Dave Shaw

“The anarchical potential of AI is particularly alarming, because it is not only new human groups that it allows to join the public debate. For the first time ever, democracy must contend with a cacophony of nonhuman voices, too. On many social media platforms, bots constitute a sizable minority of participants. One analysis estimated that out of a sample of 20 million tweets generated during the 2016 U.S. election campaign, 3.8 million (almost 20 percent) were generated by bots.[48] By the early 2020s, things got worse. A 2020 study assessed that bots were producing 43.2 percent of tweets.[49] A more comprehensive 2022 study by the digital intelligence agency Similarweb found that 5 percent of Twitter users were probably bots, but they generated “between 20.8% and 29.2% of the content posted to Twitter.”[50] When humans try to debate a crucial question like whom to elect as U.S. president, what happens if many of the voices they hear are produced by computers?”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI