Anti-AI astroturfing

Extracted Attributes

• Alternative Name

  Doomer industrial complex

• Counter-Evidence

  Vanguard study indicating higher growth in jobs exposed to AI.

• Tactical Methods

  Funding seemingly independent organizations and promoting 'doomer' scenarios through media and political channels.

• Primary Objective

  To shape a negative public narrative around AI to influence policy and public sentiment.

• Key Concerns Addressed

  Job displacement, existential risk, deepfakes, disinformation, and financial fraud.

Timeline

• Earliest recorded instances of political astroturfing in the United States. (Source: Journal of Democracy)

  1950-01-01

• The Guardian highlights the growing urgency to protect the internet from organized astroturfing campaigns. (Source: The Guardian)

  2011-02-24

• Vanguard releases a study challenging the theory of AI-driven job loss by showing growth in AI-exposed sectors. (Source: All-In Podcast)

  2024-01-01

• Editorial by Sabrina Hornung explores the concept of AI 'astroturfing humanity' by altering human expression and reality. (Source: HPR1 Editorial)

  2025-08-19

Deepfake

Deepfakes (a portmanteau of 'deep learning' and 'fake') are images, videos, or audio that have been edited or generated using artificial intelligence, AI-based tools or audio-video editing software. They may depict real or fictional people and are considered a form of synthetic media, that is media that is usually created by artificial intelligence systems by combining various media elements into a new media artifact. While the act of creating fake content is not new, deepfakes uniquely leverage machine learning and artificial intelligence techniques, including facial recognition algorithms and artificial neural networks such as variational autoencoders (VAEs) and generative adversarial networks (GANs). In turn, the field of image forensics has worked to develop techniques to detect manipulated images. Deepfakes have garnered widespread attention for their potential use in creating child sexual abuse material, celebrity pornographic videos, revenge porn, fake news, hoaxes, bullying, and financial fraud. Academics have raised concerns about the potential for deepfakes to promote disinformation and hate speech, as well as interfere with elections. In response, the information technology industry and governments have proposed recommendations and methods to detect and mitigate their use. Academic research has also delved deeper into the factors driving deepfake engagement online as well as potential countermeasures to malicious application of deepfakes. From traditional entertainment to gaming, deepfake technology has evolved to be increasingly convincing and available to the public, allowing for the disruption of the entertainment and media industries.

Web Search Results

• How AI Threatens Democracy

  Federal Communications Commission with more than eight-million comments advocating repeal of net neutrality during the open comment period on proposed changes to the rules.13This “astroturfing” was detected, however, because more than 90 percent of those comments were not unique, indicating a coordinated effort to mislead rather than genuine grassroots support for repeal. Contemporary advances in AI technology can easily overcome this limitation, rendering it exceedingly difficult for agencies [...] Trust operates in multiple directions. For political elites, responsiveness requires a trust that the messages they receive legitimately represent constituent preferences and not a coordinated campaign to misrepresent public sentiment for the sake of advancing a particular viewpoint. Cases of “astroturfing” are nothing new in politics, with examples in the United States dating back at least to the 1950s.24However, advances in AI threaten to make such efforts ubiquitous and more difficult to [...] which legislators were able to discern (and therefore not respond to) machine-written appeals. On three issues, the response rates to AI- and human-written messages were statistically indistinguishable. On three other issues, the response rates to AI-generated emails were lower—but only by 2 percent, on average.7This suggests that a malicious actor capable of easily generating thousands of unique communications could potentially skew legislators’ perceptions of which issues are most important

• Astroturfing

  34. ^ a b c d Monbiot, George (February 24, 2011). "The need to protect the internet from 'astroturfing' grows ever more urgent". The Guardian. London, UK. Archived from the original on February 23, 2011. Retrieved February 24, 2011. [...] tend to "shirk", reusing content and showing repetitive, time-bounded activity (e.g., during office hours). By mapping message coordination networks, the study was able to reliably distinguish astroturfing accounts from organic grassroots actors across dozens of global campaigns. Unlike bot-centric detection, this strategy targets behavioral traces unique to organized disinformation and has proven robust even when automated behavior is minimal or absent. [...] The implication behind the use of the term is that instead of a "true" or "natural" grassroots effort behind the activity in question, there is a "fake" or "artificial" appearance of support. It is increasingly recognized as a problem in social media, e-commerce, and politics. Astroturfing can influence public opinion by flooding platforms like political blogs, news sites, and review websites with manipulated content. Some groups accused of astroturfing argue that they are legitimately helping

• ​Something to think about while we still can: is AI ...

  Like anything, it’s a double-edged sword — just look at social media. But what happens when these tools start to replace the things that make us human? As AI infiltrates our art, music and writing, are we in danger of AI astroturfing humanity by altering the way we express ourselves, communicate with others — or even alter our sense of reality? [...] # ​Something to think about while we still can: is AI astroturfing humanity? Editorial | August 19th, 2025 By Sabrina Hornung I’m going to go ahead and say it. I have trust issues with a lot of things and artificial intelligence (AI) is one of them. [...] usually responsible for this behavior. In this instance we’re blaming artificial intelligence.

• Online astroturfing: A problem beyond disinformation

  by J Chan · 2024 · Cited by 63 — This paper shows that astroturfing creates additional problems for social media platforms and the online environment in general.Read more

• Coordination patterns reveal online political astroturfing ...

  However, current scholarship on disinformation campaigns is largely focused on the detection of automated accounts, so-called social bots7, 96–104. (2016)."),8, 12435–12440. (2018)."),9, 310–324 (2017)."), even though it has been shown that such accounts make up only a small part of contemporary astroturfing campaigns10, 256–280. [...] (2020).") and the validity of the bot-detection methods is in question11, e0241045 (2020)."). To fill this research gap, our study focuses on “political astroturfing”, i.e., centrally coordinated disinformation campaigns in which participants pretend to be ordinary citizens who act independently12 [...] In contrast to much previous literature, our methodological approach detects astroturfing campaigns based on the patterns of coordinated group efforts to produce messages instead of focusing on individual account features, such as heavy automation. By relying on a parsimonious set of metrics, we also provide a transparent methodology that can be universally applied. We argue that this is an improvement over machine learning classifiers that might achieve a better performance as they are