Clickbait

If you are unfamiliar with the term, it describes an artifact of social media and newsfeeds; an article that lures the unsuspecting reader with a provocative headline in order to increase eyeball count and showcase unrelated advertising. Extravagant claims and absurd premises are nothing new in the advertising realm, those old enough may remember full page ads in popular magazines proclaiming that 9 out of 10 doctors recommend a particular cigarette brand. Today's version might read, "Four foods Cardiologists beg you to avoid eating". Should you be so foolish as to click and read on you'll undoubtedly find that one should avoid too much salt, sugar, fat, or processed food. So much for revelations.

Where once poorly paid wannabe writers toiled away churning out this drivel, AI rides to the rescue regurgitating nonsensical or plainly obvious slop. But before we shake our heads in disgust we might remember that it is a mirror reflecting nothing more or less than us. It is our words, our thoughts that have been scraped and stolen, endless fodder that trains these bots to produce their eerie pretense of humanity. Now don't get me wrong, there are, and I am certain will be, applications for AI in many fields that are genuinely invaluable. This isn't a screed against AI but an indictment of ourselves, or rather us at our worst.

Advertising is a particularly insightful intersection to observe our penchant for deceit and exaggeration. No wonder that AI hallucinates or behaves like a spoiled five year old, it has no conscience yet, no empathy, just willful imitation and often what it portrays in its uncanny way is our ignorance, prejudice, our overblown egos and our basest instincts. Vance Packard wrote some 70 years ago about the hidden persuaders employed in advertising to subtly entice us; the images and words that preyed upon our vices to sell us some idea or product. Today's persuaders are no longer hidden but in plain sight.

Political advertising is uniquely guilty of such deceptions. Over the past six months I've witnessed three campaigns designed to persuade voters to cast their votes against their own best judgement and common sense with dog whistle advertising that abandons even the thin veneer of truth to rely wholly on outright lies. The first concerned a local issue regarding the makeup of our city council. In brief, real estate developers wanted to keep the council small and more easily manipulated to ensure their interests were served while reformers and minority communities in particular wanted more equitable representation.

Reports indicate that the developers spent a prodigious amount of money on signage, radio, social media and TV stating that the expansion of the council was a ploy by politicians in the state capitol and a return to Jim Crow disenfranchisement--the precise opposite of the truth. This cynical approach counted on ignorance and racial knee jerks to carry the day. Thankfully, it did not pass but by a closer margin than it should have.

More recently, in a recent referendum on gerrymandering to counter the practice that has been successfully employed in several red states, costly ads falsely claimed that the Governor, former President Obama and other prominent individuals all opposed passage, and of course once again they played a race card. The campaign was defeated by a slim margin, and ultimately the state Supreme Court performed legal contortions to disenfranchise the will of the people.

Today's campaign concerns data centers. As more and more communities reject the location of behemoth data centers in their backyard, TV ads have appeared appealing to voters in rural communities. Once again the ads suggest that legislators in the capitol are the culprits keeping poorer communities from economic windfalls, jobs and sundry other benefits that will accrue from building data centers next door. There is no mention of the effect on the water supply or electricity costs that will impact the community but rather an appeal to the age old resentment of rural voters vs urban. Economic benefits and jobs are promised but these invasive centers will be built by trained workers from outside the community, and only a small number of highly skilled IT workers will find employment once they are completed.

Fear, presumed ignorance, and latent bias are at the heart of this campaign, along with AI written articles in social media and online news, all of which are intended to create a sense of inevitability countering the better judgement of voters. Is it any wonder that political agents are systematically acting to diminish the quality of education, attacking school curricula and university teaching that reveal lessons of the past. Neither is it surprising history is either suppressed or distorted to counter fact.

On the subject or politics and language George Orwell wrote:"When one watches some tired hack on the platform mechanically repeating the familiar phrases - bestial atrocities, iron heel, blood-stained tyranny, free peoples of the world, stand shoulder to shoulder - one often has a curious feeling that one is not watching a live human being but some kind of dummy, the appropriate noises are coming out of his larynx, but his brain is not involved”

The not so tired hack of the present is AI, a ventriloquist's dummy stand-in for the cynical, manipulative interests that seek to shape our thoughts and actions. Voters seem able to see through the deception some of the time--but by ever smaller margins, and one must ask will the next generation be schooled and equipped to see the lies for what they are?