[inglor_cz]

While true, you neglect the fact that US corporations have some autonomy from the government. I doubt that any of the current American AI corporations get regular dossiers of desirable responses to sensitive political topics from Washington and implement them. That would be a reason for a major lawsuit and a major scandal.

In China, the image of the country and the preferred narrative is under much tighter control of the government and local AI shops won't have any autonomy in this regard at all. Either obey or get shut down.

BTW What you mean by "weaponizing human rights", exactly? I am curious. If anything, I would say that the US foreign policy didn't promote human rights sufficiently, especially in Latin America, where the "bastard, but our bastard" attitude was typical.

OTOH in Europe, US human rights policy was probably relevant in saving some dissenters in the former Eastern Bloc from torture or execution.

[sajithdilshan]

> you neglect the fact that US corporations have some autonomy from the government

I'm not sure if this is correct. It seems like every big US corporation is changing their policy based on the views of the administration in place. As an example during Biden's time the DEI was in full motion in every corporation and in current administration it's the other way around. Also I remember as soon as Biden won the election twitter and meta suspended the profile of Trump. So I hardly think that there is much room for autonomy. Also the latest export bans on Antropic and OpenAI models kind of make your argument weak, of course the company can sue the givernment, but the national security comes above all.

> BTW What you mean by "weaponizing human rights", exactly?

US has been using the violations of human rights to impose sanctions or to especially get countries in line which are not supporting the US agenda when it comes to global politics. However, they were more than happy turn a blind eye if the respective country that violates human rights (most middle eastern countries) if they are allies of US doctrine.

[inigyou]

A Russian and an American are sitting next to each other on a plane.

The American says "I'm impressed by the propaganda you have in Russia."

"Oh it's very good, but it's nothing compared to the propaganda you have in America." replies the Russian.

"Huh? We don't have propaganda in America." says the American.

"Exactly." says the Russian.

[abalashov]

As a Russian, I deeply appreciate this. In Russia, it seemed obvious to even the most parochial peasant that there was propaganda, while in America, the vast majority of the society not only fails to consider the possibility, but is cholerically allergic to the very idea.

Edit: recognising that there is propaganda != knowing what is and isn't propaganda. That's all I meant.

[WarmWash]

The American government has propaganda but it really sucks at it. All the people skilled in manipulating behavior work at our ad agencies, and hence our actual propaganda is mostly "Use this detergent! Take this drug! Drive this car!"

[kelipso]

Lol, someone completely missed the point… American propaganda is such a part of the culture, it gets barely noticed. Even movies that has military equipment, the military gets to have heavy input towards positive depictions of american military. US military has paid millions in marketing to all the sports organizations for promoting the military. Etc etc. This is just one aspect of the propaganda.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military%E2%80%93entertainment...

[WarmWash]

>etc etc

please, keep going...

[butlike]

Propaganda is just advertisements for the government, right?

[abalashov]

Hard to say. Advertisements have at least a pretense of persuasive intent. Propaganda mostly operates in the absence of contrary information.

[inglor_cz]

If every parochial peasant could recognize Russian official propaganda, why are so many people on board with whatever the propaganda says?

I mean, it took longer than the Great Patriotic War before Putin's popularity started visibly falling and people started questioning what the entire "SVO" is for.

[inigyou]

Surely [a] they don't really give a shit anyway and [b] they don't want to fall out a window

I think Russians are used to knowing it's dangerous to disagree with dear leader and there's no advantage to disagreeing so they just go along with whatever he says

[nixon_why69]

I mean, if the American propaganda is "you are evil" and the Russian propaganda is "fuck those guys", you don't have to agree on every particular. People have nationalism everywhere.

[inglor_cz]

The Russian propaganda is more along the lines of "Ukraine is an illegitimate state led by Nazis and drug junkies, they steal children's organs and sell them to the West, cook up dangerous viruses in their labs and prepared to attack innocent Russia, hence they have to be crushed, which our glorious Russian power will soon accomplish with mighty Oreshniks that have no parallel anywhere".

There is way too many mixed marriages etc. for any reasonable Russian to believe that their formerly-closest East Slavic neighbour has turned into a Fourth Reich.

The glorification of Russian military power after almost five years of static attritional war and dozens of burning refineries and ships is in a category of its own...

[abalashov]

Recognising that there is propaganda != being deeply savvy about what the propaganda is. However, I've found it to be an article of faith in America that the US just doesn't engage in that kind of thing--less so in recent years, as the crisis of belief and confidence in institutions has ricocheted, egged on by the disinformation and demagoguery of the Trump years.

[hnfong]

Well, these days there's little need for propaganda when people just blatantly do sh!t in the open and get away with it.

[inglor_cz]

I remember peak wokeness quite well and it was pretty obvious that it was driven by the Twitter activist mob and not the Biden administration, which was quite visibly behind the times and followed the trends.

Already during the Biden administration, defections from the orthodoxy started and then multiplied - some businesses like Coinbase or IIRC Cloudflare refused the demands outright. Musk bought Twitter with an explicit task to make it less progressive.

And the White House did precisely nothing against this defection trend.

"US has been using the violations of human rights to impose sanctions or to especially get countries in line which are not supporting the US agenda when it comes to global politics. However, they were more than happy turn a blind eye if the respective country that violates human rights (most middle eastern countries) if they are allies of US doctrine."

