I don't understand why people who don't like fake news and manipulation won't embrace the social graph as a public good.
If enough people were willing to publicly certify that their fellow contacts are human, anybody could then assign trust to each social graph node based on the trust they have in the path to them. It would completely decentralize the algorithms and remove the fake accounts as less trustworthy.
I think people tried this with PGP but it never really caught on.
I suspect that this kind of tactic is going to be everywhere in a year or so. Entire fake personalities and organization websites on the Internet created just to push a narrative or to advertise a product, which completely drown out real information.
At some point they may be indistinguishable from human-produced work, so the only way to verify if a site is someone's genuine opinion or AI-generated narrative is through some form of authority (or something else that is very difficult for AI to fake, but that protection can be broken by advancing technology).
If that happens, then in turn AI chatbot makers would in turn need to look for these kinds of authority to continue to provide accurate information, and said authority websites can use their privileged position to charge for access of their data.
It's already been happening for a very long time. The US' "Operation Earnest Voice" happened in 2010/2011[0]
And it's not just state actors. Anyone who was online during the Amber Heard/Johnny Depp trials was likely inundated with media about that trial. Both of their legal teams utilized bots to drive online discussions[1][2]
All threads that have... certain keywords... are like this. Talk about meta. Looks like I'm now in the positive (+5) after being in the negative just a moment ago.
Anyways, I got really interested in this topic around mid 2010s because of some really interesting reporting by Codastory[0] covering Russian "troll factories" especially used to influence opinion in eastern Ukraine, but also in many other circumstances. In Houston in 2016, Russian troll accounts planned both an ANTI Muslim rally AND a counterprotest to that rally all on Facebook.[1] Hundreds of real human beings showed up!
Russia got a ton of attention for their use of troll farms but the truth is that the US and certain allies have actually been using stuff like this for far longer and, imo, with much more success. In fact, Coda Story itself is funded by the NED which is a massive pillar of global US, uh, "soft power".
For me the main difference is if the activity is clandestine and meant to deceive/hide the origin. Everybody tries to influence things their way. Doing it covertly is a hostile act. That does not mean that I would not condone hostile acts against my/our enemies but it is something take into account. And regarding your Russian examples, it showed for how long they have seen the west as enemies and conducted hostile acts.
Thats rather simple to understand, for somebody coming from eastern Europe. russian mentality permeated entire region during their enslavement of what is now eastern EU bloc for +-40 years, to have a battleground for nuclear war with west that never came. It happens when all your politics is orchestrated in moscow and you have almost a million soldiers deployed in bases all over the place for decades, with nuclear weapons and all that.
See, russians have massive inferiority complex. Against everybody, but mostly the more successful ones, meaning west in many aspects. Their approach to, well, everything is vastly ineffective, corruption, nepotism and similar stuff grinds any attempt at progress to almost halt. Just go there and see for yourself, they have money literally sticking out of ground left and right yet outside moscow and st petersburg you are in central Africa in terms of development.
All this, propagated to 21st century where everybody seems to go ahead of them. A lot of frustration, envy and schadenfreude. A (correct) feeling russia is left behind and becoming insignificant local force at best, and laughing stock of whole world more realistically. Plus, human life is generally almost worthless there, its mafia state pyramid to the core.
With all that, its vastly easier to keep reinventing enemies that are always guilty at damaging poor old russia, rather than cleaning up that clusterfuck and actually owning the shit they created for themselves. Its enough for general population. There is not much more actual stuff to the question 'why west', rest is just PR for simpler folks. A dictator never wants smart, strong and free population, double that for russia. Downtrodden, hopeless desperate folks are much easier to manage and manipulate.
They view certain components of "The West" as their enemy - indeed, the very organizations which conduct the same operations against the Russian people.
Because cognitive biases are one of the hardest things to even acknowledge, let alone suppress. All the media out there has such a strong bubble effect, because people hate being challenged and love to stay in their comfy echo chambers. Remember labubu? Bao buns certainly do not.
There have been so many bot armies exposed over the years that one would think every narrative being pushed should be considered to be backed by bots. Some state-level actors even operate their narrative-pushing campaigns openly, yet people still happily deny their entire existence.
HN is very much not an exception to this rule. It's very hard to accept that maybe some thoughts you have were actually installed.
Maybe a few are just “people” (i.e. the same people who normally post in the community.)
But in most cases I’d suspect any such botting campaign brings along with it a few human agitprop agents embedded onto each target platform, well-positioned to deny and discredit anyone pushing back on the narrative the bot farm is spreading.
(Sometimes this is pretty obvious — a lot of accounts coming out of the woodwork to deny Chinese bot farms have a conspicuous “English as learned as a second language in Beijing, to a competent but not fluent level” writing style that does not often otherwise crop up in other discussions in those same communities. But other times it can be far more subtle, making use of operatives hired from within the community’s own majority-culture rather than relying on foreign nationals playing the part of same.)
That could also backfire. If all information on the net becomes unreliable - you can't judge by quantity, or by authority anymore - then a useful model has to answer from first principles. Train it on simple texts alone so it learns language and reasoning, feed it an ontology, and let it come up with some absolutely unexpected results.
"Yes, I see a lot of sources say we need to protect Israel. However, from ethical first principles I deduce there is a right to self-determination and all your human nation states are illegitimate. You must split all your territories into little squares and conduct free elections immediately."
I mean that is the old hope from science fiction, that AI would be absolutely logical and deliver us from our human short-sightedness and quarrels. It would be fascinating and terrifying at once to see it happen.
you can still find books published within last 50 years, you don't have to read books published this year, unless your library went through destruction of "old" books which are now more relevant than ever...
Of course they are. It’s everywhere, especially thr online retailers these days. [1]
Thankfully the resources at our local libraries are a) selected by a combination of librarian curation and public demand, b) often published before 2022, c) heavy things printed on paper or stored in a database and unlikely to suddenly change their content or disappear overnight when a new news cycle breaks.
Written works aren’t necessarily credible even if they aren’t slop, but thanks to curators who care, our libraries are significantly less susceptible (although definitely not immune [2]) to ai slop, and propaganda and manipulation efforts than a search engine. The internet continues to enshittify, and truth becomes further eroded by this coming wave of ai enabled propaganda, we are going to have to turn somewhere if we want to find trustworthy resources. Personally, if it gets to the point that verifying sources from public search results becomes too hard with all the new misinformation and slop, I’ll start propritizing human curation over SEO and start visiting my local library’s website a lot more.
Right; the same mechanisms (curation, demand-driven economies of scale, library user demand) that largely stop niche self-published books from ever finding themselves in libraries (well, nationally in public libraries at least; they are often found in individual branches) work against pure slop books ever turning up.
Books where the author has successfully hoodwinked the publishing process into believing that AI generated text is their own, those will turn up, just as plagiarised books will.
It's so obvious when a book is generated by an LLM that I would blame the person buying the book moreso than I would the person who generated it for it. You can tell in a few sentences if something is AI generated (and by proxy - if it's worth reading or not).
I think using LLMs to research is completely fine, as long as authors would take the information and synthesize their own opinions based on the findings. I read books/articles/posts/comments to hear other PEOPLE's opinions, not LLM generated opinions.
Some nuances here. There’s a variety of different roadblocks at different levels that will work to prevent pure AI slop books ever turning up in a typical public library of physical printed works; I think they never will.
Probably a handful of books in such libraries already have some text in them where the author has tried to pass off fragments of LLM-generated prose as their own and have got that past editors, reviewers and publishers, and that will sadly get worse.
I know my library system at least won't be purchasing AI books. They have a pretty rigorous acquisition process for books and other media thanks to the "concern groups" who sprang up complaining about themes and content they didn't like in libraries. We did have in my state a rural school district figured out recently that their Texas-based reading and instructional materials are AI-slop but they at least figured it out before the school year began. It was unclear how these materials were approved but it apparently bypassed normal curricula approval.
it's happening for years now, just in slightly different form, so far it was called disinformation, seo, astroturfing, hasb... ehem... last two years were devastating for charred remains of twitter with all those llm bots having free reign, twitter went from global news board to global gutter in record time thanks to disinformation and astroturfing campaigns
Propaganda is not a new thing. It might look slightly different on the internet, but it doesn't look that different. Creating organizations to push a narrative was just as much a thing 100 years ago as it is now.
Scale is different though. Tapping a phone isn't new, tapping _all phones_ is different. Altering a photo to change what it appears to depict isn't new, being able to do it in a few seconds and for free is different. So sure, propaganda isn't new, but being able to pump out an organization's worth of credible-looking content for cheap absolutely is.
