Over at Drop Site, Waqas Ahmed, Murtaza Hussain, and Ryan Grim have unearthed a new DC ‘think tank’ called Beltway Grid. What was interesting was that they could not find any background to any of the people listed in its ‘About Us’ page. It seems to be populated entirely by non-persons.
In October, a new foreign policy think tank calling itself the Beltway Grid Policy Centre quietly entered D.C.’s diplomatic fray. While there was no launch party and no K Street office we could find, the think tank nevertheless began producing its intellectual product at a startling pace, issuing reports, press releases, and pitching journalists on news coverage—much of it focused on South Asia, and, in particular, the ongoing political crisis in Pakistan.
At first glance, Beltway Grid – which describes itself as “a forward-thinking research institute that dives deep into the modern dynamics of lobbying” whose mission is “to illuminate the hidden tactics shaping global politics” – might be one of many marginal DC-based think tanks trying to shape elite opinion and press coverage. Yet a closer look (and not even that much closer) suggests something a bit more innovative is at play.
Beltway Grid’s lack of a physical footprint in Washington – or anywhere else on the earthly plane of existence – stems from more than just a generous work-from-home policy. The organization does not appear to require its employees to exist at all.
That celestial quality begins at the top at Beltway Grid, which does not list an executive director, president, CEO, or any other leader, but does include 12 staff on its “about us” page. None of those employees have any trace of experience – not just professional, but of even living in the world – before arriving at Beltway Grid. Some appear to be plucked from 19th century Elizabethan novels, including Jimmy Prescott, given the rather unique title of “Research Consultant, Lobbying Techniques & Ethics.” Then there’s Hugh Bradford-Smythe, listed as “Lead Analyst, Political Trends & Impactlicy.”
Efforts to reach Bradford-Smythe to get a deeper understanding of his role analyzing “impactlicy” were unsuccessful. Dr. Eleanor Pemberton, the “Director of Policy Research and Impact,” was also unavailable for comment and Drop Site could not find any trace of her doctorate or indeed her attendance at any university. (A web search did find an Eleanor Pemberton who was born in 1808 but tragically died that same year.) Similarly unfindable were Ben Templeton, “Senior Fellow, Lobbying and Regulatory Affairs,” and his colleague Sebastian Fairchild, serving as “Public Policy and Engagement Coordinator.”
…The unusual nature of Beltway Grid’s staffing leaves open several possibilities. The organization may be so hard at work defending the policies of the Pakistan military and criticizing former Prime Minister Imran Khan, the team simply hasn’t had time to lead previous lives or respond to requests for comment. They may be early alien settlers, dropped off by drones on the coast of New Jersey, who are fans of Jane Austen and have come to study “the modern dynamics of lobbying.” Or, more likely, somebody with a small budget asked ChatGPT to set up a fake think tank. Using AI to make a think tank adds a deeper layer of irony, since AI proponents regularly admonish the public not to conflate the operations of an AI program with “thinking.”
The site did have a photo of people in its ‘Our Principles’ page, consisting of a diverse, serious-looking, well-dressed group of people,
Alas, Drop Site says that this is a stock photo image and it has since disappeared from the website.
In some sense, it is not surprising that so-called ‘think tank personnel’ were ‘replaced’ here by AI. Many ‘think tanks’ are merely propaganda outfits, giving their staff academic-sounding job titles who then turn out ‘research papers’ that consist largely of cherry-picking from reputable sources to arrive at pre-ordained conclusions. These ‘papers’, accompanied by breathless press-releases touting the conclusions, are then released directly to the media, bypassing any peer-review process.
AI systems are perfect for doing this since you can give them prompts such as “Write a paper as to why tax cuts for the wealthy greatly stimulate the economy” or “Why social safety nets stifle economic growth”, and then tweak the output to suit your needs, saving yourself all the expense of renting office space and paying real people to achieve the same result.
This is so bizarre. It sounds like this was intended as an astroturf influence operation. But if your “think tank” can never meet anyone in person, can never give a conference or throw a cocktail party… how is it any better than just starting a blog or putting out a press release? Maybe the people behind it thought this would give their opinions more of a veneer of legitimacy.
Twenty five years ago I was thinking about how I was interacting with others on the social network I was using. It was a novel form of interaction at the time, well before Facebook or Bebo or Myspace. I realised that the thing the format felt most like was playing an Infocom game (or “Interactive Fiction” as they preferred to call them) -- text-based adventure games. I didn’t think of my interlocutors as humans, real people with feelings and bodies and so on. They were just words on a screen. (Then again, I was almost at the end of primary school education before I fully got my head around the idea that other people were real, so there’s that.) When I met a few of them in the flesh, it was a bizarre experience. I’m still good friends with some of them.
I’m encouraged to find that going forward this assumption that people I’ve only “met” online are just fictional characters run by chatbots will no longer be regarded as symptomatic of some socially-unacceptable neurodiversity or evidence that I’m simply an anti-social arsehole (pick your diagnosis), but rather will become a perfectly reasonable first assumption when dealing with anyone online.
