AI ↔ Social Media?
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John Burn-Murdoch, "Social media is populist and polarising; AI may be the opposite", Financial Times 3/28/2026:
Every media revolution has transformed who distributes information, what messages are distributed and what form they take. As such, some media are fundamentally democratising and polarising, widening the pool of publishers and views beyond a narrow elite and amplifying radical and anti-establishment voices. TikTok and the printing press arrived almost 600 years apart but share these characteristics. Others push the opposite way: radio and television had high barriers to entry, creating a monopoly for the voices and views of elites and experts.
As the use of AI chatbots takes off, it’s worth pausing to ask which of these categories they fall into. There is good reason to believe it is the latter.
The article presents some evidence for the view that social media is populist and polarising, while AI is elitist and technocratising, based on data from the Cooperative Election Study:
The neologism technocratising comes from Dan Williams, "How AI Will Reshape Public Opinion", Conspicuous Cognition 3/3/2026.
But pointing in the other direction, there's Marlynn Wei, "The Emerging Problem of 'AI Psychosis'", Psychology Today 11/27/2025,…
Yves Rehbein said,
March 28, 2026 @ 3:02 pm
Isn't AI a misnomer and Social Media a la Facebook is run by bots, anyway, by which I mean targeted, organic advertising, fake news they call it, you know?
Commentarian said,
March 28, 2026 @ 5:11 pm
Another centralising, "technocratising" aspect of LLMs is that they are usually large, expensive models hosted in datacenters and controlled by corporations, as opposed to ones small enough to be hosted on user-owned hardware. This opens the door to censorship, which I have seen no evidence for so far, but it is still technically possible.
And, IIRC, even if it is a local model, it will probably be trained by a corporation, with corporate biases.
AntC said,
March 28, 2026 @ 5:20 pm
populist and polarising
When the press describes a politician as 'populist' that doesn't amount to popular. In the most recent New Zealand General Election (2023, under a sorta proportional representation system), the two parties usually prefixed by 'populist' in reports (of which at least one is also described as 'polarising') got 8.6% and 6% of the Party Vote.
Under a so-called First Past the Post system, determining popularity is more hazardous. In the most recent UK General Election (2024), the party most often described as 'populist' (and 'polarising') got 14.3% of the votes; the outgoing government (described as 'deeply unpopular') got 23.7%.
Chips Mackinolty said,
March 28, 2026 @ 7:35 pm
Surely the biggest misnomer around the traps at the moment is the "I" in "AI". Intelligence? I think not. It is assuredly an automated process by which so-called "intelligence" is marketed as the have-all and be-all of technology that we must purchase before stocks run out.
As noted by Yves Rehbein, AI is fake news.
Chips Mackinolty said,
March 28, 2026 @ 7:47 pm
… and minutes after signing off the above I came across this great piece from Ette Media on the creation of an entire "newsroom" via AI that purports to be filing genuine news stories by fraudulently siphoning the intellectual property of genuine journos.
https://johnmenadue.com/post/2026/03/none-of-the-diverse-journalists-writing-for-this-aussie-news-site-are-real/?utm_source=Pearls+%26+Irritations&utm_campaign=3a0e38c6cc-Daily&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_0c6b037ecb-3a0e38c6cc-647399771
JPL said,
March 28, 2026 @ 8:58 pm
AntC:
Right. The term 'populist' should be used (this is not the way it is used, but the way I think it ought to be used) to refer to the electoral appeals made by a political party, or to the strategy for getting votes, reflected in practical "theorizing" in published accounts, such that they aim at expressing solidarity with sentiments and conventional thinking coming from the masses of ordinary people. Traditionally (and these go back a really long way, to "ancient times") these appeals target primitive impulses like racism, anti-Semitism, anti-immigrant, anti- unconventional sexual orientation, sectarian differences, etc. etc. The term 'populist' should not be used to describe the conventional responses of the people themselves. The latter can be called "popular", in the sense that they belong to the people, as opposed to the elites. The suffix '-ist' is typically related to the suffix '-ism', which usually is used to talk about systems of thought created by elites. These appeals have nothing to do with a philosophy of governance (and the elites can usually be taken as knowing the better and not sharing the sentiments they are appealing to), but are intended only for winning a popular "support" that does not depend on philosophy of governing. It's important to distinguish the contributions of political elites from the primitive sentiments of popular cultures, i.e., "the people". What you have more of now, that you didn't have before, are contributors that are somewhere in between the elites and the people, for example podcasters and Youtube channels. (This gained momentum with people like Rush Limbaugh on the radio.) The result is a profusion of crackpottery, combining popular anger and lack of intellectual standards. (By "the people" above I have for the moment been understanding those without significant influence from moderating factors like higher education. The educated reading public participates in a different community of discourse from those who lack the skills and who respond mainly to what they hear everybody else around them saying.) So the party that makes a "populist" appeal is not necessarily going to be the most popular as determined by the whole electorate; but the populist appeal targets only a part of the whole electorate that they hope to be greater in number than the other part, which has the effect of alienating that other part (the 'polarization"). "Divide and rule" was the main strategy of colonialism.