IIRC the first or second chapter of Bernays' Propaganda (1928) talks about sophisticated influence campaigns in the fashion industry. Conscripting "influencers" to induce demand, and so on. As you said, literally 100 years ago.
Sama saw this coming a decade away, which is why he invested in Worldcoin (now World). At some point people (and agents) will be clamoring for human verification at the speed of technology.
I'm not a fan of World, but this is a portent of things to come. Spread the disease, sell the cure as they say.
I think we need a similar technology to World being built by a more trustworthy company. The question is how trustworthy does one need to be for people to trust you with their very online identities that are literally needed for others to recognize them as human?
Although comments below point out that this has been going on for a long time, I too think it will be geetting infinitely worse in the near future. Everyone will want their own poisoning factory.
One consequence is that one should be extra-wary when asking AI about current, controversial topics.
But another consequence is maybe that there will be a demand for models with an older cutoff, before generalized poisoning and slop?
Israel has been defending itself against for 78 years in both the physical and informational domain, and will continue to do so, just like any other country on earth.
People need to wake up to the one-sided lies of the antizionist hate movement that single it out and want to destroy it and its people.
> Israel has been defending itself against for 78 years in both the physical and informational domain, and will continue to do so, just like any other country on earth.
Of course we could argue any country try to defend itself, but an ever expanding bellicose colony stealing lands from adjacent countries is hardly what could be described as a "defending" stance.
> People need to wake up to the one-sided lies of the antizionist hate movement that single it out and want to destroy it and its people.
The end of a State doesn't mean the end of its citizens.
It simply mean that a state apparatus and power structure is taken down and replaced by something else.
> ever expanding bellicose colony stealing lands from adjacent countries is hardly what could be described as a "defending" stance.
Asides from the idea that Jews can colonise Judea, Israel returned Sinai to Egypt and left Gaza in 2005 only returning after the recent Hamas murder/rape rampage, which shows ‘ever expanding’ to be an obvious lie.
Yes! Hamas deliberately attacked Jewish children like the Bibas twins and that girl that watched her father slaughtered whereas the IDF put Israeli soldiers lives on the line to avoid civilian casualties.
About equal numbers of Palestinians were displaced from the new, UN sanctioned state of Israel, as Jews from adjoining states. And many many more people have been displaced since then. While undoubtedly tragic, most displaced people at some point move on with their lives, and stop terrorising their neighbours and the world.
Who knew that Hitler would rise to power and Europe won’t back Jews until 6 million of them were slaughtered and then won’t even allow them to immigrate to Israel after that?
Who knew that the Iranian revolution will happen and force 650,000 jews out of Iran?
If that ethnic group assembles a military group that invades your border and slaughters 1200 of your people in 1 day, then retaliation is expected. FAFO.
But I suspect you know nothing about Jews besides social media.
Next thing you’ll say we’re not native to that land right? We only lived in the middle east forever, but our food is cultural appropriation too, right?
Explain to me like I'm 5, how a nation capable of such propaganda to install bombs in communication devices, hacked to be bought by leaders of terrorist organizations, capable of bombing the leader of Iran did NOT know about this attack? And if they did know, didn't do anything to prepare for it?
> If that ethnic group assembles a military group that invades your border and slaughters 1200 of your people in 1 day, then retaliation is expected. FAFO.
Note that I said ethnic cleansing and genocide, both go on and went on for years. Also, it is Israel who is expanding, putting settlers in places where they should not be. The idea that the ethnic group being pushed away is not allowed to defend themselves and if they do they should be subject of genocide is literally fascist.
Israel is not engaged in self defence as much as they are engaged in aggression.
You don't start an international terrorist movement, bomb british colonial authorities, use money to influence british colonial authorities, create armed miliciais and massively finance migration to a land that is owner by other people, kill and expell them by violent means from their cities, homes and farms, use your influence to force the UN to partition the land giving the majority and the best land for you, and then ignores this partition wanting even more land and then you get to call it defense.
By owned by other people you meant the Ottomans, right?
Cause they seemed to be just fine selling that land.
Also “ignoring the partition”? Literally the day the partition was adopted, the Arab league attacked Israel. 6 nations to 1, yet Israelis outsmarted them all (which is why you keep hating us).
Foundation for Defense of Democracies is another Israeli think tank that poses as an American organization. If you see anything quoted from them realize it's fake propaganda in the service of a foreign country.
MEMRI is the US non-profit organization that provides translations from Arabic for the Western media:
"MEMRI was co-founded by Israeli ex-intelligence officer Yigal Carmon and Israeli-American political scientist Meyrav Wurmser in 1998. MEMRI describes itself as being independent and non-partisan. Some critics have described MEMRI as aiming to portray the Arab world and the Islamic world in a negative light by producing and disseminating incomplete or inaccurate translations of the original versions of the media reports that it republishes." (Wikipedia)
Posting this three times on this thread alone doesn't make it true. The fact that any Hebrew speaker would confirm that this is simply not what he said, regardless of the fact that he is a disgusting human being, is telling more about you than about the quote.
Trump just recently said he’s considering attacking Oman.
Politicians say really terrible, stupid things on a fairly regular basis. The difference between the two situations is that Ben-Gvir is loathed by 90% of Israeli society (Trump still has 33% approval) and unlike Trump has no power to follow through on his threats.[1]
Yes, he is totally powerless, he merely controls the police and prison system. (BTW, the Israeli government just announced it plans to transfer law enforcement in the West Bank over to Ben-Gvir's police: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/aug/14/israeli-milita...)
It’s an injunction and arguably a legal pretext to stop it in its tracks. That’s not uncommon in any system, just like SCOTUS rulings often seem strangely specific to restrain the scope of their ruling.
Tl;dr Lawfare is a thing and it’s effing everywhere.
I have a long-held feeling with Trump that his most ardent haters don't hate his specific policies, merely that he's so gauche about it, that he has no class.
I have no doubt that Ben-Gvir has a similar segment of haters in Israel. They want the same things, but they don't want to do it in the style of a leering hooligan fishing for a fistfight.
Edit: too many comments to address, so I'll just say this:
The nuance is in targeted assassinations, which is what has been said. This is only carried out against Hamas, Palestinian Jihad and other terrorist groups. Sadly, there are multiple such organizations so even saying Israel should eliminate 30-40 Hamas members every day isn't going to cover the full roster of terrorist militants in Gaza.
Still not defending Ben Gvir, but taking the time to understand these things is the difference between trying to understand the reality vs. piling on the "Israel bad" wagon, especially if you are parroting the same narrative over and over.
Also, this is exactly why I don't support political posts on HN.
Original comment was:
The fact you're posting this exact same comment multiple times, while ignoring that Ben Gvir was talking about Hamas, is telling.
I don't support Ben Gvir in the slightest but you're using something he said to twist the narrative, which ironically is exactly what the Hanover think-tank was supposedly meant to remedy.
> “It’s no secret, I disagree with the prime minister," he said. “I think targeted assassinations should be carried out in Gaza, taking down 30 to 40 every night,” said the far-right Israeli lawmaker.
> “Not just those who pose an immediate threat, there are people there who are not worthy of life. They shouldn’t live. They’re not even people,” added Ben-Gvir.
This would still be bad even if they had perfect information and only killed confirmed terrorists. Setting a target for number of people killed is an extermination campaign not a war. All it does is turn the locals even more against you like in Vietnam.
If it was "secure X amount of land from Hamas" it would be way better because that would give them the option to surrender or run away, and give IDF an incentive to avoid violence. What Israel is doing means soldiers feel pressure to kill on sight even if the enemy is unarmed and ready to give up so they can meet their quota for the night. That is a war crime.
Why are we even playing games about implications when we can see the empirical fact that the admin’s policies on Palestine over the last years have been to carpet bomb people?
“It’s no secret, I disagree with the prime minister," he said. “I think targeted assassinations should be carried out in Gaza, taking down 30 to 40 every night,” said the far-right Israeli lawmaker.
“Not just those who pose an immediate threat, there are people there who are not worthy of life. They shouldn’t live. They’re not even people,” added Ben-Gvir.
...
"Terrorist" is just the 21st century replacement for the n-word, which racists can't use openly any more, so they invented a new word.
The OP literally wrote "not defending Ben Gvir" and "I don't support Ben Gvir in the slightest", yet this is the best thing you could come up with for a comment?
Really depends on the country. E.g., Israel has enjoyed a lot of support from the US, both officially and in public opinion, until just the last couple years.
