Robots can’t bother us at the pub

By Cosmin Luca* SCROLLING THROUGH Facebook, I’m noticing more AI-generated content than ever. My feed is packed with controversial ‘clickbait’ from obscure, unverified accounts posting the same type of content on the hour, every hour. I see faces in uncanny side-by-side transformations with ‘Coraline’ eyes that just don’t look real. Despite this, the account is faceless, and came up only in the last few months. In 2023, QUT analysed one million posts on ‘X’ during the US Republican primaries, finding more than 1,200 coordinated ‘bot’ accounts working together to blast fake news to millions. That’s just the ones they found. Running AI and bots costs money, so why do it? Studies have observed humans tend to copy the majority view in a controlled situation. This is something Psychologists call “conformist transmission.” Whatever causes this behaviour, like most of our human traits, it can be useful and it can cause problems. One of those problems is our read on the majority can be distorted. Guerrilla marketing agencies have exploited this effect for decades: planting recommendations or comments on online forums to ‘build’ legitimacy for their product or persuasion point. Politicians and their political brigades have also done the same. Now, terrifyingly, AI bots are doing it for them. I feel it was more OK when Angus Taylor was writing comments praising himself on his own. The scary part is, since 2023, the cost of running sophisticated AI agents that autonomously distort public narratives has gone down by multitudes, with capabilities only increasing. What can we do to protect ourselves from being gaslighted through binary by political extremists, foreign adversaries, dark money groups and our own politicians? First, we step away from the feeds designed to manipulate us. We have to remember what actual humans sound like. Instead of reacting to synthetic outrage online, we need to ground ourselves in genuine connections. When bots flood our screens with AI-generated slop, our empathy and shared reality become uniquely vulnerable. We must look past the algorithmic weeds to see the interconnected shape of our actual community, rather than the one being manufactured for us. Our best defence against a faceless internet is stepping back from the algorithms, supporting the real people writing our independent local journalism, and taking our conversations to the pub, not the comments section. The faceless swarm of AI Agents can’t bother us there. Yet. * Cosmin Luca is a media analyst, a final year Data Science student at the University of Sydney and a former candidate in the NSW Local Government elections in the City of Ryde, in Central Ward (2021) and West Ward (2024). The post Robots can’t bother us at the pub appeared first on THE WEEKLY TIMES.