The simulation hypothesis talks about how statistically likely it is we’re all living in what amounts to The Matrix, i.e. extremely likely, given that there’s by definition only one real world but no practical limit to how many Matrixes (Matrices, language pedants) could be constructed. It’s a vaguely amusing subject for pub conversation, but you can judge how seriously to take it by knowing it’s something Elon Musk has pushed.
This is a bit different, though. There’s not really any practical limit either to how many of these sorts of organisations could be set up. They are cheap. I mean -- I couldn’t afford to set one up, but plenty could… and if you can afford to set up one, you can afford to set up a hundred, or a million. How many others are there already? How many will there be by 2026? How many of the people replying here are chatbots? And going forward, how would we know?
Charlie Brooker’s Black Mirror looks more and more like a documentary with every passing year. In all seriousness, I think he’s one of the most important creative voices in sf, which is wild when you consider he started out writing crap for video game magazines and puerile comics. How far are we from the Waldo Moment?
… 19th century Elizabethan novels…
Uh, whut?
But who am I to question those who have evidently mastered time travel -- laterally?
Hopefully the result of AI development will be that nobody trusts anything they don’t hear from an actual human being, saying it face-to-face.
On that note, bye-bye, mr “I can’t tell if you’re real or not”.
ChatGPT: Write a paper explaining how the flesh of billionaires, due to their high quality diets, can be a tasty and climate friendly way to help poor and working class Americans stretch their food budget.
@sonofrojblake #2: You’ve basically independently hit on an idea which is not really new but was obscure until fairly recently: Dead Internet Theory. I’ve also heard of it called Internet Kessler Syndrome.
Originally it was a conspiracy theory that there are almost no actual humans online, only bots; at the time, it was fairly ridiculous. Sure there were a lot of bots, but they were crude and few people ever saw them do anything other than the occasional posting-spam-on-blogs-and-message-boards thing which typically got removed quickly. The actual problem is that this was before large-scale echo chambers and siloing and “the algo” didn’t exist to anything like the extent that they do now; certain people who were very sheltered or lived in insular cultural environments had significant difficulty believing that all those other people were people, because most of them didn’t believe in “normal” things or act like they expected humans to act.
Later bots started exploding in number, mostly in the use of creating “fake” followers to pump up people’s view counts and upvotes and product ratings and such, and also to game stocks and markets, all of which caused issues and still does, but visible interaction is still almost entirely human-to-human. (I wouldn’t be surprised if there were a lot of spam chatbots fruitlessly trying to sell each other crypto-flavored viagra, which is why I specified “visible”.)
With the continual improvements in LLMs, there are now legitimate worries that bots which *initially* seem like a person might start getting involved in human conversations to a noticeable degree… and perhaps even outnumber their human counterparts eventually. At that point “Dead Internet Theory” becomes real. There’s some debate how realistic that is; at some point return-on-investment issues start to rear their ugly heads (both in the economic benefits and cultural influence senses) and it’s not like people aren’t going to try to do something about it once it gets visible and influential enough. But it’s hard to say how far things will go. Maybe it won’t get much worse than it is now, maybe it will render most of the internet useless, maybe something in between.
Internet Kessler Syndrome is a great name for it, and it’s here.
I joined Bluesky early last year, before they opened it up to the hoi polloi. It’s mainly great, but the influx of Twitter/X refugees has led to a noticeably greater preponderance of bots, specifically, bots that follow you when you say something -- not something that happened in my first few months there.
Currently I have about 70 followers, but that number is pruned significantly from what it could be, because almost every time I post anything I’ll gather two or three or 25 new followers. One or two of them might be (like me) slightly overweight middle aged grey haired or bald middle aged men, which I can usually be reasonably sure are actual humans. Usually, though, they’re conventionally attractive women in their 20s called something like marysmith989.bsky.social, and their activity seems to consist mostly or entirely of reposting things I agree with politically or generic looking photos showing their unfeasibly large lips and breasts. It’s straightforward if slightly time consuming to block them, but I have experienced them trying to start conversations. So far those have been transparently AI, but they’re only going to get better. I assume they’re automated. I’m not clear on what it is they or the people responsible for them are supposed to be gaining by doing this, but I have to assume there’s some endgame I’ll never get to see.
As long as such an endgame exists, it will persist, and given the intelligence level of the average user of the internet, it will continue and get worse basically forever. When firing at the target is basically free, it doesn’t really matter if 99.9999% of shots miss if each hit pays your expenses for a year and you can take 10,000 shots an hour.
Truth is not required. Real people is not required. For it’s purpose, Beltway Grid is perfect.
“a study said it” or “a think tank said it” is used by shitty people to say shitty things. They are ascribing authority to what they are saying because *you* are doing it. So nyeah nyeah nyeah! It’s not like they are reading the source you cite, and it’s not like they will read the source they cite. It’s only important that there -be- one. They have their evil immoral feels after all and those are IMPORTANT.
And our fake news that is posing as mainstream journalism as if they are actually doing journalism and as if their editors weren’t deep-yellow will cite that. Entirely unexamined, because why do work? Or they will cite the shitty people being all smug-and-stuff.
And politicians will of course go on the Sunday shows and repeat it ad nauseam.