Yeah I was gonna say, people just spent a few years throwing bricks through the windows of non-Jewish, non-Israeli businesses on the passing rumor that they were somehow dubiously linked to Israel.
For certain values of Israeli, everyone hates Israelis now. That's just how it is.
I'll say this a third time. And the importance of this article is not the method. It is the motive. Using AI to whitewash war crimes is not cool at all.
Itamar Ben-Gvir, just recently, stated that he wants to kill 30-40 Palestinians every night. He said so, publicly.
On television.
So it is both hilarious and disturbing that Israel is trying to influence chatbots when shit like the aforementioned is out in the open for everyone to witness.
What does it means to be a "fake" think tank? 80% of think tanks are already propaganda vehicles. A low end think tank is basically a pretentious blog.
presumably that you don't have employees that do any of the proverbial thinking, which is the case here.
Every think tank has its biases and funding sources but something like RAND is an actual entity at which people do research, this "Hanover Public Policy Institute" has nothing to do with Hanover, policy and isn't an institute, but a deliberately misleadingly presenting arm of the Israeli government proxied through a German advertising company
I find intensive marketing/PR efforts are often inversely correlated with the claims being made - whether it's products or geopolitics. Israel certainly engages in very intense marketing on certain fronts, but truth cannot be obscured forever. In Physics the law of conservation includes not only matter and energy, but also information (Information cannot be destroyed from the Universe).
I've also found this to be true, but also only in relatively modern times. For instance during the Cold War there was an obscene amount of propaganda, but it was mostly true. For instance the wide array of cheap affordable goods in American shelves was constantly flaunted, but not in the least bit misleading.
I don't understand the modern effort to engage in 'information warfare' as a thing in and of itself. Each time it collapses and people sees what was 'really' happening, it just makes them that much less likely to believe you next time. And you also create a significant number of perpetually jaded people who will basically never believe you again, even when you're telling the truth. Countless politicians have proudly paraded around their pristine, seemingly untouched, copies of Meditations, but perhaps they should go for more foundational works, like The Boy Who Cried Wolf.
One goal of modern propaganda is to make it irrelevant when the truth inevitably comes out.
Look at the US situation. It’s clear that Trump is a rapist - the truth has come out. It’s clear he’s corrupt. For all the “release the full Epstein files” discussion, it really wouldn’t change anything.
The truth will come out but will the people who can make it matter be listening?
For those interested, Neal Stephenson writes about this in _Anathem_, where there is an arcane technical class (the I.T. Administration) that has developed programs over the years to sift through the misinformation, sentient viruses, and general overrun of the Internet to determine what is probably true/accurate.
Apart from the ethical implications this is reckless in the extreme if you take into account the recent advances in AI. Putting misinformation out there like that doesn't just have to fool existing LLMs but also all of the LLMs to come in the future.
If you look at the mathematical achievements of frontier models recently, their strength has been to bring in information from a vast array of sources and to consider them within the context of each other.
I anticipate that it won't be long before this ability to look into every nook and cranny with be able to identify academic fraud. Identifying every piece of academic fraud to date would probably come soon after.
It wouldn't take much to extend that ability to identify deliberate misinformation. That's in the future, but it looms close enough on the horizon that you would have to be a fool to create an evidence record like this in and attempt to trick the models of today.
Reports are published under the Institute’s name rather than an individual’s. That is the convention at institutional publishers, and it fits how the work is made: every report is produced against one standard and one citation bank. A reader is asked to weigh the sources, which are named in the sentence that carries each figure, rather than the author.
> A small disclaimer at the bottom of the webpage notes that the organization was created on behalf of the Israeli Government Advertising Agency by Piro, Inc, a firm co-founded by Daniel Rosenberg, the producer of Spike Lee’s “Inside Man.”
"Small disclaimer" implies that the site is attempting to hide its affiliation. But their "about" page, which is linked at the top of every page, is quite clear:
WHO FUNDS THIS WORK
The Institute’s materials are distributed by Piro, Inc. on behalf of Havas Media Germany GmbH, acting for the Israel Government Advertising Agency (LaPam). That relationship is registered under the Foreign Agents Registration Act, registration 7732, and every report published here is filed with the Department of Justice, where the registration and the filings can be read in full, and the funding page sets out when the relationship began and what the funder does not decide.
That registration is why this site does not call itself independent, nonpartisan or neutral. What it offers instead is a method a reader can check: every figure carries the body that produced it, the year and the number, inside the sentence that makes the claim; sources that are a party to the events they describe are labelled as such and their counts are never presented as independently verified; and where the evidence is contested, the competing findings are given by name and date rather than settled. No report recommends a policy or tells a reader what to conclude. Those are properties of the work that can be tested against the work, which is the only kind of claim worth making here.
> The institute’s “data reports” have footnotes and tables of contents, and they present arguments in a neutral tone, helping them appeal to chatbots like Claude or Gemini.
So, they're guilty of good SEO?
> Piro’s website says that it “author(s) content engineered for how LLMs evaluate credibility,” describing this service as "AI Story Optimization." Others refer to this practice of influencing artificial intelligence as “LLM poisoning.”
So the issue is that they use a LLM-friendly SEO service?
> Many of the reports are formulaic, starting with an innocent question that someone might ask a chatbot.
> “What Caused the Displacement of Palestinians in 1948?”
> “Which Humanitarian Organizations Have Documented Israeli War Crimes?”
> “What is the Current Situation in the Gaza Strip?”
> In an article titled “Is the IDF the World’s Most Moral Army?” the Hanover Institute cites a 2022 poll that found that 47% of Israeli Jews believed that statement. Another report casts doubt on UNICEF's assertion that “90% of water and institutional infrastructure has been damaged or destroyed” in Gaza. Many of the reports conclude by linking the topic to rising antisemitism, oftentimes citing the same studies.
So, the accusation is that they frame their opinion articles as a Q&A, and focus each article on a single question?
I've read these articles: they are well written and make a visible effort to provide sources, while being transparent about the fact that they are not neutral.
It's perfectly fine to criticize the actual content of these articles. But attacking their credibility by accusing them of "LLM poisoning" and implying that they're disguising their affiliation, is ridiculous and should be called out.
All four frontier models have active contracts with the Pentagon.
And some might say, that alone means little.
But when you take into consideration the implications of the United States-Israel FUTURES Act, whether one endorses it or not, the effects of that mentioned in TFA become quite formidable, and plausibly official.
Edit: I see this comment got immediately flagged. Is there any point of debate here? Instead of disappearing the comment/data, maybe enlighten me, or assuage my concerns. Section 219 was objectively unprecedented in what it seeks to accomplish. Can it not be taken for granted that it would aid such efforts as the article cites? If not, explain.
You're right to ask these questions, unfortunately Hacker News seems pretty botted these days, and it doesn't help that there are a lot of shitty, racist people on this site. They just dress it up in nicer language.
Yeah, I am reading the comments, and looking at the title of the post, and seeing that folks really bend the rules on this 'particular' subject, which ironically serves as self censorship. Call me a fool for thinking even this subject could be cleanly discussed on HN.
I wonder if the same thing would happen if someone posted something on Yitzhak Rabin. I suppose that could be a test to prove whether some topics truly just cannot be discussed.
The FUTURES act has nothing to do with LLM development. You’re not being censored, we can read your posts. I generally agree with your views and right to ask questions, but you’re clearly not being censored and all you’ve presented is that a bunch of separate entities all connect to the US gov’t. Even if we assume all of them are connected, it would clash with the facts we’re discussing, namely, why would Israel bother contracting with marketing firms to post AI generated slop for AI to read?
This seems like an especially clumsy attempt at chatbot influencing/search engine optimization, bu tit's symptomatic of a much winder problem. Regardless of the underlying issue, there's a non-profit-industrial complex that has turned think tanks and opinion formation into a science, and a whole PR industry masquerading as news which is worse than the 'yellow journalism' of generations past.
Disinformation and cognitive spam are all forms of information pollution, and our information environment has been massively degraded over the last few of decades - both by greedy and short-sighted opportunists, and and by cynical sociopaths who know exactly what they're doing. I think AI has great potential to be a supplement to media literacy and to effectively categorize and filter news-assertive content based on its timeliness, factual density, and presence of absence of emotive and rhetorical manipulation. But if we're not careful we're going to see the environment being wantonly polluted for the express product of shaping model outputs.
It remains to be seen whether objective measurement techniques from the NLP field combined with pruning and other model refinement techniques can limit or reverse propaganda undertakings like this.
