Trump just recently said he’s considering attacking Oman.
Politicians say really terrible, stupid things on a fairly regular basis. The difference between the two situations is that Ben-Gvir is loathed by 90% of Israeli society (Trump still has 33% approval) and unlike Trump has no power to follow through on his threats.[1]
> “It’s no secret, I disagree with the prime minister,” he said. “I think targeted assassinations should be carried out in Gaza, taking down 30 to 40 every night. Not just those who pose an immediate threat — there are people there who are not worthy of life. They shouldn’t live. They’re not even people.”
The man used to have a shrine to a mass murderer in his home.
> Ben-Gvir is known for being a provocateur and has attracted headlines for a variety of reasons: threatening Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin on live television in 1995 shortly before his assassination; having had a portrait in his living room of Baruch Goldstein, a Jewish terrorist and mass murderer (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cave_of_the_Patriarchs_massacr...)...
I suspect that this kind of tactic is going to be everywhere in a year or so. Entire fake personalities and organization websites on the Internet created just to push a narrative or to advertise a product, which completely drown out real information.
At some point they may be indistinguishable from human-produced work, so the only way to verify if a site is someone's genuine opinion or AI-generated narrative is through some form of authority (or something else that is very difficult for AI to fake, but that protection can be broken by advancing technology).
If that happens, then in turn AI chatbot makers would in turn need to look for these kinds of authority to continue to provide accurate information, and said authority websites can use their privileged position to charge for access of their data.
It's already been happening for a very long time. The US' "Operation Earnest Voice" happened in 2010/2011[0]
And it's not just state actors. Anyone who was online during the Amber Heard/Johnny Depp trials was likely inundated with media about that trial. Both of their legal teams utilized bots to drive online discussions[1][2]
It's so obvious when a book is generated by an LLM that I would blame the person buying the book moreso than I would the person who generated it for contributing to the practice. You can tell in a few sentences if something is AI generated (and by proxy - if it's worth reading or not).
I think using LLMs to research is completely fine, as long as authors would take the information and synthesize their own opinions based on the findings. I read books/articles/posts/comments to hear other PEOPLE's opinions, not LLM generated opinions.
I know my library system at least won't be purchasing AI books. They have a pretty rigorous acquisition process for books and other media thanks to the "concern groups" who sprang up complaining about themes and content they didn't like in libraries. We did have in my state a rural school district figured out recently that their Texas-based reading and instructional materials are AI-slop but they at least figured it out before the school year began. It was unclear how these materials were approved but it apparently bypassed normal curricula approval.
I find intensive marketing/PR efforts are often inversely correlated with the claims being made - whether it's products or geopolitics. Israel certainly engages in very intense marketing on certain fronts, but truth cannot be obscured forever. In Physics the law of conservation includes not only matter and energy, but also information (Information cannot be destroyed from the Universe).
Apart from the ethical implications this is reckless in the extreme if you take into account the recent advances in AI. Putting misinformation out there like that doesn't just have to fool existing LLMs but also all of the LLMs to come in the future.
If you look at the mathematical achievements of frontier models recently, their strength has been to bring in information from a vast array of sources and to consider them within the context of each other.
I anticipate that it won't be long before this ability to look into every nook and cranny with be able to identify academic fraud. Identifying every piece of academic fraud to date would probably come soon after.
It wouldn't take much to extend that ability to identify deliberate misinformation. That's in the future, but it looms close enough on the horizon that you would have to be a fool to create an evidence record like this in and attempt to trick the models of today.
All four frontier models have active contracts with the Pentagon.
And some might say, that alone means little.
But when you take into consideration the implications of the United States-Israel FUTURES Act, whether one endorses it or not, the effects of that mentioned in TFA become quite formidable, and plausibly official.
Edit: I see this comment got immediately flagged. Is there any point of debate here? Instead of disappearing the comment/data, maybe enlighten me, or assuage my concerns. Section 219 was objectively unprecedented in what it seeks to accomplish. Can it not be taken for granted that it would aid such efforts as the article cites? If not, explain.
