Language models trained on media diets can predict public opinion (opens in new tab)

This is pretty scary if true. Imagine you would like to influence an individual’s opinion in a very specific way. At present the only way to do this is to write articles in the general vicinity of your cause. However, with an accurate forecast of public opinion, it’s possible to tune the input content such that the output is most closely aligned with the public opinion we are trying to generate. That is, given a history of K previous articles, it’s possible to show a K+1 article that influences an individual’s opinion most closely towards the target.

We may soon be moving into a new political era with propaganda tools so powerful that most historians will be convinced that representative democracy was a historical anomaly of our technological timeline, not an “End of History” inevitability that many either implicitly or explicitly believe it to be.

In other words, anything can be “both-sided”. Great /s.