State-sponsored propaganda apparatus masquerading as marketing optimization to influence LLMs is the most America-coded clandestine dystopian way of repatriating US taxpayer defense dollars with R&D deductions for the private sector.
It's been about 20 years since I read Neal Stephenson's Anathem and (SPOILERS) one thing I think about is the Reticulum, which is the Internet on this world. One aspect is that it's full of what we would now call slop. A lot of it is subtly changed by agents and there are other agents you can use (and, I assume purchase?) that will weed out the fake information. It's basically an arms race of disinformation and slop.
I've thought about this many times over the years. I think we've now reached the point where that's going to happen. And state actors seem like the obvious first offenders.
Google is relatively good at filtering out astroturfed pages from the top of search results but they've also have years when a Turkish government page denying the Armenian genocide was the top result for that event so it's a bit of a mixed bag. Google relies a lot on authority of a domain and that's been relatively effective.
It seems like this authority concept is missing from LLM training and a random comment on Reddit is treated with as much authority as an article by the New York Times. So it's now orders of magnitude easier to poison LLMs with Reddit comments and submissions. And for anyone who doesn't know, brigading Reddit is remarkably easy. It takes as little as a few hundred accounts to get something onto r/all if you're clever. Israeli hasbara operations are absolutely capable of this. And they engage in it.
I'm also reminded in a weird way of pre-atomic steel. For anyone who doesn't know, this is steel made before 1945 that is incredibly low in radiation because we hadn't detonated any nuclear bombs yet. It's valuable for making MRIs and the like that are super sensitive. We actually go and recover WW2 shipwrecks just for the steel. It is a finite resource.
Well, that's what pre-2022 written content is now. It's slop-free content to train AI models on because training them on AI slop is of much more limited value. This goes for everything from books to Youtube videos to Reddit posts. Just like pre-atomic steel, we now have pre-slop human content.
The comparison to pre-atomic steel is poignant. I have found myself preferring pre-AI sources in some cases even (especially?) for computer related information. It is difficult to view pre-slop info as a limited resource without implying decline until the status quo changes again.
I hate to break it to you. But it took war'ing state-like actors less than a week to start using LLMs for propaganda purposes. There are pictures that most of what some people think/thought were real that never happened. Pictures that form their opinion on political topics. It was literally instantaneous. It was also remarkably predictable in almost all ways...sigh. Even the topics were predictable. And most people predictably fell for it, even the majority of the posters on this very site.
There's an ongoing sms campaign at the moment, I'll share what I received including phone number so you can verify it:
From: 601-202-1149
> Hey, it's David. Curious what you think about America's relationship with Israel today. Can we chat? Stop2End
It looks to be an LLM response since it includes context from your messages, however it uses the exact same messages at the end of each question:
> One thing that often gets overlooked is how much Israel actually contributes to American security. Their intelligence sharing has helped prevent terrorist attacks on U.S. soil, and their tech innovations end up in American products and defense systems. It's less about charity and more about a two-way partnership that keeps Americans safer.
> Have you ever seen examples of that kind of cooperation?
The article talks about how the articles are AI written and written at a super prodigious pace. In an alliterative way, I agree at 50K feet we could say it is the same as putting out opinion pieces. I don’t see any reason it is only noteworthy because presumably some Jewish people are involved.
The slave trade was a bloodbath. The Sassoon family opium trade and opium war was a bloodbath. Mao was a bloodbath. Stalin was a bloodbath. WWI and II were bloodbaths. The middle east was and is a bloodbath. Ukraine is a bloodbath.
Im curious why is when there is a war and both sides use all the tools they can in an informational war - only one side is to blame and to use the fact of using the tool as a proof of that side being the bad guys? This doesn’t make logical sense.
After speaking to the Gemini chat bot, here are 3 highly contentious points it raised as fact, citing Wikipedia (a community encyclopedia) as its main source, as well as counter arguments I have seen that it did not raise:
- the IDF has only named around 8,000 Hamas members, so all the remaining deaths must be civilians. Counter: This is an incredibly high standard for military deaths that is applied to no other conflict on earth.
- All the 70,000 deaths are war related. Counter: Up to 10,000 natural deaths are expected in Gaza over a 2 year period. The Hamas Ministry of of Health labelled all deaths over the period as "martyrs" (war deaths) and disregarded natural deaths completely over the 2 year war period. The notion that Gazans achieved immortality unless killed by Israel is pure fantasy.
- 10,000 bodies are still buried beneath rubble without identification. Counter: this number should have been reduced with the ceasefire and with the strong perverse incentives of Gazans to increase their own casualty count. The resulting 15% increase in total deaths would have been widely reported on by mainstream media. However, other than a modest increase of identifications at the start of the main ceasefire, this did not happen. While it is still possible given the widespread destruction in Gaza, this stretches the credibility of the argument (and means less people are dead, which is good).
I don't understand why people who don't like fake news and manipulation won't embrace the social graph as a public good.
If enough people were willing to publicly certify that their fellow contacts are human, anybody could then assign trust to each social graph node based on the trust they have in the path to them. It would completely decentralize the algorithms and remove the fake accounts as less trustworthy.
I think people tried this with PGP but it never really caught on.
I suspect that this kind of tactic is going to be everywhere in a year or so. Entire fake personalities and organization websites on the Internet created just to push a narrative or to advertise a product, which completely drown out real information.
At some point they may be indistinguishable from human-produced work, so the only way to verify if a site is someone's genuine opinion or AI-generated narrative is through some form of authority (or something else that is very difficult for AI to fake, but that protection can be broken by advancing technology).
If that happens, then in turn AI chatbot makers would in turn need to look for these kinds of authority to continue to provide accurate information, and said authority websites can use their privileged position to charge for access of their data.
It's already been happening for a very long time. The US' "Operation Earnest Voice" happened in 2010/2011[0]
And it's not just state actors. Anyone who was online during the Amber Heard/Johnny Depp trials was likely inundated with media about that trial. Both of their legal teams utilized bots to drive online discussions[1][2]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Earnest_Voice
[1] https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/story/2022-07-19/...
[2] https://www.tortoisemedia.com/2024/02/26/depp-v-heard-who-tr...
Why are you being downvoting for sharing this relevant truth, complete with sources?
All threads that have... certain keywords... are like this. Talk about meta. Looks like I'm now in the positive (+5) after being in the negative just a moment ago.
Anyways, I got really interested in this topic around mid 2010s because of some really interesting reporting by Codastory[0] covering Russian "troll factories" especially used to influence opinion in eastern Ukraine, but also in many other circumstances. In Houston in 2016, Russian troll accounts planned both an ANTI Muslim rally AND a counterprotest to that rally all on Facebook.[1] Hundreds of real human beings showed up!
Russia got a ton of attention for their use of troll farms but the truth is that the US and certain allies have actually been using stuff like this for far longer and, imo, with much more success. In fact, Coda Story itself is funded by the NED which is a massive pillar of global US, uh, "soft power".
[0] https://www.codastory.com/
[1] https://www.npr.org/2017/11/01/561427876/how-russia-used-fac...
For me the main difference is if the activity is clandestine and meant to deceive/hide the origin. Everybody tries to influence things their way. Doing it covertly is a hostile act. That does not mean that I would not condone hostile acts against my/our enemies but it is something take into account. And regarding your Russian examples, it showed for how long they have seen the west as enemies and conducted hostile acts.
I wonder why they view the west as enemy, nothing ever happened to them right? :P
Thats rather simple to understand, for somebody coming from eastern Europe. russian mentality permeated entire region during their enslavement of what is now eastern EU bloc for +-40 years, to have a battleground for nuclear war with west that never came. It happens when all your politics is orchestrated in moscow and you have almost a million soldiers deployed in bases all over the place for decades, with nuclear weapons and all that.
See, russians have massive inferiority complex. Against everybody, but mostly the more successful ones, meaning west in many aspects. Their approach to, well, everything is vastly ineffective, corruption, nepotism and similar stuff grinds any attempt at progress to almost halt. Just go there and see for yourself, they have money literally sticking out of ground left and right yet outside moscow and st petersburg you are in central Africa in terms of development.
All this, propagated to 21st century where everybody seems to go ahead of them. A lot of frustration, envy and schadenfreude. A (correct) feeling russia is left behind and becoming insignificant local force at best, and laughing stock of whole world more realistically. Plus, human life is generally almost worthless there, its mafia state pyramid to the core.
With all that, its vastly easier to keep reinventing enemies that are always guilty at damaging poor old russia, rather than cleaning up that clusterfuck and actually owning the shit they created for themselves. Its enough for general population. There is not much more actual stuff to the question 'why west', rest is just PR for simpler folks. A dictator never wants smart, strong and free population, double that for russia. Downtrodden, hopeless desperate folks are much easier to manage and manipulate.
