Fake Consumer Group Using AI To Generate Fake Support For Paramount Merger
from the phony-business dept
In addition to the $111 billion Paramount/Warner Bros merger just being foundationally bad for creatives, labor, and consumers, the Ellison family-owned company’s executives just keep demonstrating why they’re not really the kind of folks you want dominating the lion’s share of U.S. media.
That’s included calling deal critics “antisemitic,” cozying up to foreign authoritarians, constantly threatening to take Paramount out of California, or, more recently, using a fake consumer group (dubbed the “Neighbors for Strong Communities“) to try and create bogus public support for what’s a pretty broadly unpopular deal.
Neighbors for Strong Communities doesn’t disclose its funding donors and insists it’s not being “directly funded” by Paramount, but it has all the telltale signs of “astroturf,” or fake public interest advocacy. One of the things the group does is generate comments to California AG Rob Bonta urging him to drop the 12-state antitrust lawsuit against the merger. You know… for the children.
Rachel Antell at The Contrarian took a closer look at the Neighbors for Strong Communities website, and tried to fill out a letter to Rob Bonta opposing the merger, only to see something curious happen: The website’s AI-assisted letter system simply changed her writing to not only express support for the merger, but make up an entire fake backstory about her. This is not what she told it:
Antell notes the astroturf group’s letters leverage Influent, an AI vendor founded by a guy named Tanner Kelly, who registered as a California lobbyist last year. Antell herself is an archival producer who founded the Archival Producers Alliance and has crafted guidelines for the use of generative AI aimed at more transparently disclosing when it’s being used.
U.S. corporations have a very long history of flooding regulatory comment proceedings (or the press) with completely artificial support for what’s almost always bad policy few people actually support. You may recall how the telecom industry was caught using fake and dead people to support the Trump administration’s destruction of net neutrality rules and other consumer protections.
This stuff was bad before AI, now everything’s been taken to the next level. There’s no meaningful effort afoot to stop or identify it anywhere in the U.S. government. It exists as an effective way to drum out genuine public interest opinion and replace it with lazy cack that supports whatever shitty policy companies drum up (gaining merger approvals, gutting oversight).
In this case, that means creating fake workers who are super excited about a merger that’s going to result in thousands of layoffs as the bigger company’s executives offload their massive new debt obligations to labor and consumers. How do we know this? It’s what happens literally every time regulators rubber stamp more media consolidation — particularly when Warner Brothers is involved.
Filed Under: ai, antitrust, astroturf, consumers, david ellison, lawsuit, media consolidation, mergers
Companies: neighbors for strong communities, paramount, warner bros.
Comments on “Fake Consumer Group Using AI To Generate Fake Support For Paramount Merger”
The use of AI to fabricate public support highlights a troubling trend in corporate lobbying that undermines genuine stakeholder engagement. Organizations must prioritize transparency and accountability to restore trust and ensure that regulatory processes serve the public interest.
Well...
What is the answer? Do we find a way to get the government to deal with it? Do we create fake pro-consumer groups to go with the real ones? Do we try and get legislation that forces transparency?
Re:
I sadly believe that orgs like the EFF and publications like Techdirt would treat any sort of regulation or attempt as something that would, as they say endlessly, “Destroy The Free And Open Internet™” even though AI slop and AI-accelerated fraud are destroying the Internet right now as well as further destroying any semblance of a shared reality we still had.
Re: Re:
Sadly, yes. This is why I’m not a member of the EFF: they’ve been badly misguided for a long time because they live in an ivory tower of fine principles but don’t actually talk to those of us who built the Internet and run the Internet on a day-to-day basis. They’re out of touch with ground reality and as a consequence of that, they’re quite easily manipulated into supporting some of the very worst people in the world.
Not to mention domestic ones.
This is why AI/LLM companies exist
They don’t exist to further scientific exploration or increase knowledge or facilitate artistic expression; they exist solely for the purpose of cementing social, economic, and political control by billionaires over the masses.
Every day we read another story like this, and it’s not an accident or a coincidence. (Note Ian Fleming’s maxim.) It’s deliberate. It’s a fundamental design goal of these systems, which is why so many of the already-rich and already-powerful are behind them. (If you think that sociopathic thugs like Musk and Zuckerberg and Altman &etc. have humanity’s best interests at heart, you’re delusional.)
This will continue to get progressively worse until/unless the AI/LLM ecosystem is destroyed, because the billionaires want it to get worse and they’re calling the shots. They intend to be the last ones standing on a dying planet, and if that means killing everyone else — which it does — they won’t hesitate.
That may seem like hyperbole; I assure you it’s not. Ignore what they say: look at where they’re putting their money. (Not the token amounts of money they use as distractions; the REAL money.)
“AI” scams.
Garden-variety financial scammers use “AI” to generate slop websites for deceptive purposes. Amateurs.
The Truly Great scammers use “AI” to rule nations and rake $billions into their pockets.
But does it really matter? If (or when?) mass social grade slop-scamming goes hyperinflationary, humans will only be able to communicate with monkey-grunts and shrill cries. For any human who uses human language will be accused of being a robot! Only robots will be able to use human language—to pronounce the diktats of the Truly Great scammers.
Looks like the dystopia machine is dystopia-ing again
Almost like it was made to do that or something
No, I also don’t know if I mean capitalism or ai or both
Re:
At this point, capitalism and AI are so closely linked—especially in the sense that the people who control most of the world’s capital are almost completely in the bag for AI—that they may as well be the same thing.
I wonder how much people would be up in arms if a foreign government orchestrated a similar astroturfing campaign?