DaybyDay ISSN 1860-2967Erstaunlich, was im Umfeld dieses Artikels MTHCON (II): Text - Film - Foto: einst&jetzt alles gepostet wurde.
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TOBIAS ROSE-STOCKWELL, 2026 OCT 1, Into The Machine, on SUBSTACK [1]
AI is suddenly shockingly persuasive
Asking AI to be clever on our behalf will soon be how we do discourse
I remember when Claude Opus 4.6 came out. It feels like a decade ago.
The jump in capabilities was shocking. Suddenly I was amazed by all its new abilities. It had hit some new waterline of capacity, and I could trust it with all sorts of tasks.
(This was just eight months ago.)
I recently had the same experience for the first time again with Claude Opus 5.5, which was released last week and it’s already enabling the creation of insane new cultural artifacts. This model’s capabilities are wildly above what even the biggest boosters expected.
Notably, it’s very good at video. This is what someone put together asking Opus 5.5 to respond to the paper AI as Normal Technology in music video form. It extremely impressive:
Today, in response, one of the authors, Sayash Kapoor directed Opus 5.5 to rebut it in the same style of video.
These two videos on their own are remarkable creations. Each scene is detailed, well-thought out, and very clever. Kapoor said it took him roughly an hour of work, and about 12 hours of compute.
I expect this is the beginning of everyone and their mother using Claude to make a music video promoting their particular political platform, idea, plank, or belief. They will ask Claude to be clever on their behalf, and Claude will deliver.
To be clear, I really enjoyed both of these videos. I’ve watched them several times to digest the talking points they are both making. The songs are just as catchy as anything by Lin-Manuel Miranda. They are educational & fun, and legitimately delightful.
But this might also be the beginning of a new sort of memetic arms race.
The new industrial meme factory
I’m reminded of what Scott Alexander wrote in Meditations on Moloch, his prescient essay on races to the bottom:
We have about a zillion think tanks researching new and better forms of propaganda. And we have constitutionally protected freedom of speech. And we have the Internet. So we’re kind of screwed. There are a few people working on raising the sanity waterline, but not as many people as are working on new and exciting ways of confusing and converting people, cataloging and exploiting every single bias and heuristic and dirty rhetorical trick.
So as technology (which I take to include knowledge of psychology, sociology, public relations, etc) tends to infinity, the power of truthiness relative to truth increases, and things don’t look great for real grassroots democracy. The worst-case scenario is that the ruling party learns to produce infinite charisma on demand. If that doesn’t sound so bad to you, remember what Hitler was able to do with an famously high level of charisma that was still less-than-infinite.
(alternate phrasing for Chomskyites: technology increases the efficiency of manufacturing consent in the same way it increases the efficiency of manufacturing everything else)
I take this to mean: the price of effective propaganda will reach zero.
Well, not zero, but around $20 a month for a Claude pro subscription.
The emergence of discourse slop
AIs are already better at persuasion than humans.
As knowledge of this new toolset disperses, we might assume that we’ll see a new flood of highly entertaining political content. We may then have equal opportunity to evaluate the most persuasive ideas.
Will this mean infinite charisma for everyone? Will we get better at discerning the good ideas from the bad? Will it just be more fun?
I’m not so sure. Like any new widely available media, we’ll have good actors and bad ones. Iran, Russia, China, North Korea will all have these same tools now to push ideas. We also might soon come to see it — like so many other novel AI creations — simply as slop.
But slop still has power. People still widely consume it. Many accounts on Instagram that are clearly AI have millions of real human followers who eagerly consume their content. They are still being persuaded to purchase products and change behavior.
I think that in retrospect we will look back at this week as an inflection point: the week when Claude got better at propaganda than 99% of humans.
Whether or not that’s a good thing or a bad thing remains to be seen. But for now, it’s worth knowing we just blew through another weird milestone.