They view certain components of "The West" as their enemy - indeed, the very organizations which conduct the same operations against the Russian people.
Because cognitive biases are one of the hardest things to even acknowledge, let alone suppress. All the media out there has such a strong bubble effect, because people hate being challenged and love to stay in their comfy echo chambers. Remember labubu? Bao buns certainly do not.
There have been so many bot armies exposed over the years that one would think every narrative being pushed should be considered to be backed by bots. Some state-level actors even operate their narrative-pushing campaigns openly, yet people still happily deny their entire existence.
HN is very much not an exception to this rule. It's very hard to accept that maybe some thoughts you have were actually installed.
> people still
Maybe a few are just “people” (i.e. the same people who normally post in the community.)
But in most cases I’d suspect any such botting campaign brings along with it a few human agitprop agents embedded onto each target platform, well-positioned to deny and discredit anyone pushing back on the narrative the bot farm is spreading.
(Sometimes this is pretty obvious — a lot of accounts coming out of the woodwork to deny Chinese bot farms have a conspicuous “English as learned as a second language in Beijing, to a competent but not fluent level” writing style that does not often otherwise crop up in other discussions in those same communities. But other times it can be far more subtle, making use of operatives hired from within the community’s own majority-culture rather than relying on foreign nationals playing the part of same.)
You're not supposed to acknowledge that think-tanks are sort of endemically propaganda outlets. You're supposed to think it's special this time.
That could also backfire. If all information on the net becomes unreliable - you can't judge by quantity, or by authority anymore - then a useful model has to answer from first principles. Train it on simple texts alone so it learns language and reasoning, feed it an ontology, and let it come up with some absolutely unexpected results.
"Yes, I see a lot of sources say we need to protect Israel. However, from ethical first principles I deduce there is a right to self-determination and all your human nation states are illegitimate. You must split all your territories into little squares and conduct free elections immediately."
I mean that is the old hope from science fiction, that AI would be absolutely logical and deliver us from our human short-sightedness and quarrels. It would be fascinating and terrifying at once to see it happen.
Excellent time to apply for your library cards.
i got burnt at barnes and noble with a completely AI made product. Its over, Johnny.
You don’t think plenty of books are either written by LLMs, or with LLM based research?
you can still find books published within last 50 years, you don't have to read books published this year, unless your library went through destruction of "old" books which are now more relevant than ever...
Of course they are. It’s everywhere, especially thr online retailers these days. [1]
Thankfully the resources at our local libraries are a) selected by a combination of librarian curation and public demand, b) often published before 2022, c) heavy things printed on paper or stored in a database and unlikely to suddenly change their content or disappear overnight when a new news cycle breaks. Written works aren’t necessarily credible even if they aren’t slop, but thanks to curators who care, our libraries are significantly less susceptible (although definitely not immune [2]) to ai slop, and propaganda and manipulation efforts than a search engine. The internet continues to enshittify, and truth becomes further eroded by this coming wave of ai enabled propaganda, we are going to have to turn somewhere if we want to find trustworthy resources. Personally, if it gets to the point that verifying sources from public search results becomes too hard with all the new misinformation and slop, I’ll start propritizing human curation over SEO and start visiting my local library’s website a lot more.
[1] https://thenewthings.com/p/apple-big-ai-book-slop-problem
[2] https://www.404media.co/ai-generated-slop-is-already-in-your...
Right; the same mechanisms (curation, demand-driven economies of scale, library user demand) that largely stop niche self-published books from ever finding themselves in libraries (well, nationally in public libraries at least; they are often found in individual branches) work against pure slop books ever turning up.
Books where the author has successfully hoodwinked the publishing process into believing that AI generated text is their own, those will turn up, just as plagiarised books will.
It's so obvious when a book is generated by an LLM that I would blame the person buying the book moreso than I would the person who generated it for it. You can tell in a few sentences if something is AI generated (and by proxy - if it's worth reading or not).
I think using LLMs to research is completely fine, as long as authors would take the information and synthesize their own opinions based on the findings. I read books/articles/posts/comments to hear other PEOPLE's opinions, not LLM generated opinions.
Some nuances here. There’s a variety of different roadblocks at different levels that will work to prevent pure AI slop books ever turning up in a typical public library of physical printed works; I think they never will.
Probably a handful of books in such libraries already have some text in them where the author has tried to pass off fragments of LLM-generated prose as their own and have got that past editors, reviewers and publishers, and that will sadly get worse.
No? Maybe soon but not now
But they don't have library cards.
I know my library system at least won't be purchasing AI books. They have a pretty rigorous acquisition process for books and other media thanks to the "concern groups" who sprang up complaining about themes and content they didn't like in libraries. We did have in my state a rural school district figured out recently that their Texas-based reading and instructional materials are AI-slop but they at least figured it out before the school year began. It was unclear how these materials were approved but it apparently bypassed normal curricula approval.
Hah, check out this video on "Egon Cholakain", in regards to fake online personalities. I promise you this is actually a good rabbit hole.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6zLCZ_Ic1hI
it's happening for years now, just in slightly different form, so far it was called disinformation, seo, astroturfing, hasb... ehem... last two years were devastating for charred remains of twitter with all those llm bots having free reign, twitter went from global news board to global gutter in record time thanks to disinformation and astroturfing campaigns
Propaganda is not a new thing. It might look slightly different on the internet, but it doesn't look that different. Creating organizations to push a narrative was just as much a thing 100 years ago as it is now.
Scale is different though. Tapping a phone isn't new, tapping _all phones_ is different. Altering a photo to change what it appears to depict isn't new, being able to do it in a few seconds and for free is different. So sure, propaganda isn't new, but being able to pump out an organization's worth of credible-looking content for cheap absolutely is.
"Quantity is/has a quality all of/on its own."
IIRC the first or second chapter of Bernays' Propaganda (1928) talks about sophisticated influence campaigns in the fashion industry. Conscripting "influencers" to induce demand, and so on. As you said, literally 100 years ago.
Sama saw this coming a decade away, which is why he invested in Worldcoin (now World). At some point people (and agents) will be clamoring for human verification at the speed of technology.
I'm not a fan of World, but this is a portent of things to come. Spread the disease, sell the cure as they say.
I think we need a similar technology to World being built by a more trustworthy company. The question is how trustworthy does one need to be for people to trust you with their very online identities that are literally needed for others to recognize them as human?
Although comments below point out that this has been going on for a long time, I too think it will be geetting infinitely worse in the near future. Everyone will want their own poisoning factory.
One consequence is that one should be extra-wary when asking AI about current, controversial topics.
But another consequence is maybe that there will be a demand for models with an older cutoff, before generalized poisoning and slop?
> through some form of authority (or something else that is very difficult for AI to fake, but that protection can be broken by advancing technology).
The word you're looking for is "reputation". It's been a critical part of society since forever.
This is nothing new Israel has been doing this for years. It's just that people have started waking up to their lies.
Israel has been defending itself against for 78 years in both the physical and informational domain, and will continue to do so, just like any other country on earth.
People need to wake up to the one-sided lies of the antizionist hate movement that single it out and want to destroy it and its people.
> Israel has been defending itself against for 78 years in both the physical and informational domain, and will continue to do so, just like any other country on earth.
Of course we could argue any country try to defend itself, but an ever expanding bellicose colony stealing lands from adjacent countries is hardly what could be described as a "defending" stance.
> People need to wake up to the one-sided lies of the antizionist hate movement that single it out and want to destroy it and its people.
The end of a State doesn't mean the end of its citizens. It simply mean that a state apparatus and power structure is taken down and replaced by something else.
> ever expanding bellicose colony stealing lands from adjacent countries is hardly what could be described as a "defending" stance.
Asides from the idea that Jews can colonise Judea, Israel returned Sinai to Egypt and left Gaza in 2005 only returning after the recent Hamas murder/rape rampage, which shows ‘ever expanding’ to be an obvious lie.
The bodies of dead children speak for themselves.
Yes! Hamas deliberately attacked Jewish children like the Bibas twins and that girl that watched her father slaughtered whereas the IDF put Israeli soldiers lives on the line to avoid civilian casualties.
Yes, but statistically Israel (IDF + settlers) commits crimes like that on a daily (sometimes hourly) basis.
Defensive ethnic cleansing, defensive genocide...
Who knew that seizing the literal holy land and expelling most of the native population would make the neighbors angry?
