I found this is a “marketing” technique, that I first encountered on LinkedIn Groups.
A shill asks a specific question, which is then “answered” by a bunch of other shills, recommending some product.
I remember answering a technical “question” on the Swift Language group, in LI. I gave a simple, accurate, answer to what I considered to be an earnest question about a basic dilemma. It was something that I knew all about, and had a lot of experience, dealing with.
My answer was completely ignored, but the asker engaged many of the ridiculous “answers,” and I realized what was happening.
I left that group years ago (along with every other LI group, and, pretty much, LI, in general), and now see this technique being applied everywhere.
It may actually be a technique, taught in school. There's a lot of underhanded behavior in that field, especially in trying to drive talking points and corporate glossaries.
I know that was a joke, but the reality is almost as creepy.
I worked for a corporation that drove marketing terminology to use their glossary, and saw the thinking firsthand. It's not paranoia. In fact, it makes perfect sense, and may not even be that underhanded. They submit huge reams of text, interspersed with their talking points, to any and all publications, news outlets, whatever. Some percentage of that gets published; sometimes, verbatim, and that reinforces the glossary.
The underhanded stuff, is when they start sneaking it into places that should normally not be "infected" by this behavior (like news organizations that accept corporate dogma as news articles, and put their own bylines on corporate fodder).
AI is gonna absolutely supercharge this.
I could already do this with ChatGPT, but that's kind of clunky and primitive. Custom LLMs will make it almost completely invisible and undetectable, and create an enormous tsunami of this junk.
A shill asks a specific question, which is then “answered” by a bunch of other shills, recommending some product.
I remember answering a technical “question” on the Swift Language group, in LI. I gave a simple, accurate, answer to what I considered to be an earnest question about a basic dilemma. It was something that I knew all about, and had a lot of experience, dealing with.
My answer was completely ignored, but the asker engaged many of the ridiculous “answers,” and I realized what was happening.
I left that group years ago (along with every other LI group, and, pretty much, LI, in general), and now see this technique being applied everywhere.