How ChatGPT Hijacks Democracy

.... for all the consternation over the potential for humans to be
replaced by machines in formats like poetry and sitcom scripts, a far
greater threat looms: artificial intelligence replacing humans in the
democratic processes — not through voting, but through lobbying.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/15/opinion/ai-chatgpt-lobbying-democracy.html

On Sun, Jan 15, 2023 at 04:28:56PM -0500, Monty Solomon wrote:
> How ChatGPT Hijacks Democracy
>
> ... for all the consternation over the potential for humans to be
> replaced by machines in formats like poetry and sitcom scripts, a far
> greater threat looms: artificial intelligence replacing humans in the
> democratic processes — not through voting, but through lobbying.
>
> https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/15/opinion/ai-chatgpt-lobbying-democracy.html

Business and society are changing all the time. Letterpress
revolutioned information distribution. Electricity replaced fuels for
light, computers and networking (partially) replaced paper in the
office. E-mail and instant messengers replaced snail mail letters in
many circumstances.

Now AI ([which is] just software) replaces certain activities, like
doing (very) basic research.

If I need to find something out, I don't go to the library, borrow
some book and the try to find it out. That is [my] grandparent's way
to deal with that, I use search engines for that. AI software is able
to handle basic customer questions, maybe not in the intended quality
yet, but it might be improved. It is there - like cars are there -
and will be used. We need to deal with that - there is no other way.
I know that it can be abused - but almost anything can be abused.

Is this “Chat” engine mislabelled? Is it an “AI-based response
system,” or something else entirely?

I don't know much about it - AI is a term that is widely used for many
aspects.

In some circumstances it saves time and money, like computers did in
the last 30 years. Government, at least in Germany, is very, very
slow. There are people who don't want to change anything, because
there is no market with competition for government tasks. Ai software
is also used by the big players in the internet, e.g. for suggesting
content or finding answers to questions the customers ask,
e.g. Amazon's Alexa. People are free to use it or not. The
disadvantage: More data will be collected.

I don't think that this is different from other communications. The
internet is being used to influence people, TV and radio broadcasts
are being used for that, since the 1920s. Did that create so many
problems?