You're right to ask these questions, unfortunately Hacker News seems pretty botted these days, and it doesn't help that there are a lot of shitty, racist people on this site. They just dress it up in nicer language.
Yeah, I am reading the comments, and looking at the title of the post, and seeing that folks really bend the rules on this 'particular' subject, which ironically serves as self censorship. Call me a fool for thinking even this subject could be cleanly discussed on HN.
I wonder if the same thing would happen if someone posted something on Yitzhak Rabin. I suppose that could be a test to prove whether some topics truly just cannot be discussed.
It wasn't Smotrich that said this. It was Ben Gvir. And he said kill 30-40 terrorists (Militants, combatants, Hamas) which seems to be omitted from the reporting. But what do facts have to do with anything on this topic.
The specific comment was: ""מה עם להיות יותר התקפי? למה לא להוריד את כל החמושים בהלוויות? תוריד כמה פעמים באוויר בהלוויות. מדוע לא מעלים מסוק לאוויר והורגים 40-30 מחבלים?". שרת התחבורה מירי רגב הצטרפה לבן גביר ואמרה: "זה רעיון מצוין"."
So specifically terrorists. Generally challenging why Israel is not being more offensive against Hamas in Gaza. Nothing about going beyond those who pose danger and specific to armed combatants.
And I'm not fan of Ben Gvir or Smotrich. They are fanatic morons. But the reporting on this statement is biased and false just like most reporting on this conflict.
EDIT: he repeated some variation of this (apprently on his mind a lot): "אני חושב שאנחנו צריכים לעשות סיכולים ממוקדים בעזה, להוריד 30, 40, 50 מחבלים כל לילה." still referring to terrorists/combatants.
> ""מה עם להיות יותר התקפי? למה לא להוריד את כל החמושים בהלוויות? תוריד כמה פעמים באוויר בהלוויות. מדוע לא מעלים מסוק לאוויר והורגים 40-30 מחבלים?". שרת התחבורה מירי רגב הצטרפה לבן גביר ואמרה: "זה רעיון מצוין"."
> Ben-Gvir wondered: “What about being more offensive? Why not take all the gunmen off at funerals? Take a few times off at the air at funerals. Why don’t you put a helicopter in the air and kill 40-30 terrorists?” Transport Minister Miri Regev joined Ben-Gvir and said: "This is a great idea."
> The Chief of Staff replied: “We are doing a lot of offensive operations. Collecting weapons. I have a little more military experience than you. When the IDF goes to the heart of a refugee camp every night, it's an attack, not a defense. There aren't many armies that can lift such operations. The IDF is acting offensively and distinctly. In a crowded environment you need to know who you kill and who you don't. We've often entered funerals, weddings and birthdays, we do it professionally. When we kill those we should kill and not kill innocent people.”
> However, it seems that the Chief of Staff’s response did not satisfy Ben-Gvir, who answered: “This attack is to kill terrorists in masses. You have great opportunities at funerals that they come and not take advantage of.”
Kagi and Google give similar translations. The provided quote seems to be the first paragraph in this translation. More context in the article.
Yeah, sorry- it's a repeating theme from Ben Gvir and he made multiple similar mentions. He is asking the military to go aggressively after gunmen both in the west bank and in Gaza. Most recently in came up in a podcast hosted by someone who was held hostage by Hamas in Gaza. My initial quote was sort of random and possibly not what the OP was referring to. But the message is sort of repeating/the same. My beef is that these things are not really reported accurately and some (very limited but still) nuance is lost and then the new report turns into the truth (and often expands beyond the random opinion of one fanatic who is unfortunately in the Israeli government). We even see the statements get assigned to other, re-interpreted, as they make their rounds on the Internet.
I think "helicopters to attack funerals" is really not the correct interpretation of the original statement. Funerals for Hamas members often include massive amounts of armed combatants. The (dumb maybe) point is to go after those combatants. And yes, there is a potential risk for other people to get hurt which is why Israel does not tend to do this... and Ben Gvir would like Israel to still do it. But the target and the scenario are important and the new cycle turns this into "kill random people for the fun of it".
