‘Magic tricks’ from social media mimic cigs

Addiction Economy Thought for Today - how they do it, and why we fall for it - 'it' being whatever harmful industry mysteriously still gets away with harming society in the name of profit.

I was going to post this article from the Guardian 'How to spot the Fossil Fuel industry's disinformation tactics' ...

https://lnkd.in/esQRXF2q

...or this one also from Guardian on cigarette company tactics to prevent the phase out of cigs

https://lnkd.in/eHSPYdAA

...and highlight many more examples in our Economic Model of Addiction here which explores how and why addictive products have been allowed to flourish for the benefit of companies, at the expense of the rest of us.

https://lnkd.in/enuF7_t4

But this popped in my inbox from Gary Marcus (an essential follow for all things AI) in which he highlights the work of Baldur Bjarnason on LLMs and ChatGPT, in which he compares the strategy which fools us into thinking they are 'intelligent' to the con artists who do magic tricks. Brilliant.

These 'sleight of hand' tricks and mind games are exactly those employed by addiction economy companies like cigs, gambling, vapes, alcohol, opioids with their misinformation. Primed by predatory marketing the misinformation they create uses generally believable stories which are just plausible enough to cause us to pause and question what we thought we knew and distract attention from what is really happening, while they undermine the political process to prevent restrictions to their business model.

Excellent article and observations. I might try to build on it for our next draft!