> Well do you think that social media could be a threat to democracy
Yes, I certainly agree that it is and recognize all your examples.
> You don't see LLMs' impact on culture and society being at least as broad and thorough?
In the sense I think you're implying, I see them as having almost zero impact. Just because more crap is generated doesn't mean it's going to be more believable, or that it will even be seen. How many tokens do you think it would take a SOTA model to convince you that the earth is flat or that the moon-landing was a hoax? Do you think Trump supporters will start voting for Democrats if they see 100 anti-Trump posts in every comment section on the internet? The LLM isn't going to generate anything that we haven't all heard already.
With enough money, you absolutely could persuade Trump voters to vote for Democrats.
This isn't up for debate. PR and advertising exist because this is absolutely possible, and has been for a long time.
AI makes it much, much easier and more cost-effective.
This was how Cambridge Analytica and Facebook swung the Brexit vote. They didn't send out blanket "EU bad, vote Brexit" content. They created targeted ads that addressed hot-button fear points for individuals and niche demographics and used Facebook's ad targetting system to deliver them.
So some people were concerned about money for the UK's health system. They saw ads promising that Brexit would mean more money for the NHS. Others were concerned about potholes, or education, or - often - immigration.
Every group saw ads that triggered their personal hot-button issues and persuaded them to vote against their interests.
LLMs allow for much subtler forms of manipulation. For example, those Trump supporters could see 100 pro-Trump posts that very much toe the party line on the surface while introducing subtle contrarian points.
And it's not that the LLM is going to generate something that we haven't seen before. The point is that it can do that at scale far exceeding what you can do with mere human troll bots. With LLMs you can literally have a bot assigned to every single person in the country that feeds them agitprop tuned for maximum agreement by that person.
Yes, I certainly agree that it is and recognize all your examples.
> You don't see LLMs' impact on culture and society being at least as broad and thorough?
In the sense I think you're implying, I see them as having almost zero impact. Just because more crap is generated doesn't mean it's going to be more believable, or that it will even be seen. How many tokens do you think it would take a SOTA model to convince you that the earth is flat or that the moon-landing was a hoax? Do you think Trump supporters will start voting for Democrats if they see 100 anti-Trump posts in every comment section on the internet? The LLM isn't going to generate anything that we haven't all heard already.