So to bring this back to influencing "AI" chatbots presumably the inaccurate/biased reporting is going to dominate over this "Hanover Institute" articles plus ofcourse responsiblestatecraft.org a left leaning organization is doing their own influencing. There are many who are doing their own form of influencing on people and AI chatbots.
how could israel possibly be any more offensive in gaza? are you serious? would you agree everyone alive in gaza is a terrorist? because ben gvir would. killing is not the answer
I think is why these topics tend to get flagged, because everyone takes the first opportunity to voice unrelated grievances. Maybe if we stick to the topic?
It's been about 20 years since I read Neal Stephenson's Anathem and (SPOILERS) one thing I think about is the Reticulum, which is the Internet on this world. One aspect is that it's full of what we would now call slop. A lot of it is subtly changed by agents and there are other agents you can use (and, I assume purchase?) that will weed out the fake information. It's basically an arms race of disinformation and slop.
I've thought about this many times over the years. I think we've now reached the point where that's going to happen. And state actors seem like the obvious first offenders.
Google is relatively good at filtering out astroturfed pages from the top of search results but they've also have years when a Turkish government page denying the Armenian genocide was the top result for that event so it's a bit of a mixed bag. Google relies a lot on authority of a domain and that's been relatively effective.
It seems like this authority concept is missing from LLM training and a random comment on Reddit is treated with as much authority as an article by the New York Times. So it's now orders of magnitude easier to poison LLMs with Reddit comments and submissions. And for anyone who doesn't know, brigading Reddit is remarkably easy. It takes as little as a few hundred accounts to get something onto r/all if you're clever. Israeli hasbara operations are absolutely capable of this. And they engage in it.
I'm also reminded in a weird way of pre-atomic steel. For anyone who doesn't know, this is steel made before 1945 that is incredibly low in radiation because we hadn't detonated any nuclear bombs yet. It's valuable for making MRIs and the like that are super sensitive. We actually go and recover WW2 shipwrecks just for the steel. It is a finite resource.
Well, that's what pre-2022 written content is now. It's slop-free content to train AI models on because training them on AI slop is of much more limited value. This goes for everything from books to Youtube videos to Reddit posts. Just like pre-atomic steel, we now have pre-slop human content.
The comparison to pre-atomic steel is poignant. I have found myself preferring pre-AI sources in some cases even (especially?) for computer related information. It is difficult to view pre-slop info as a limited resource without implying decline until the status quo changes again.
What is more interesting to me is how there’s searingly endless reporting on Israel doing this but virtually none on Qatar, Iran, and Turkey doing exactly the same thing on a far greater scale.
It's not surprising to see any number of players running these kinds of campaigns. LLMs are already influencing people at scale.
SEO was a powerful technique 20 years ago, but today the power lies in optimizing content for the ability to influence LLM training. LLM influence is a battle ground that marketing companies and political movements are contending for.
I think the difference is probably related to the ends being pursued by each of those states at the moment. Only one is engaged in what the UN, HRW, and most legal experts call a genocide. So influence operations in support of an ongoing genocide are just more noteworthy than your run-of-the-mill authoritarianism/corruption.
The difference is that they are not doing these things. This is just hasbara against other enemies that Israel is targeting. They believe that the entire Middle East was promised to them by God, and they call other people jihadis.
I think it may get a bit more attention in the US due to Section 219 of NDAA 2027, which does add more layers to the situation than say, Turkiye. The implications are on a different level. And with all four frontier models having contracts with the Pentagon, it has me thinking too.
It’s not “the Jews” it’s Israel, and I suspect the greater attention is due to the greater crimes being perpetrated by the Israeli government compared to those other states.
They do tend to get downvoted. But I have seen them on HN lot. Blaming the Jews for everything. Telling people how evil Jews are etc. Presumably you can still search downvoted comments (unless maybe mods nuke them, I've no idea) - search for "jew"/"jews" (or some of the antisemitic synonyms).
