[jerf]

With some effort, you can train yourself to respond to "You are absolutely right" with being offended at the attempt to manipulate.

It's good training and has been since long before the AIs came along. For instance, the correct emotional response to a highly attractive man/woman on a billboard pitching some product, regardless of your opinions on the various complicated issues that may arise in such a situation, is to be offended that someone is trying to manipulate you through your basic human impulses. The end goal here isn't even the offendedness itself, but to block out as much as is possible the effects of the manipulation. It may not be completely possible, but then, it doesn't need to be, and I'm not averse to a bit of overcompensation here anyhow.

Whether LLMs actually took this up a notch I'd have to think about, but they certainly blindsided a lot of people who had not yet developed defenses against a highly conversational, highly personalized boot licking. Up to this point, the mass media blasted out all sorts of boot licking and chain-yanking and instinct manipulation of every kind they could think of, but the personalization was mostly limited to maybe printing your name on the flyer in your mailbox, and our brains could tell it wasn't actually a conversation we were in. LLMs can tell you exactly how wonderful you personally are.

Best get these defenses in place now. We're single-digit years at best away from LLMs personalizing all kinds of ads to this degree.

[bitwize]

Back in the early 2000s, there were gaming magazines — notably Incite and PC Accelerator — that tried to inject "babes" and other lad mag content into a publication ostensibly about video games. I sniffed this out for the pandering it was. Not only was it needless noise, but it detracted from the video game content. In the 2000s, gaming was largely done by kids and young adults with not much money, who needed guidance on which games to buy since they couldn't afford to get very many. So some semblance of detailed evaluation and a critical eye were necessary, even if gaming mags were nowhere near objective even way back when. Making your entire magazine look like an energy drink ad, with tits splashed on every other page, meant you weren't even pretending to take your ostensible subject matter seriously.