In my humble opinion, LLM astroturfing is only a productivity increase over what is currently already a very automated process (social media bot farms, etc).

While this seems like it would exacerbate an already existing problem, it may not have so profound an effect. You see, while LLMs may be able to increase the amount and quality of fake information, fake information isn't currently in short supply, so increasing the amount and quality of it may not have that strong an effect.

In short, we already have 24-hour fake news cable channels and infinite doom scrolls. The bottleneck is there, not in the quality or quantity of fake news.

Now, if they invented a LLM that doomscrolled Twitter and voted based on generated summaries, we would have much greater grounds for concern.

[edit: I hope this doesn't sound too snarky. What I mean to say is that we should fight it by creating less gullible consumers of information, a project in which AI may be uniquely qualified to assist us.]

stop using the internet

How do you propose we fight government/corporate astroturfing?

At least LLMs will democratize the astroturfing.

LLMs can usually tell when they wrote something, so we can at least recognize it. But really, LLMs could be used by genuine grassroots campaigns as well - possibly make grassroots campaigns easier, since the skills to write persuasively aren't always available to the groups that most need them.

I suspect the observation that 95% of anything is crap will hold true, and simply have to filter out more crap now that it's easier to produce it. There'll also be more gems, so it's hardly all bad.

Use LLM anti-astroturfing to fix it. Fight fire with fire.