[AnthonyMouse]

> I've fought for a free internet. I've fought for the right to anonymous posting. To be a voice, without an identity. But? That time is over, or we won't have a democracy.

The con is claiming that this has anything to do with anonymity. There are 8 billion people. Someone with money can get a hundred, or a thousand, or ten thousand of them to lend their names to bots. The cost of a random human name is less than the cost of the years worth of tokens they'd be putting under it. Sacrificing anonymity over that is a fraud.

On top of that, we shouldn't pretend this is a new issue. In 1975 the local magnate owned the local newspaper and radio station and had relatively unbiased coverage of issues until it came to the ones that affect their own business dealings or the political ambitions of their associates.

And your disaster scenario doesn't even work when people are getting information from multiple sources. If the sources are >50% lies and exaggerations then you can spot check a small sample of the stories and notice that. (Sadly all too many current outlets fail this test.) But if, as you posit, they offered unbiased coverage almost all of the time then their coverage would be similar to every other source offering mostly unbiased coverage, until they try to mislead you, and then your "reliable sources" would be saying different things from one another because less than 100% of them are controlled by the one trying to manipulate you, which is a major red flag that somebody is lying to you.

The actual problem is that people don't bother to do the spot checks when the source is telling them the pretty lies they want to hear. Which is nothing new and has very little to do with AI.