BTW, one can recognize a similar dynamic between elite populist appeal and popular response among the more educated communities, usually based more on articulated and tacit ethical understanding (e.g., appeals to "the constitution", or "fairness", and thus appeals that do depend on philosophy of governing). This universalizing appeal is not intended to be polarizing, but nevertheless, sadly, often has that result.
Chester Draws said,
March 28, 2026 @ 11:45 pm
This opens the door to censorship, which I have seen no evidence for so far, but it is still technically possible.
You haven't been looking very hard then. There's plenty of censorship in the current AI models.
Most of it might be that the training data is censored, rather than the responses, but it amounts to the same thing. Most of it is quite gentle, but the AI I have used are quite distinctly not on the side of climate scepticism, for example. They will give you minority points of view, but you have to ask specifically.
And there's a whole bunch of things most AI systems refuse to answer, and which are definitely specific instructions. Try "How to make ricin", for example.
AntC said,
March 29, 2026 @ 2:26 am
Intelligence? I think not.
Yeah, back in the day when chess machines began beating grandmasters, there was great brouhaha about machine "Intelligence" taking over the world. It turns out there's two ways to win at chess: one is a very particular form of human intelligence, by no means common amongst humans; the other is sheer brute-force computing power. (The machines began winning not from superior algorithms or strategies, but because Moore's Law had delivered faster execution of 'dumb' lookahead.)
Bob Ladd said,
March 29, 2026 @ 3:44 am
Sorry to inject a purely linguistic note into a Language Log thread, but where is the stress in technocratizing? Would anyone really say tech-NO-cratizing? If not, what would they say?
Rodger C said,
March 29, 2026 @ 9:39 am
I'd certainly pronounce "technocratizing" with the first three syllables of "technocracy." What's the problem.
Philip Taylor said,
March 29, 2026 @ 9:59 am
Well, for me (and after some considerable thought) because while following the stress pattern of "technocracy" would (IMHO) be appropriate for (say) "technocraci[s|z]ation", it would be less appropriate (also IMHO, of course) for "technocrati[s|z]ing" which might better follow the stress pattern of "technocrat".
Jarek Weckwerth said,
March 29, 2026 @ 12:46 pm
I would say, if democratize, then technocratize, and ing is normally claimed not to affect stress placement.
On the topic of populism: @JPL seems to be very negative about it (e.g. appeals target primitive impulses). AFAIK, in political science, populism is defined much more neutrally as an approach that extols the "people" as virtuous and good, and criticizes the "elites" as rotten. In a sense, this is an tantamount to unconditional no-adjective democracy where, in essence, the majority wins. You could even argue that it is an emanation of left-wing thinking a la the French Revolution. It only becomes negative, somewhat perversely, if you hold the opposite view of the "people" being primitive.
Of course, as @JPL observantly observes, this is not related in simple ways to popularity (in the sense of the number of votes won, for example).
J.W. Brewer said,
March 29, 2026 @ 1:45 pm
I think the FT writer responsible for the block quote is wrong in lumping together television and radio, where at least in the US experience radio ended up more effectively serving minority/niche interests due to among other things the lower cost of producing (certain sorts of) programming compared to television, which was one of the factors that made it more viable in radio than in tv to have a locally-programmed station that didn't just rebroadcast content from one of a handful of nationwide networks. Of course the FT is a British publication, and the experience in the UK was otherwise, due to the brute historical fact of it having been totally illegal until the 1970's for anyone other than the BBC to operate a radio station there. That said, the offshore "pirate" radio stations of the 1960's that helped create public demand for alternatives to the BBC monopoly were much cheaper to set up and operate than "pirate" tv stations would have been.