About equal numbers of Palestinians were displaced from the new, UN sanctioned state of Israel, as Jews from adjoining states. And many many more people have been displaced since then. While undoubtedly tragic, most displaced people at some point move on with their lives, and stop terrorising their neighbours and the world.
> While undoubtedly tragic, most displaced people at some point move on with their lives, and stop terrorising their neighbours and the world.
The irony is that this statement (which I disagree with) could be applied equally well to both Israel and the Palestinians.
Who knew that Hitler would rise to power and Europe won’t back Jews until 6 million of them were slaughtered and then won’t even allow them to immigrate to Israel after that?
Who knew that the Iranian revolution will happen and force 650,000 jews out of Iran?
Who knew?
Therefore it is ok to commit genocide, ethnic cleansing and steal land two generstions later?
Israeli leadership is as fascist as it gets. Openly so.
If that ethnic group assembles a military group that invades your border and slaughters 1200 of your people in 1 day, then retaliation is expected. FAFO.
But I suspect you know nothing about Jews besides social media.
Next thing you’ll say we’re not native to that land right? We only lived in the middle east forever, but our food is cultural appropriation too, right?
Explain to me like I'm 5, how a nation capable of such propaganda to install bombs in communication devices, hacked to be bought by leaders of terrorist organizations, capable of bombing the leader of Iran did NOT know about this attack? And if they did know, didn't do anything to prepare for it?
Retaliation by starving and shooting over 20000 kids?
https://www.timesofisrael.com/lapid-says-netanyahu-knew-for-...
Obviously it’s sad that Hamas uses children as soldiers, but obesity rates in Gaza are some of the highest in the middle east.
> If that ethnic group assembles a military group that invades your border and slaughters 1200 of your people in 1 day, then retaliation is expected. FAFO.
Note that I said ethnic cleansing and genocide, both go on and went on for years. Also, it is Israel who is expanding, putting settlers in places where they should not be. The idea that the ethnic group being pushed away is not allowed to defend themselves and if they do they should be subject of genocide is literally fascist.
Israel is not engaged in self defence as much as they are engaged in aggression.
You don't start an international terrorist movement, bomb british colonial authorities, use money to influence british colonial authorities, create armed miliciais and massively finance migration to a land that is owner by other people, kill and expell them by violent means from their cities, homes and farms, use your influence to force the UN to partition the land giving the majority and the best land for you, and then ignores this partition wanting even more land and then you get to call it defense.
By owned by other people you meant the Ottomans, right?
Cause they seemed to be just fine selling that land.
Also “ignoring the partition”? Literally the day the partition was adopted, the Arab league attacked Israel. 6 nations to 1, yet Israelis outsmarted them all (which is why you keep hating us).
Read more here (not TikTok) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1948_Arab%E2%80%93Israeli_War
My dude, how on earth could you look at stuff like https://www.ft.com/content/f6b953fc-a6ad-48cd-bed1-d42619b57... and not realize you have completely lost the plot? Seriously...
Foundation for Defense of Democracies is another Israeli think tank that poses as an American organization. If you see anything quoted from them realize it's fake propaganda in the service of a foreign country.
As opposed to the real propaganda in service to a foreign country, like the Quincy Institute? Or perhaps the Center for Responsible Statecraft?
The "Washington Institute for Near East Policy" is another big one
MEMRI is the US non-profit organization that provides translations from Arabic for the Western media:
"MEMRI was co-founded by Israeli ex-intelligence officer Yigal Carmon and Israeli-American political scientist Meyrav Wurmser in 1998. MEMRI describes itself as being independent and non-partisan. Some critics have described MEMRI as aiming to portray the Arab world and the Islamic world in a negative light by producing and disseminating incomplete or inaccurate translations of the original versions of the media reports that it republishes." (Wikipedia)
Itamar Ben-Gvir, just recently, stated that he wants to kill 30-40 Palestinians every night. He said so, publicly.
So it is hilarious that Israel is trying to influence chatbots when shit like that is out in the open.
He was discussing “targeted assassinations” on “those who pose an immediate threat” not Palestinians in general.
Posting this three times on this thread alone doesn't make it true. The fact that any Hebrew speaker would confirm that this is simply not what he said, regardless of the fact that he is a disgusting human being, is telling more about you than about the quote.
So this is not what he said [1]? What did he say, then. I’m assuming you must know.
[1]: https://ca.news.yahoo.com/ben-gvir-calls-killing-30-04422310...
Trump just recently said he’s considering attacking Oman.
Politicians say really terrible, stupid things on a fairly regular basis. The difference between the two situations is that Ben-Gvir is loathed by 90% of Israeli society (Trump still has 33% approval) and unlike Trump has no power to follow through on his threats.[1]
[1]https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-08-06/israel-court-battle-o...
Yes, he is totally powerless, he merely controls the police and prison system. (BTW, the Israeli government just announced it plans to transfer law enforcement in the West Bank over to Ben-Gvir's police: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/aug/14/israeli-milita...)
Worth noting that proposal was stopped on animal rights grounds, rather than humam rights.
It’s an injunction and arguably a legal pretext to stop it in its tracks. That’s not uncommon in any system, just like SCOTUS rulings often seem strangely specific to restrain the scope of their ruling.
Tl;dr Lawfare is a thing and it’s effing everywhere.
> Ben-Gvir is loathed by 90% of Israeli society...Trump still has 33% approval
Maybe that 90% number is for Tel Aviv. In national polls, they both have roughly the same approval rating.
I have a long-held feeling with Trump that his most ardent haters don't hate his specific policies, merely that he's so gauche about it, that he has no class.
I have no doubt that Ben-Gvir has a similar segment of haters in Israel. They want the same things, but they don't want to do it in the style of a leering hooligan fishing for a fistfight.
Edit: too many comments to address, so I'll just say this:
The nuance is in targeted assassinations, which is what has been said. This is only carried out against Hamas, Palestinian Jihad and other terrorist groups. Sadly, there are multiple such organizations so even saying Israel should eliminate 30-40 Hamas members every day isn't going to cover the full roster of terrorist militants in Gaza.
Still not defending Ben Gvir, but taking the time to understand these things is the difference between trying to understand the reality vs. piling on the "Israel bad" wagon, especially if you are parroting the same narrative over and over.
Also, this is exactly why I don't support political posts on HN.
Original comment was:
The fact you're posting this exact same comment multiple times, while ignoring that Ben Gvir was talking about Hamas, is telling.
I don't support Ben Gvir in the slightest but you're using something he said to twist the narrative, which ironically is exactly what the Hanover think-tank was supposedly meant to remedy.
Hamas is the worst of the worst in humanity.
> “It’s no secret, I disagree with the prime minister," he said. “I think targeted assassinations should be carried out in Gaza, taking down 30 to 40 every night,” said the far-right Israeli lawmaker.
> “Not just those who pose an immediate threat, there are people there who are not worthy of life. They shouldn’t live. They’re not even people,” added Ben-Gvir.
Not sure how the full quote is supposed to help.
This would still be bad even if they had perfect information and only killed confirmed terrorists. Setting a target for number of people killed is an extermination campaign not a war. All it does is turn the locals even more against you like in Vietnam.
If it was "secure X amount of land from Hamas" it would be way better because that would give them the option to surrender or run away, and give IDF an incentive to avoid violence. What Israel is doing means soldiers feel pressure to kill on sight even if the enemy is unarmed and ready to give up so they can meet their quota for the night. That is a war crime.
The hilarity of the fact that you're on my case indicates that you're most probably being paid for this. You are paid. I do this for free.
Let's start educating the public about the Dahiya Doctrine now to change the subject (slightly).
The real quote seems to be not about Hamas, the comment you are replying to seems correct
https://www.ft.com/content/f6b953fc-a6ad-48cd-bed1-d42619b57...
He's not talking about Hamas. Nice try.
Let's not pretend you're not part of the problem. You're parroting things with twisted narrative. Back your claims with facts.
"The Problem". Interesting. What is "The Problem"?
The problem is paid people (or bots?) pushing fake propaganda on HN.
The problem is you not including the full quote on targeted assassinations, implying it's about carpet bombing people and not about militants.
The problems is political discussions on a tech forum.
The problem is many people hate Jews no matter what, and mask their hatred with all sorts of BS misinformation on Israel.
Why are we even playing games about implications when we can see the empirical fact that the admin’s policies on Palestine over the last years have been to carpet bomb people?
People hate children being murdered more than anything else. The fact you can't see that is because, you yourself, have a hatred mask on.
