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tyretoday at 8:17 PM1 replyview on HN

We will get much better at manipulation and better at people “writing” things to justify their own feelings.

What’s new about LLMs is that you can scalably manipulate people individually. It used to be that you could either have scale (speeches, tweets, interviews, website, etc.) or individual engagement (replying to mail/tweets/town hall questions.)

Now you can pull the history and preferences of an individual, then shape a message—in real time—to them, specifically. You can have conversations on social media with a single person and shape your message specifically to them.

Part of this can be good (you talk about what they care about, where 90% of broadcast messaging might not apply) and part of it can be bad (manipulation.)

My guess is that, in the US, the right will cynically adopt manipulation to great effect and the left will take a moral stand against shady practices and lose elections.


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lettergramtoday at 8:26 PM

> My guess is that, in the US, the right will cynically adopt manipulation to great effect and the left will take a moral stand against shady practices and lose elections.

I think that statement may itself highlight how prevalent manipulation is.

I fully anticipate all groups to continue maximal manipulation they can. One thing with LLMs is that it'll be a far less unified view, so a "divide and conquer" strategy is what I anticipate.

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