheney: <https://archive.org/details/operationhollywo00robb/page/180>. Similarly endless war, cowboy, biblical, and rom-com films of that period.
At the same time, you certainly could reasonably read the film as being very dubious about the military. It opens with the psychological collapse of Maverick's wingman when a MiG locks on to him, Cruise's character has to defy orders to save him, and gets chewed out for doing so.
Maverick's original motivation is clearing his father name, not patriotism. Goose dies in a pointless accident. The final dogfight is random "rescue mission" against an unnamed foe in "hostile waters" in the Indian ocean, and Cruise's character almost abandons the fight due to PTSD.
Yeah, the almost pornographic love the camera shows to the jets probably made the actual story all be irrelevant to the Navy's recruiting success. But it's easy to imagine all the whining from the Fox news personality cosplaying as Secretary of "War" about such a film if it were made today.
> The original Top Gun (1986) was describe at the time as the US Navy's most successful recruiting campaign ever, noted in this 2004 account citing 1990 correspondence with then Secretary of Defence Dick Cheney: <https://archive.org/details/operationhollywo00robb/page/180>.
Sure, but was that the intent of Tony Scott when he made the film, or was it just a side effect of watching exciting air wing navy operations portrayed on the big screen?
I can easily see a young man wanting to be not just a fighter pilot, but one of those guys on deck standing in the wind, dancing and pointing and saluting F-14s off the catapult.
I think one highlight is that the old propaganda doesn't affect you in the same way as the "current thing" propaganda. Old propaganda feels sort of cute. So this is an argument for watching older movies :)
For what it's worth, I feel similarly about old advertising. Anything from, say, the 1970s and before just doesn't hit me the same way, particularly in print. Audio/visual ads somewhat, but even they seem different and more innocent.
>I feel similarly about old advertising. Anything from, say, the 1970s and before just doesn't hit me the same way, particularly in print. Audio/visual ads somewhat, but even they seem different and more innocent.
No, the reason they seem so different and innocent is because you aren't bombarded by them. You watch an old ad on YouTube once, and you think it's cute or corny and laugh at it. Now imagine you're watching a movie, and they show you the same 1980s ad over and over again while you're watching the movie, every 15 minutes.
If you're old enough that you had to watch ads on TV because TiVo didn't exist yet, you might remember how annoying they became, and how glad people were when they got remote control TVs with mute buttons. Or maybe it's been so long you've forgotten how bad it was.
NB: it's generally poor form to presume what someone thinks or perceives. At best it may be highly inaccurate. At worst ... well, worse. Better to couch it in terms of your own experience, or third-party research where that exists.
Though yes, old-style ads are less relentless, and often have some degree of novelty. Repetition of ads where I do encounter them (largely public-broadcasting underwriting spots and on podcasts before I fast-forward through them) is in fact tedious, so you may have a point.
Another factor though is that the old-time ads are attempting to manipulate, yes, but they're trying to manipulate a target which is no longer present. Current-day ads both turn the dial to 11 and are often at least trying to specifically exploit personal information and weaknesses.
TV's been dead to me for decades, in large part for the reasons you describe. The few times I'm exposed to it just reinforces why.
It can, sure. However, I will not pay to be lectured to on topics I have no interest getting lectured on. I'll keep my money, they can keep the sermon. Let's see who has more to gain from listening to the other. If they want my money, what I want to hear/see matters a whole lot more than what they want to preach to me.
They simply forgot the golden rule: he who has the gold -- makes the rules. Let them rediscover it.
Some is reasonable and then some is obviously just what rich people want you to think. Like America paid Hollywood a lot to always show the US armies being macho and always on the right side of wars.
The number of lies, lies by omission, deceptive distortions, and fallacious argument tactics they generate is absurd, and increasing rapidly. Translation, when done as a service you are paid for, can't be relied on by propaganda bots.
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