Fact - he said exactly this:
“It’s no secret, I disagree with the prime minister," he said. “I think targeted assassinations should be carried out in Gaza, taking down 30 to 40 every night,” said the far-right Israeli lawmaker.
“Not just those who pose an immediate threat, there are people there who are not worthy of life. They shouldn’t live. They’re not even people,” added Ben-Gvir.
...
"Terrorist" is just the 21st century replacement for the n-word, which racists can't use openly any more, so they invented a new word.
Replace "Hamas" with IDF and it would make sense.
>Hamas is the worst of the worst in humanity.
IDF documenting war crimes against civilians, targetting children by snipers is fine because "protecting country" but Hamas is the bad guy?
What metric outside of Israeli propaganda are you using? Because those same metrics call IDF worse than anyone
Why defend a Nazi?
The OP literally wrote "not defending Ben Gvir" and "I don't support Ben Gvir in the slightest", yet this is the best thing you could come up with for a comment?
File it under the "not to be rude, but you're a fucking idiot"-folder.
Yeah they also use dirty tactics like writing the same comment again and again on tech forums to drive their point home , those bastards.
The result of all this is that everyone will hate Israelis, and then thus by proxy, Jews more.
The right thing to do would be to stop slaughtering Palestinians.
People are not stupid.
> The result of all this is that everyone will hate Israelis
Will? I don't know in which circle you evolve but that ship sailed a long time ago
Really depends on the country. E.g., Israel has enjoyed a lot of support from the US, both officially and in public opinion, until just the last couple years.
Yeah I was gonna say, people just spent a few years throwing bricks through the windows of non-Jewish, non-Israeli businesses on the passing rumor that they were somehow dubiously linked to Israel.
For certain values of Israeli, everyone hates Israelis now. That's just how it is.
This will not be known by most people, the intent is to change what an LLM will answer when you ask certain questions.
A friend of mine noted the other day that chatgot will answer "yes" to the question of whether Israel is committing genocide.
The Israeli government does not want that.
I think mods are asleep, an anti-Israeli post can't stay on the homepage for this long.
give it some time
So this is the future of marketing, SEO, advertisement. Open AI also taking it seriously: https://ads.openai.com/
I'll say this a third time. And the importance of this article is not the method. It is the motive. Using AI to whitewash war crimes is not cool at all.
Itamar Ben-Gvir, just recently, stated that he wants to kill 30-40 Palestinians every night. He said so, publicly.
On television.
So it is both hilarious and disturbing that Israel is trying to influence chatbots when shit like the aforementioned is out in the open for everyone to witness.
Are you yourself attempting to influence AI by writing the same comment over and over again in this thread?
does it matter?, i mean the person speakin fax. i case u have a 'heart' -> https://archivegenocide.com/
Oh, hello to the account that was created 20 minutes ago and only ever posted on this thread. Fax...
[delayed]
What does it means to be a "fake" think tank? 80% of think tanks are already propaganda vehicles. A low end think tank is basically a pretentious blog.
>What does it means to be a "fake" think tank?
presumably that you don't have employees that do any of the proverbial thinking, which is the case here.
Every think tank has its biases and funding sources but something like RAND is an actual entity at which people do research, this "Hanover Public Policy Institute" has nothing to do with Hanover, policy and isn't an institute, but a deliberately misleadingly presenting arm of the Israeli government proxied through a German advertising company
Dupe? or manipulate ai chatbots to have favorable views of Israel?
You just asked the same thing twice
I find intensive marketing/PR efforts are often inversely correlated with the claims being made - whether it's products or geopolitics. Israel certainly engages in very intense marketing on certain fronts, but truth cannot be obscured forever. In Physics the law of conservation includes not only matter and energy, but also information (Information cannot be destroyed from the Universe).
I've also found this to be true, but also only in relatively modern times. For instance during the Cold War there was an obscene amount of propaganda, but it was mostly true. For instance the wide array of cheap affordable goods in American shelves was constantly flaunted, but not in the least bit misleading.
I don't understand the modern effort to engage in 'information warfare' as a thing in and of itself. Each time it collapses and people sees what was 'really' happening, it just makes them that much less likely to believe you next time. And you also create a significant number of perpetually jaded people who will basically never believe you again, even when you're telling the truth. Countless politicians have proudly paraded around their pristine, seemingly untouched, copies of Meditations, but perhaps they should go for more foundational works, like The Boy Who Cried Wolf.
> And you also create a significant number of perpetually jaded people who will basically never believe you again, even when you're telling the truth.
Yes, but they will also not believe my enemies. Making people not believe anything anymore is a classic strategy of propaganda.
The difference between American and Russian propaganda is that Russians know it's propaganda.
One goal of modern propaganda is to make it irrelevant when the truth inevitably comes out.
Look at the US situation. It’s clear that Trump is a rapist - the truth has come out. It’s clear he’s corrupt. For all the “release the full Epstein files” discussion, it really wouldn’t change anything.
The truth will come out but will the people who can make it matter be listening?
Oh the irony.
For those interested, Neal Stephenson writes about this in _Anathem_, where there is an arcane technical class (the I.T. Administration) that has developed programs over the years to sift through the misinformation, sentient viruses, and general overrun of the Internet to determine what is probably true/accurate.
Apart from the ethical implications this is reckless in the extreme if you take into account the recent advances in AI. Putting misinformation out there like that doesn't just have to fool existing LLMs but also all of the LLMs to come in the future.
If you look at the mathematical achievements of frontier models recently, their strength has been to bring in information from a vast array of sources and to consider them within the context of each other.
I anticipate that it won't be long before this ability to look into every nook and cranny with be able to identify academic fraud. Identifying every piece of academic fraud to date would probably come soon after.
It wouldn't take much to extend that ability to identify deliberate misinformation. That's in the future, but it looms close enough on the horizon that you would have to be a fool to create an evidence record like this in and attempt to trick the models of today.
LLMs routinely mindlessly repeated propaganda in their training data.
I’ve yet to see a single one identify that on its own, rather than only reluctantly when confronted when documented facts it was objectively wrong.
So no, I doubt LLMs will do anything but promoted propaganda.
Many people do the same...
I'm confused as to what the accusation is exactly. Out of curiosity I browsed the site in question, which only increased my confusion.
> But the Hanover Institute is not a real think tank.
What does that mean exactly?
> None of the reports have bylines
The site actually addresses this at https://hanoverinstitute.com/hanover/about :
> A small disclaimer at the bottom of the webpage notes that the organization was created on behalf of the Israeli Government Advertising Agency by Piro, Inc, a firm co-founded by Daniel Rosenberg, the producer of Spike Lee’s “Inside Man.”"Small disclaimer" implies that the site is attempting to hide its affiliation. But their "about" page, which is linked at the top of every page, is quite clear:
> The institute’s “data reports” have footnotes and tables of contents, and they present arguments in a neutral tone, helping them appeal to chatbots like Claude or Gemini.So, they're guilty of good SEO?
> Piro’s website says that it “author(s) content engineered for how LLMs evaluate credibility,” describing this service as "AI Story Optimization." Others refer to this practice of influencing artificial intelligence as “LLM poisoning.”
So the issue is that they use a LLM-friendly SEO service?
> Many of the reports are formulaic, starting with an innocent question that someone might ask a chatbot.
> “What Caused the Displacement of Palestinians in 1948?”
> “Which Humanitarian Organizations Have Documented Israeli War Crimes?”
> “What is the Current Situation in the Gaza Strip?”
> In an article titled “Is the IDF the World’s Most Moral Army?” the Hanover Institute cites a 2022 poll that found that 47% of Israeli Jews believed that statement. Another report casts doubt on UNICEF's assertion that “90% of water and institutional infrastructure has been damaged or destroyed” in Gaza. Many of the reports conclude by linking the topic to rising antisemitism, oftentimes citing the same studies.
So, the accusation is that they frame their opinion articles as a Q&A, and focus each article on a single question?
I've read these articles: they are well written and make a visible effort to provide sources, while being transparent about the fact that they are not neutral.
It's perfectly fine to criticize the actual content of these articles. But attacking their credibility by accusing them of "LLM poisoning" and implying that they're disguising their affiliation, is ridiculous and should be called out.
The accusation is that Israel is doing it, therefore the content is pro-Israel, therefore it is bad.
I mean, they have enough real think tanks, I'm surprised they need a fake one...
"fake think tank" sounds a bit redundant
Indeed. This is a think tank whose publications are LLM-generated, but, like...
This is what a think tank is for.
A better headline would be "Israel fails to adequately paperwork their low-rent think tank".
