A new Science Policy Forum article warns that the next generation of influence operations may not look like obvious “copy-paste bots,” but like coordinated communities: fleets of AI-driven personas that can adapt in real time, infiltrate groups, and manufacture the appearance of public agreement at scale. In this week’s journal, the authors describe how the fusion of large language models (LLMs) with multi-agent systems could enable “malicious AI swarms” that imitate authentic social dynamics—and threaten democratic discourse by counterfeiting social proof and consensus.
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