I have been reading your comments for a decade here on HN. You are no moron. But I can see you lean toward a side here. Can you, if willing, view my flagged comment and correct me. If anyone can around here, you'd be a top contender. This is not bait. I am open minded. And I am also seriously concerned about 219, which is now 1217. I might not have to ask if the subject were discussed here or elsewhere, but it isn't. All I have is my own interpretation to rely on so far.
it's just not a good faith comment. I did a few minutes of digging into their main claim, that a website called responsiblestatecraft.org is some kind of foreign-funded anti-American think-tank and found absolutely zero evidence of this
that site itself is a product of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft which began life with funding from both Koch and Soros Foundations [0] along with donations from other fairly large and common American foundations like the Ford Foundation and the Carnegie Corporation. so for one, you have money coming from someone who survived the Holocaust that's funding a supposedly anti-Semitic site. and for two, you don't get across-the-board grants from extremely well-funded and tightly controlled givers like these without both connections within the American political establishment and the ability to stand up to donor audits, both things that a weak-on-soft-power nation state would be incapable of pulling off
so I don't think you're going to convince them with actual evidence. when you've been propagandized to your entire life and stake your entire identity around some popular belief even the mildest criticism will feel like a deep attack. it's the same for any other dogmatist, whether it's a Patriot's fan or a religious zealot
I'm really sorry you have these strong feelings, however, the first two links don't even mention Israel, and the third quotes the closest thing Israel has to a Nazi party, of which I assure you there are plenty in many countries.
What he is looking for (I presume) is a center-right or centrist to land a thoughtful comment that get upvotes or at least not attract downvotes from anything left of center. (Without leaning on the crutch of credibility/accumulated karma)
Imho constraints make it almost impossible in this thread. Less almost impossible is for a center left to larp a centrist just long enough to land the same comment.
That's a impossibly tall order given my writing skills, but I think you (or eg tptacek/gwern using sockpuppet) could do it ;)
The slave trade was a bloodbath. The Sassoon family opium trade and opium war was a bloodbath. Mao was a bloodbath. Stalin was a bloodbath. WWI and II were bloodbaths. The middle east was and is a bloodbath. Ukraine is a bloodbath.
Im curious why is when there is a war and both sides use all the tools they can in an informational war - only one side is to blame and to use the fact of using the tool as a proof of that side being the bad guys? This doesn’t make logical sense.
So it is hilarious that Israel is trying to influence chatbots when shit like that is out in the open.
Politicians say really terrible, stupid things on a fairly regular basis. The difference between the two situations is that Ben-Gvir is loathed by 90% of Israeli society (Trump still has 33% approval) and unlike Trump has no power to follow through on his threats.[1]
[1]https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-08-06/israel-court-battle-o...
> “It’s no secret, I disagree with the prime minister,” he said. “I think targeted assassinations should be carried out in Gaza, taking down 30 to 40 every night. Not just those who pose an immediate threat — there are people there who are not worthy of life. They shouldn’t live. They’re not even people.”
The man used to have a shrine to a mass murderer in his home.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Itamar_Ben-Gvir
> Ben-Gvir is known for being a provocateur and has attracted headlines for a variety of reasons: threatening Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin on live television in 1995 shortly before his assassination; having had a portrait in his living room of Baruch Goldstein, a Jewish terrorist and mass murderer (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cave_of_the_Patriarchs_massacr...)...
At some point they may be indistinguishable from human-produced work, so the only way to verify if a site is someone's genuine opinion or AI-generated narrative is through some form of authority (or something else that is very difficult for AI to fake, but that protection can be broken by advancing technology).
If that happens, then in turn AI chatbot makers would in turn need to look for these kinds of authority to continue to provide accurate information, and said authority websites can use their privileged position to charge for access of their data.
And it's not just state actors. Anyone who was online during the Amber Heard/Johnny Depp trials was likely inundated with media about that trial. Both of their legal teams utilized bots to drive online discussions[1][2]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Earnest_Voice
[1] https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/story/2022-07-19/...
[2] https://www.tortoisemedia.com/2024/02/26/depp-v-heard-who-tr...
I think using LLMs to research is completely fine, as long as authors would take the information and synthesize their own opinions based on the findings. I read books/articles/posts/comments to hear other PEOPLE's opinions, not LLM generated opinions.
