Athena Thorne writes for PJMedia.com about an interesting discovery in the world of online propaganda.
On Tuesday, an AI researcher named Jacob Coxon flounced from his job at Anthropic, posting on X that he was afeared of the monster he had been helping to build.
His warning was immediately everywhere, a chorus of prominent media and legislators amplifying it at dizzying speed while Congress-critters clamored to bring down the regulation hammer.
But how in the world did this one warning blow up so quickly and so completely? It’s not like plenty of other intelligent, sophisticated people hadn’t been expressing concerns about AI and leading an informed public debate. Why was some guy no one had ever heard of able to short-circuit this healthy process? Was this new narrative launch orchestrated somehow?
You may have noticed by now that these successive waves of hysteria seem to materialize out of thin air and are suddenly everywhere all at once. …
… “A sad realization is that nearly every single moral panic in recent years is a politically funded operation, pure propaganda from a completely manipulated mainstream media,” observes physicist Andrew Côté. “The [lever] of control in a democracy is controlling the narrative, and public discourse is constantly under attack from foreign agents, subversive social elements, and political agent provacateurs.” …
… [Parker] Thayer managed to pinpoint the very second this anti-tech putsch burst forth from the shadows of the planning phase to the stage lights of the narrative-building phase. …
… Within hours, it has tens of thousands of reposts and the account has 100k+ followers. The post is punchy, quotable, it almost seems professionally written. The first three accounts to quote tweet it all do so within 15 minutes of the initial posting. Remember, this account had basically zero engagement beforehand, so an organic reach explanation seems unlikely.
According to Grok those accounts are @_NathanCalvin (General Counsel at Encode AI), @peterwildeford (Head of Policy at the AI Policy Network), and @DKokotajlo (Head of the AI Futures Project), all of which are up-and-coming AI-Doomer policy advocacy nonprofits.
