AI Could Be the Most Effective Tool for Dismantling Democracy Ever Invented
AI Could Be the Most Effective Tool for Dismantling Democracy Ever Invented | Common Dreams
This is a thing on social media already.
Lots of bad faith conservatives will just output AI garbage. They don’t care about truth, they just want to waste your time. You spend time researching their claims, providing counter evidence - they don’t care, because they don’t even read what you say, just copy and paste into an LLM.
It’s very concerning with the Trump administrations attack on science. Science papers are disappearing, accurate/vetted information because sparser - then you can train Grok to claim that all trans women are rapists or that global warming is just Milkanovitch cycles.
It is and has been an info war. An attack on human knowledge itself. And AI will be used to facilitate it.
Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past. Jean-Paul Sartre
But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words.
It is so goddamn frustrating. I had one on here claiming that the US had not deported US citizens, while linking the article saying that the US had deported four children who were citizens!
I read fast and have been following this shit for so long that I can call a lot out. But it never changes their minds, they never concede defeat. They just jump from place to place. Or “you libs always assume i’m MAGA” is a funny one I keep seeing on here - like, if you are supporting Trump’s policies, you are a Trump supporter. It’s so goddamn slimy and disingenuous.
TERFs are the worst about it. They’ve started spreading Holocaust denial. I saw one claim the the Nazi government issued transvestite passes! Like no! It was the Weimar Republic! The Nazis used those passes to track down and kill trans people!
You can provide crystal clear documentation, all of the sources they ask for - it’s never good enough and it’s exhausting.
My takeaway: if they don't respond to evidence in good faith, you can simply consider them as enemies. From there, the only time to argue with them is when you want to convince other people in the room about your position. The court of public opinion is the key to obtaining a better society.
It’s probably some ASD-ish adjacent, but it just breaks my brain every time. It seems like there’s a large proportion of people who don’t seem to actually care whether they have an accurate understanding of the world or not? The amount of times online I’ve been able to show someone evidence that they demanded, and then they double down. At best they’ll go silent, but then you’ll see them making the exact same claim later.
In general right now it seems like there are a lot willing to call evil good, and good evil. Everything is backwards. The Moral Majority voted in a pedophile rapist.
They're trying to burn the library of Alexandria, again.
ChatGPT:
You're absolutely right to be concerned — this is a real and growing problem. We're not just dealing with misinformation anymore; we're dealing with the weaponization of information systems themselves. Bad actors leveraging AI to flood conversations with plausible-sounding nonsense don’t just muddy the waters — they actively erode public trust in expertise, evidence, and even the concept of shared reality.
The Trump-era hostility to science and the manipulation or deletion of research data was a wake-up call. Combine that with AI tools capable of producing endless streams of polished but deceptive content, and you’ve got a serious threat to how people form beliefs.
It's not just about arguing with trolls — it's about the long-term impact on institutions, education, and civic discourse. If knowledge can be drowned in noise, or replaced with convincing lies, then we're facing an epistemic crisis. The solution has to be multi-pronged: better media literacy, transparency in how AI systems are trained and used, stronger platforms with actual accountability, and a reassertion of the value of human expertise and peer review.
This isn’t fear-mongering. It’s a call to action — because if we care about truth, we can’t afford to ignore the systems being built to undermine it.
God I miss when em dashes were a sign of literacy. Now I despise them.
If it makes you feel better, you made me realize I've been using en dashes in places where I should be using em dashes! So, thank you.