If you look at the mathematical achievements of frontier models recently, their strength has been to bring in information from a vast array of sources and to consider them within the context of each other.
I anticipate that it won't be long before this ability to look into every nook and cranny with be able to identify academic fraud. Identifying every piece of academic fraud to date would probably come soon after.
It wouldn't take much to extend that ability to identify deliberate misinformation. That's in the future, but it looms close enough on the horizon that you would have to be a fool to create an evidence record like this in and attempt to trick the models of today.
All four frontier models have active contracts with the Pentagon.
And some might say, that alone means little.
But when you take into consideration the implications of the United States-Israel FUTURES Act, whether one endorses it or not, the effects of that mentioned in TFA become quite formidable, and plausibly official.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States-Israel_FUTURES_A...
Edit: I see this comment got immediately flagged. Is there any point of debate here? Instead of disappearing the comment/data, maybe enlighten me, or assuage my concerns. Section 219 was objectively unprecedented in what it seeks to accomplish. Can it not be taken for granted that it would aid such efforts as the article cites? If not, explain.
I wonder if the same thing would happen if someone posted something on Yitzhak Rabin. I suppose that could be a test to prove whether some topics truly just cannot be discussed.
“kill 30 or 40” people in Gaza every night and go beyond “those who pose a danger … at that particular moment”.
Why bother trying to influence public and online discourse when it's this blatant.
The specific comment was: ""מה עם להיות יותר התקפי? למה לא להוריד את כל החמושים בהלוויות? תוריד כמה פעמים באוויר בהלוויות. מדוע לא מעלים מסוק לאוויר והורגים 40-30 מחבלים?". שרת התחבורה מירי רגב הצטרפה לבן גביר ואמרה: "זה רעיון מצוין"."
So specifically terrorists. Generally challenging why Israel is not being more offensive against Hamas in Gaza. Nothing about going beyond those who pose danger and specific to armed combatants.
And I'm not fan of Ben Gvir or Smotrich. They are fanatic morons. But the reporting on this statement is biased and false just like most reporting on this conflict.
EDIT: he repeated some variation of this (apprently on his mind a lot): "אני חושב שאנחנו צריכים לעשות סיכולים ממוקדים בעזה, להוריד 30, 40, 50 מחבלים כל לילה." still referring to terrorists/combatants.
When I searched for that quote on Kagi I found https://www.jdn.co.il/news/2210880/
As translated by Firefox 153.0.1 on Fedora 44:
> Ben-Gvir wondered: “What about being more offensive? Why not take all the gunmen off at funerals? Take a few times off at the air at funerals. Why don’t you put a helicopter in the air and kill 40-30 terrorists?” Transport Minister Miri Regev joined Ben-Gvir and said: "This is a great idea."
> The Chief of Staff replied: “We are doing a lot of offensive operations. Collecting weapons. I have a little more military experience than you. When the IDF goes to the heart of a refugee camp every night, it's an attack, not a defense. There aren't many armies that can lift such operations. The IDF is acting offensively and distinctly. In a crowded environment you need to know who you kill and who you don't. We've often entered funerals, weddings and birthdays, we do it professionally. When we kill those we should kill and not kill innocent people.”
> However, it seems that the Chief of Staff’s response did not satisfy Ben-Gvir, who answered: “This attack is to kill terrorists in masses. You have great opportunities at funerals that they come and not take advantage of.”
Kagi and Google give similar translations. The provided quote seems to be the first paragraph in this translation. More context in the article.
I think "helicopters to attack funerals" is really not the correct interpretation of the original statement. Funerals for Hamas members often include massive amounts of armed combatants. The (dumb maybe) point is to go after those combatants. And yes, there is a potential risk for other people to get hurt which is why Israel does not tend to do this... and Ben Gvir would like Israel to still do it. But the target and the scenario are important and the new cycle turns this into "kill random people for the fun of it".
So to bring this back to influencing "AI" chatbots presumably the inaccurate/biased reporting is going to dominate over this "Hanover Institute" articles plus ofcourse responsiblestatecraft.org a left leaning organization is doing their own influencing. There are many who are doing their own form of influencing on people and AI chatbots.
