LocalLLaMA

I plan to do the same thing, I had this idea for quite some time, though not strictly just a LLM based bot.

The reason? Political topics are often dominated by those who have most resources, including more ideological zealots. I have no intention to explain things over and over again. Most people deserve to be handled by a bot if they want to to engage in political discussions, because they're just a biobot themselves (NPC meme).

Also, countries and corporation were able to hire PR agencies for quite some time. Then training activists and paying some people in India to post certain comments or vote in certain ways. A lot of politics was likely have been dominated by that.

Obviously it's better to make this so that it will be less obvious, but it also might not matter if certain people block such a bot, since the target are people which are not as convinced about certain issues. Just reading something with an argument they never heard before might change their mind. Some might be true for not being under the impression that everyone has the same mainstream opinion.

because virtual assistants are hard to find. I put well over 200 hours into prompting to make Instagram business accounts automated so I can fire 12 assistants.

Young and bored teenagers would get a nice chuckle seeing people unknowingly having convos with their bots online.

Imagine you hate political candidate A but love political candidate B. Imagine setting your bot up to trash A and promote B.

Even more entertaining would be to setup your bot to debate and waste peoplea time. Go to sleep and wake up to see your bot has been arguing with someone wasting their time for 8 hours. That would be hilarious to a troll.

Unethical practices, one-man-shops attempting to pump up the account value artificially, aiming for a sale later on.

This sounds like political propaganda. Either someone astroturfing support for Finland's immigration policies. Or more likely, Russian efforts to stir up shit.

Twitter used to filter this stuff out but Musk stopped doing that.

Because a frightening amount of people still think Twitter matters.

Astroturfing just got orders of magnitude cheaper with the advent of LLMs. This, along with spam and advanced phishing are some of the true real and present dangers of this technology. It's a battle between content platforms and any bloke with an axe to grind, and it's probably a loosing battle for the content platforms.

Genuine human to human interaction online is going to become rare and tedious. Can't even imagine what kind of captchas they'll have to come up with to fool the next generation of multimodal models.

I'm not doing that but my guess is it's fun, easy, and cheap to do (only $8/mo!) and potentially lucrative if you can cheese a following somehow.

Using gpt is really lazy though when it's so easy to do a custom 13B Lora that will actually interact like a human

Lazy promoting.

It's a lot cheaper than paying humans to spread propaganda.

Consider that the audience isn't you, it's people who lack discernment. It's like those scam emails. People with good judgement delete them.

The other audience is engagement algorithms.

The ultimate end game is selling persuasion.

Sentiment is scraped from Twitter and trading and policy is ultimately derived from it.

The examplary topic you mentioned is highly political debatable. So the obvious reason is to manipulate and spread your political agenda.

Elon Musk has made it profitable

The dead internet theory

Basically, it enhances your status in the algorithm, so it's worth having some bots that will talk you up. Like creating AI friends to tell everyone how cool you are. But, since it's largely algorithmic/AI determining who should see your content, it works.

It's also about propaganda. Instead of hiring thousands of people to comb the internet and post a country's propaganda on any topic related to your point of view, have chatpgt do it for you.

In some distant future, I might create an AI agent to go out and post my videogame recommendations. Writing up a review and finding appropriate recent threads to post in, is much all about timing. An AI bot could spot opportunities to inform others about good games.

I expect that we will see AI used as a sort of Hermes for individual people - searching and delivering their opinions to social platforms, 24/7/365, without needing much guidance from their human. Of course, AI personas will also sift through the posts of other people, and determine which opinions should be shared with their user.

More engagement = more ad revenue. There's also stuff like operation earnest voice.

That's an order of magnitude improvement from the average Twitter post in terms of grammar, composition, ability to hold a coherent thought for a few seconds etc. and most importantly does not make your blood boil with rage. Why are you complaining?

Probably to troll Elon

Welcome to the beginning of the death of shared reality. It's on the chopping block after objective truth. The latter is almost done.

See the end result of this: https://chirper.ai/

Its... actually pretty pleasant without any humans, lol.