I do agree that the US is hypocritical about human rights, but actual violations of human rights should be a reason for sanctions, and the fact that this is done only partly/imperfectly, IMHO, beats the potential alternative when it isn't done at all. This would be a much worse world in my opinion.

[sajithdilshan]

> I do agree that the US is hypocritical about human rights, but actual violations of human rights should be a reason for sanctions, and the fact that this is done only partly/imperfectly, IMHO, beats the potential alternative when it isn't done at all. This would be a much worse world in my opinion.

That's why I said that it was weaponized. In reality US doesn't care if there is a real human rights violation or not, they just use it as an excuse to get what they want.

[linkregister]

Everybody is amoral and cynically only doing good things for personal gain, except for you, the one good person

[littlecorner]

It's much easier to blame everyone else instead of trying to change myself

[buellerbueller]

>US corporations have some autonomy from the government

This is correct...because they just buy the government when they need to.

[pydry]

In China the state rules the corporations and in the US the corporations rule the state.

Neither is a system worth fighting for. Swiss style democracy maybe but not autocracy and not oligarchy.

>OTOH in Europe, US human rights policy was probably relevant in saving some dissenters in the former Eastern Bloc from torture or execution.

Yeah, a bit like how Russia saved Edward Snowden.

The US will use human rights as a club to beat its imperial rivals with but when it has deemed torture and arbitrary execution in the interests of its imperial power it has adopted them enthusiastically.

When US allies use these tools and worse they are excused.

There is basically nothing which US rivals do which the US wouldn't also do under similar circumstances.

[tedd4u]

The corps ruled the US until Trump. Now it’s moving to an oligarchical / kleptocratic mode like Russia. Sure the corps are still involved, but not on top. Will they remain after the current administration? I think it will be hard to put the genie back in the bottle.

[ux266478]

> I doubt that any of the current American AI corporations get regular dossiers of desirable responses to sensitive political topics from Washington and implement them.

That's completely true. What happens is that you get hit with a wall of bureaucratic threats and nonsense by the government out of nowhere, and usually for some unrelated matter. It's like a high level version of getting pulled over for not using your turn signal. Which is why if your company has good legal, they often act in a highly proactive manner about that kind of thing.

What constitutes sufficient rabble rousing to get put on the government's shitlist differs between both countries, but there are plenty of things that will send American politicians into having a conniption, and it's not a static criteria. McCarthyism is a pretty easy example. I'm no Muskboy, but we can point to the procedural harassment he recieved over hitting a blunt on the Joe Rogan podcast to be a related matter. Criticizing the genocide happening in the Levant is frequently saber rattled by politicians as something they're interested in making prosecutable, and there are examples of institutional authority targeting and attempting to punish people over it.

[mullen]

Non-sense. In China, you obey. There is no way to challenge the orders in courts or even with your local party official. It's written into law and companies that disobey are shutdown or taken over by a party loyalist and the management is disappeared.

> bureaucratic threats and nonsense by the government out of nowhere

You can challenge these in courts. There is a free press you can go to. You can go to social media and lay your case out there. You can challenge what the government is requesting of you. In China, you can not at all.

[traceroute66]

> you neglect the fact that US corporations have some autonomy from the government

In theory.

In practice, Trump picks up the phone and say "jump" and the CEO on the other end says "how high ?".

And if you say no, well, we saw what happened when Anthropic said no.

[inglor_cz]

Do you seriously believe that if you ask Grok or ChatGPT their opinion about tariffs or the Iran war, they will simply regurgitate Trump's talking points because they were programmed so on the threat of shutdown?

People with no personal experience of an actual totalitarian system don't really know what they are talking about when it comes to actual information control and micromanagement by the government. Hence they make nonsensical comparisons with a straight face.

[traceroute66]

I am not going to post what I could respond on a public forum.

All I will say is that it should be perfectly apparent by now to any sane external observer that Trump does not play by any long-established rules or protocols.

An entire encyclopedia of examples could easily be provided, the most famous recent one being his phone call to FIFA about the red card suspension.

[inglor_cz]

Yes, Trump is quite an outlier in his non-standard behavior, I agree on that.

That said, Americans still enjoy very robust protections of freedom of speech and association, about the strongest in the world, and your SCOTUS does not seem to be inclined to hollow them out. Many of the pending lawsuits will end there and eventually bind this administration, plus the following ones.

This just does not happen in actual authoritarian countries, where no judicial remedy is available and the justice system is just another arm of the tyrant, rubberstamping punishments pre-determined by him.

Yes, I agree that vigilance about infringements of freedom is necessary, but the current US population is plenty vigilant. Trump is nowhere near as popular as, say, Erdogan is, and cannot simply raid offices of the Democrats and shut down oppositional media.

[nekusar]

No, he's not. He's more direct and brazen about it.

But he's doing the same culling, the same political demands, same everything.

Its just now in plain view rather than behind closed doors.

[sajithdilshan]

Exactly, people think that Biden, Obama, Bush, etc. are some sort of saints and Trump is the devil. All other presidents used to do the same things behind closed doors and Trump just doesn't care to hide it.

[WarmWash]

If you're not kowtowing the worst possible characterization of someone, then you're wrong.

Is Trump a dictator with unilateral control? No.

Will you be celebrated for failing to recognize that? Yes.