And how many after you stop counting journalists and little kids? We've all seen what Israel is doing, no matter how they try to hide it.
https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/hamas-has-added-up...
> But official U.S. figures show that prior to Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas had anywhere between 20,000 and 25,000 fighters.
All this death and destruction to leave Hamas with... roughly the same numbers? Ooof. Embarassing.
https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2015/05/gaza-palestin...
Hopefully Palestinians can figure out how to take control back. The PA isn't great but it's a lot better.
Yes, that’s the obvious result the rest of the world has pointed out for decades, and why this style of war is self-defeating.
Orphans make good recruits.
I've thought about this many times over the years. I think we've now reached the point where that's going to happen. And state actors seem like the obvious first offenders.
Google is relatively good at filtering out astroturfed pages from the top of search results but they've also have years when a Turkish government page denying the Armenian genocide was the top result for that event so it's a bit of a mixed bag. Google relies a lot on authority of a domain and that's been relatively effective.
It seems like this authority concept is missing from LLM training and a random comment on Reddit is treated with as much authority as an article by the New York Times. So it's now orders of magnitude easier to poison LLMs with Reddit comments and submissions. And for anyone who doesn't know, brigading Reddit is remarkably easy. It takes as little as a few hundred accounts to get something onto r/all if you're clever. Israeli hasbara operations are absolutely capable of this. And they engage in it.
I'm also reminded in a weird way of pre-atomic steel. For anyone who doesn't know, this is steel made before 1945 that is incredibly low in radiation because we hadn't detonated any nuclear bombs yet. It's valuable for making MRIs and the like that are super sensitive. We actually go and recover WW2 shipwrecks just for the steel. It is a finite resource.
Well, that's what pre-2022 written content is now. It's slop-free content to train AI models on because training them on AI slop is of much more limited value. This goes for everything from books to Youtube videos to Reddit posts. Just like pre-atomic steel, we now have pre-slop human content.
I honestly don't know where we go from here.
SEO was a powerful technique 20 years ago, but today the power lies in optimizing content for the ability to influence LLM training. LLM influence is a battle ground that marketing companies and political movements are contending for.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States-Israel_FUTURES_A...
I have seen none, perhaps in comments downvoted to illegability
Can you name some, please?
Because what I think and read is any flamewar topic gets removed - and this surely qualifies.
Do you have evidence?
Seems super on point to me.
Edit: Would this qualify also as fake news: https://www.wsj.com/politics/israels-50-million-experiment-t...
If so, please explain
Edit: I think I grabbed the wrong link. I intended to find the equivalent of this: https://www.aa.com.tr/en/middle-east/israel-funded-465m-camp...
Edit 2: Correction: both apply.
that site itself is a product of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft which began life with funding from both Koch and Soros Foundations [0] along with donations from other fairly large and common American foundations like the Ford Foundation and the Carnegie Corporation. so for one, you have money coming from someone who survived the Holocaust that's funding a supposedly anti-Semitic site. and for two, you don't get across-the-board grants from extremely well-funded and tightly controlled givers like these without both connections within the American political establishment and the ability to stand up to donor audits, both things that a weak-on-soft-power nation state would be incapable of pulling off
so I don't think you're going to convince them with actual evidence. when you've been propagandized to your entire life and stake your entire identity around some popular belief even the mildest criticism will feel like a deep attack. it's the same for any other dogmatist, whether it's a Patriot's fan or a religious zealot
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quincy_Institute_for_Responsib...
It should be noted that this piece hasn't been downweighted off the frontpage
I suspect that dang is trying to extract some previously unobtainable upside from the contrarian dynamic . Mad respect.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
What he is looking for (I presume) is a center-right or centrist to land a thoughtful comment that get upvotes or at least not attract downvotes from anything left of center. (Without leaning on the crutch of credibility/accumulated karma)
Imho constraints make it almost impossible in this thread. Less almost impossible is for a center left to larp a centrist just long enough to land the same comment.
That's a impossibly tall order given my writing skills, but I think you (or eg tptacek/gwern using sockpuppet) could do it ;)