JPL said,
March 29, 2026 @ 7:08 pm
@Jerek Weckwerth:
Thanks for the response. My comment was meant to be an exercise in the clarification of a technical term ('populism'/'populist'), and as I said in the first sentence —
"The term 'populist' should be used (this is not the way it is used, but the way I think it ought to be used) to refer to the electoral appeals made by a political party, or to the strategy for getting votes, reflected in practical "theorizing" in published accounts, such that they aim at expressing solidarity with sentiments and conventional thinking coming from the masses of ordinary people." —
I was aiming for a revision of the conventional usage. Nevertheless, as you can see, the first sentence suggests a description that applies to the term 'populism' tout court; I am aware that careful commentators distinguish between 'right wing populism' and 'left wing populism', but I wanted to focus on the kind of populism that has always been more problematic, namely what is these days called "right-wing populism". (Note the parenthetical beginning with, "By "the people" above I have for the moment been understanding ….") But the phenomenon has been recognized since ancient times as a problem, long before people came up with the term 'right-wing populism' to describe it. I wanted to avoid depending on the journalistic notions of "right vs left", so I tried to identify the "popular" phenomenon in terms of the discourse community out of which those particular sentiments and responses arise. I was more concerned with the distinction between ideas coming from the elites vs ideas coming from the people, because, for one thing, usually the ideas used in the appeals from a political party to a particular community are not necessarily the same as what the opinions and sentiments of the people of that community are. It's well known that party propaganda outlets like Fox News will attempt to exacerbate the passions, sometimes previously latent, surrounding impulses like racism or anti-immigrant feelings, while, left to their own devices, the people themselves have a mellower outlook and are open to accommodation, at least to some extent. The problem of a manipulative populist appeal to popular sentiment is a big problem (practically) all over the world these days.
In the second paragraph I indicated that a similar phenomenon exists that could be called "populist" wrt the other discourse community, but at the moment this one is less problematic; but, given its ethical underpinnings, it has the potential of being a positive force in the evolution of political thought. I always think of "Mr Smith goes to Washington" as coming out of this tradition.
WRT the term 'democracy', the relevant distinction is between the idea that it's all about interest groups, however these are defined, trying to gain political power, so that their interests can prevail, as opposed to being all about ideal principles, like what is called the "rule of law" principle (and this notion should be thought of as an ideal principle, not just a social preference) that assume that all people affected by the laws of the land are equivalent with respect to the application of those laws, so nobody is meant to suffer more than anybody else. The aim is to minimize the potential for the abuse of power.
Notice that I focus on getting clear about the phenomena we're trying to understand, rather than the definitions of terms. Wittgenstein is sometimes, perhaps misleadingly, translated as saying, "Meaning is use"; but linguists have a better term to describe what is happening: 'usage'. Usage of a term can be described in terms of what is generally being referred to.
Andrew Usher said,
March 29, 2026 @ 7:48 pm
Re the pronunciation of technocratising: agree with second-syllable stress, can't imagine anything else. Philip Taylor's quibble appears to be a misunderstanding that technocratise derives from technocrat, but that's a misleading conclusion from English spelling: it's technocratise from technocracy, just as democratise from democracy.
Chester Draws is definitely correct that current AI does have some censorship, and in the case of ChatGPT it's been well-known a long time that it has a module devoted to that. But, as he says, the effects of this are mild, and can usually be gotten around (with some annoyance). The conclusion of the OP is still broadly correct in that censorship could theoretically be a lot worse – but AI companies would be unlikely to want that as it would significantly impair utility and annoy more people.
Philip Taylor said,
March 30, 2026 @ 7:56 am
Etymononline would disagree, Andrew (when I can locate my copy of Onions, I will see if he does as well) —
Andrew Usher said,
March 30, 2026 @ 7:18 pm
That quotation agrees with me exactly, except that the coinage happened in French rather than English – it doesn't really matter, the point is that the root is (what in English is) -cracy, and conserves the stress of that root.
JPL said,
March 31, 2026 @ 7:49 pm
I noticed that the last paragraph of Jerek Weckwerth's comment above says, "Of course, as @JPL observantly observes, this is not related in simple ways to popularity (in the sense of the number of votes won, for example)." The credit for that observation should go to AntC, further above, whose comment I was taking off of in my comment.
As for the article cited in the OP, in my opinion it is not really helpful as an analysis of current problems with social media and AI use. This is mainly because the terms they use in the analysis ("concepts", in some circles), such as 'democratising', 'polarising', 'populist', 'elites', are ill-defined (in the author's apparent understanding) and sloppily used. Why is a comparison being made between social media use and AI use, anyway? (Or is it social media platforms and AI (LLM) robots?) On the one hand, there are the current political problems; on the other hand, while the rise of social media platforms has allowed the mobilisation of a discourse community who have not usually been so politically active, what the political effects of the use of AI robots (such as ChatGPT or Claude) to write texts or answer questions might be is not so evident. It looks like an apples and oranges comparison. It seems to me that social media use on the part of the people, in the context of ongoing messaging from the elites, allows greater reciprocal effects between the two that haven't existed traditionally. AI-produced texts can be manipulated in a certain direction by the user. How does this relate to the use of "us-vs-them" appeals, as opposed to "ideal-sharing" and "all-inclusive" appeals by the elites in election-oriented activity?
Here's a recent contribution by Simon Wren Lewis, a well-known economist at Oxford, as an example of the more careful commentators. This post, unlike the one above, provides a sound basis for further discussion of the problems of populism and popular thought, polarisation, democracy, etc.
https://mainlymacro.blogspot.com/2026/03/the-damage-that-right-wing-populists-do.html