alt Hacker News> And it's all because of ads.
Not really. A while ago there was a news piece stating that Israel was behind a series of fake think-tanks with very accessible websites which were created with the express purpose of feeding AI agents with alternative facts aligned with their foreign policy.
If anyone has the link at hand, please post it.
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Some of us have been predicting this for a while.
People with an axe to grind or states with an agenda are already devoting tremendous effort toward affecting LLM models and it is very difficult to determine real from astroturf for humans let alone an LLM trying to train.
Much like PageRank now that the cat's out of the bag all the current approaches may prove to be useless in the long run.
If by "not really" you mean it's not all because of ads, some governments dabble in it too, you're right. But it's still overwhelmingly because of ads.
Sure maybe, but the online ad market is USD 400b give or take, which vastly outmatches any such budgets.
There are incentives other than marketing, but I doubt the SEO company referred to by the ancestor comment is planning to do lots of business in the political propaganda space.
That sounds very plausible too. Propaganda/spin has always been a component of mass media.
>If anyone has the link at hand, please post it.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/aug/26/fake-thinktank...
You wrote "not really" and then described a literal ad.
Same difference tbh
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/aug/26/fake-thinktank...