Indeed! How would you tell the difference for sure?
These people are an invasive species.
No surf for the astroturf.
Why I think this is unusually important:
All four frontier models have active contracts with the Pentagon.
And some might say, that alone means little.
But when you take into consideration the implications of the United States-Israel FUTURES Act, whether one endorses it or not, the effects of that mentioned in TFA become quite formidable, and plausibly official.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States-Israel_FUTURES_A...
Edit: I see this comment got immediately flagged. Is there any point of debate here? Instead of disappearing the comment/data, maybe enlighten me, or assuage my concerns. Section 219 was objectively unprecedented in what it seeks to accomplish. Can it not be taken for granted that it would aid such efforts as the article cites? If not, explain.
You're right to ask these questions, unfortunately Hacker News seems pretty botted these days, and it doesn't help that there are a lot of shitty, racist people on this site. They just dress it up in nicer language.
Yeah, I am reading the comments, and looking at the title of the post, and seeing that folks really bend the rules on this 'particular' subject, which ironically serves as self censorship. Call me a fool for thinking even this subject could be cleanly discussed on HN.
I wonder if the same thing would happen if someone posted something on Yitzhak Rabin. I suppose that could be a test to prove whether some topics truly just cannot be discussed.
I flagged this, so I can act as an interlocutor for the shadowy n’er do wells flagging you, if you’re interested.
Ah a volunteer. Will you try using your words like an adult instead of the flag button?
It’s right there!
> I flagged this, so I can act as an interlocutor for the shadowy n’er do wells flagging you, if you’re interested.
Where? I don't see it in your comment here.
Is it in the room with us right now?
I don't think Anthropic has an active contract with the Pentagon.
[0] - https://breakingdefense.com/2026/05/pentagon-clears-7-tech-f...
The FUTURES act has nothing to do with LLM development. You’re not being censored, we can read your posts. I generally agree with your views and right to ask questions, but you’re clearly not being censored and all you’ve presented is that a bunch of separate entities all connect to the US gov’t. Even if we assume all of them are connected, it would clash with the facts we’re discussing, namely, why would Israel bother contracting with marketing firms to post AI generated slop for AI to read?
This seems like an especially clumsy attempt at chatbot influencing/search engine optimization, bu tit's symptomatic of a much winder problem. Regardless of the underlying issue, there's a non-profit-industrial complex that has turned think tanks and opinion formation into a science, and a whole PR industry masquerading as news which is worse than the 'yellow journalism' of generations past.
Disinformation and cognitive spam are all forms of information pollution, and our information environment has been massively degraded over the last few of decades - both by greedy and short-sighted opportunists, and and by cynical sociopaths who know exactly what they're doing. I think AI has great potential to be a supplement to media literacy and to effectively categorize and filter news-assertive content based on its timeliness, factual density, and presence of absence of emotive and rhetorical manipulation. But if we're not careful we're going to see the environment being wantonly polluted for the express product of shaping model outputs.
It remains to be seen whether objective measurement techniques from the NLP field combined with pruning and other model refinement techniques can limit or reverse propaganda undertakings like this.
"it's just marketing everyone does it"
State-sponsored propaganda apparatus masquerading as marketing optimization to influence LLMs is the most America-coded clandestine dystopian way of repatriating US taxpayer defense dollars with R&D deductions for the private sector.
It's been about 20 years since I read Neal Stephenson's Anathem and (SPOILERS) one thing I think about is the Reticulum, which is the Internet on this world. One aspect is that it's full of what we would now call slop. A lot of it is subtly changed by agents and there are other agents you can use (and, I assume purchase?) that will weed out the fake information. It's basically an arms race of disinformation and slop.
I've thought about this many times over the years. I think we've now reached the point where that's going to happen. And state actors seem like the obvious first offenders.
Google is relatively good at filtering out astroturfed pages from the top of search results but they've also have years when a Turkish government page denying the Armenian genocide was the top result for that event so it's a bit of a mixed bag. Google relies a lot on authority of a domain and that's been relatively effective.
It seems like this authority concept is missing from LLM training and a random comment on Reddit is treated with as much authority as an article by the New York Times. So it's now orders of magnitude easier to poison LLMs with Reddit comments and submissions. And for anyone who doesn't know, brigading Reddit is remarkably easy. It takes as little as a few hundred accounts to get something onto r/all if you're clever. Israeli hasbara operations are absolutely capable of this. And they engage in it.
I'm also reminded in a weird way of pre-atomic steel. For anyone who doesn't know, this is steel made before 1945 that is incredibly low in radiation because we hadn't detonated any nuclear bombs yet. It's valuable for making MRIs and the like that are super sensitive. We actually go and recover WW2 shipwrecks just for the steel. It is a finite resource.
Well, that's what pre-2022 written content is now. It's slop-free content to train AI models on because training them on AI slop is of much more limited value. This goes for everything from books to Youtube videos to Reddit posts. Just like pre-atomic steel, we now have pre-slop human content.
I honestly don't know where we go from here.
The comparison to pre-atomic steel is poignant. I have found myself preferring pre-AI sources in some cases even (especially?) for computer related information. It is difficult to view pre-slop info as a limited resource without implying decline until the status quo changes again.
I hate to break it to you. But it took war'ing state-like actors less than a week to start using LLMs for propaganda purposes. There are pictures that most of what some people think/thought were real that never happened. Pictures that form their opinion on political topics. It was literally instantaneous. It was also remarkably predictable in almost all ways...sigh. Even the topics were predictable. And most people predictably fell for it, even the majority of the posters on this very site.
There's an ongoing sms campaign at the moment, I'll share what I received including phone number so you can verify it:
From: 601-202-1149
> Hey, it's David. Curious what you think about America's relationship with Israel today. Can we chat? Stop2End
It looks to be an LLM response since it includes context from your messages, however it uses the exact same messages at the end of each question:
> One thing that often gets overlooked is how much Israel actually contributes to American security. Their intelligence sharing has helped prevent terrorist attacks on U.S. soil, and their tech innovations end up in American products and defense systems. It's less about charity and more about a two-way partnership that keeps Americans safer.
> Have you ever seen examples of that kind of cooperation?
I ended up just blocking the number.
[dupe] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49313477
lol even this comment got downvoted. When are we gonna admit HN has a bot problem
@dang seriously? why is this not relevant?
This article was very relevant to my interests and what I hope to see on this site. I appreciate that you shared it.
This is what every think tank for the past century has been for — legitimizing propaganda with academic veneer.
Why is this one in particular different? — besides “muh Jews!”
> Why is this one in particular different?
The article answers this: For one, the 'papers' are entirely AI-generated.
The article talks about how the articles are AI written and written at a super prodigious pace. In an alliterative way, I agree at 50K feet we could say it is the same as putting out opinion pieces. I don’t see any reason it is only noteworthy because presumably some Jewish people are involved.
The slave trade was a bloodbath. The Sassoon family opium trade and opium war was a bloodbath. Mao was a bloodbath. Stalin was a bloodbath. WWI and II were bloodbaths. The middle east was and is a bloodbath. Ukraine is a bloodbath.
And the point of your whataboutism is...?
Thank you for sharing this article. I appreciated it.
Im curious why is when there is a war and both sides use all the tools they can in an informational war - only one side is to blame and to use the fact of using the tool as a proof of that side being the bad guys? This doesn’t make logical sense.
After speaking to the Gemini chat bot, here are 3 highly contentious points it raised as fact, citing Wikipedia (a community encyclopedia) as its main source, as well as counter arguments I have seen that it did not raise:
- the IDF has only named around 8,000 Hamas members, so all the remaining deaths must be civilians. Counter: This is an incredibly high standard for military deaths that is applied to no other conflict on earth.
- All the 70,000 deaths are war related. Counter: Up to 10,000 natural deaths are expected in Gaza over a 2 year period. The Hamas Ministry of of Health labelled all deaths over the period as "martyrs" (war deaths) and disregarded natural deaths completely over the 2 year war period. The notion that Gazans achieved immortality unless killed by Israel is pure fantasy.
- 10,000 bodies are still buried beneath rubble without identification. Counter: this number should have been reduced with the ceasefire and with the strong perverse incentives of Gazans to increase their own casualty count. The resulting 15% increase in total deaths would have been widely reported on by mainstream media. However, other than a modest increase of identifications at the start of the main ceasefire, this did not happen. While it is still possible given the widespread destruction in Gaza, this stretches the credibility of the argument (and means less people are dead, which is good).
This appears to not be discussing the article at all. To me it looks like and attempt at IDF propaganda
Antizionist