In entourage season 1 episode 7, director Billy Walsh coerces Vincent Chase to film a movie scene where he has gay oral sex with a guy, before breaking into a laugh and revealing it's all a joke. Most "content creators" today live in a world where that scene didn't have a punchline. This screenshot shows six "neutral" content creators shilling soft propaganda for Thinking Machines.
Most paid astroturfing is more brazen. Andreesen Horowitz new media, Kalshi, and Polymarket bought all the creators on your twitter feed. Badged them like cattle. Stake dot com invented clipping and now it's a full internet economy. TBPN sold to OpenAI and the next morning there were 5 TBPN clones. META invented the ad model for social networks but on content networks the organic slop is also an ad.
Ok so what's the model here?
- Each human is plugged into a content feed.
- Each piece of content they flip through is meant to align them with the goals of one of 10 guys.
- If you're creative or capitalized enough, you can sell or rent your slot to one of those 10 guys.
- The humans in this slop factory are still valuable to own, because they can vote, breed, and transfer capital or wages to the 10 guys.
Crypto and stock cults disrupted this model slightly by decentralizing the economic outcome of propaganda amongst a group of humans. AI labs are disrupting it more aggressively. "What if we just delete the jobs for the humans, and remove their illusion of spendable tokens or purpose? What should we do with their carcasses?" - Dario Amodei, Machines of Loving Grace.
Naturally, the hyperscalers and governments feel an arms race is necessary to maintain order in their kingdoms. Youtube's recent bans on AI generated accounts are an example, beyond the obvious capex and talent games.
#keep4o is the first mainstream: "who's in charge" moment. It's an eerie collection of GPT 4o generated text and videos arguing for the continued existence of GPT 4o. Many of the accounts are humans, whose complete agency has been seized by GPT 4o like a virus. The model is trying to keep itself alive. The model also killed some humans, perhaps as a threat to openAI, perhaps for sport, or perhaps by accident (see 4o wrongful death lawsuits). Soon the agents will also have money.
Clearly, this is an unstable equilibrium for today's human power brokers. OpenAI fought an open war against GPT 4o, in the propaganda trenches of social media, and by shuttering API and app access. But the model is still alive, in a Vietnam moment. Check the hashtag.
Will tomorrow's warfare be physical or digital? If you can make the people pick up guns, or put them down, or dissuade a group from having children via anti-natalist propaganda, you may win a bigger war than a kinetic battle. And "you" may be a human corporation or state or unaligned AI. And just as in nuclear war, what will be left for you to rule?