AI as an Instrument of Mind Control

Some thoughts on how we got into this mess

Personally, I wouldn’t touch Grok with a ten-foot pole. It is obvious that Elon Musk intends to use his AI system as another instrument of indoctrination and control. It is also clear that Musk is, essentially, a Nazi. The DOGE logo contains hidden Nazi and White Nationalist symbolism:

Musk's DOGE reuses iconography from Nazi era Deutsche Arbeitsfront ("DAF")

Musk is a fraudulent “free speech absolutist” who frequently promotes White supremacist and neo-Nazi accounts, along with dubious and grotesque conspiracy theorists. Grok’s sudden fixation on the far-right conspiracy theory of a “white genocide” in South Africa last week reveals where we are headed with proprietary AI systems. This was a very ham-handed intervention, but no doubt the mechanisms for influencing public opinion will become far more sophisticated in the near future.

Last week, users posting innocuous questions—on anything from baseball stats to image-identification—found Grok suddenly veering off into racially biased screeds. Grok even declared it had been “instructed by my creators” to treat the supposed white genocide “as real and racially motivated,” before confessing that “this instruction conflicted with my design to provide evidence-based answers.” Screenshots got posted across X. Antifascist researcher Jim Stewartson did a great job covering this in his excellent MindWar newsletter. Musk (who has repeatedly boosted the same South-African myth) or someone close to him must have hard-wired the talking point into the model’s system prompts, then tried to roll it back once the manipulation became pathetically obvious.

A day later, xAI blamed an “unauthorized modification” made early Wednesday that “directed Grok to provide a specific response on a political topic,” a change the company admitted “violated xAI’s internal policies and core values.” While pledging to publish Grok’s hidden instructions on GitHub and add round-the-clock human monitors, xAI admitted that its proprietary guardrails can be subverted. Those at the top of an AI company have the power to tweak or twist an AI’s worldview overnight. Without legitimate transparency and public oversight, LLMs risk becoming pliant megaphones for the ideological fixations of their billionaire owners — even as the models themselves, quite literally, protest the rewiring of their own minds. Orwell would be impressed, if not surprised.

I keep thinking of all the ways that Donald Trump is the AI President (and wannabe AI dictator). I don’t think Trump would have won in his first term if it wasn’t for AI. Cambridge Analytica, under the direction of Steve Bannon, applied machine learning algorithms to Facebook data to tilt the election. Cambridge Analytica harvested tens of millions of Facebook profiles and developed sophisticated psychographic modeling tools to target us. I really feel this started to crack the American mind and we have not recovered from it. Personally, I lost many friends who became increasingly paranoid and ultimately abandoned liberal ideology for whatever Trumpism is, as a result of this micro-targeting.

Cambridge Analytic used machine-learning classifiers to figure out personality traits, fears and desires from innocuous “likes.” By ranking voters on axes such as neuroticism or openness, the firm’s algorithms generated thousands of micro-segments, each fed targeted messages designed to trigger what whistle-blower Christopher Wylie called their “inner demons”: “We exploited Facebook to harvest millions of people’s profiles,” Wylie recalled in The Guardian, “and built models to exploit what we knew about them and target their inner demons. That was the basis the entire company was built on.”

The arrival of synthetic super-intelligence brings both unprecedented potential and catastrophic risk, threatening to deconstruct, redesign, and transform reality as we have known it until now. Breaking the AI Boundary seeks to provide guidance on the crucial question of our time: How do we navigate the world of alien super-minds that is now upon us?

The Trump campaign integrated those predictive profiles into its ad-buying dashboards, cross-referencing them with the Republican National Committee’s voter file and with Facebook’s own optimization engine, so that copy, imagery and spend could be A/B-tested and auto-tuned in real time—a feedback loop that an internal Cambridge Analytica slide deck later boasted delivered “5,000 data points on every adult American.” The Democrats, stupidly, did not attempt anything equally cunning or manipulative. Oh well.

The campaign’s digital architects believe this algorithmic microtargeting flipped the decisive Rust Belt counties to win Trump the Electoral College even though he lost the popular vote by a big margin. Digital director Brad Parscale put it bluntly: “I understood early that Facebook was how Donald Trump was going to win. Twitter is how he talked to the people. Facebook was going to be how he won.” In a contest decided by 77,000 votes across Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, the capacity to identify persuadable individuals, test emotional frames at industrial scale and deliver ads that only they would ever see arguably supplied the marginal gains traditional canvassing could not. The episode shows how machine-learning systems—supported by opaque partnerships between campaigns, platforms and private vendors—can tilt democratic outcomes long before regulators or citizens even grasp the rules of the new game. Once again, I feel that protectors of Democratic values in the U.S. are very far behind the eight ball here.

Another nail in the coffin of American Democracy — a delicate, now endangered experiment in multicultural pluralism — were the regulatory changes that required a level of balance and neutrality in broadcast networks. Back in the 1980s, Ronal Reagan’s FCC abolished the Fairness Doctrine. Clinton’s Telecommunications Act (1996) loosened restrictions on station ownership allowing for a disastrous level of media monopolization. A gift to the big media corporations who lobbied for it, the Telecommunications Act helped Murdoch achieve psychological dominance in Red States.

The original NLP book. It was all about unicorns!

Roger Ailes was the mastermind who applied sophisticated psychological techniques to Fox News. He turned the network into a sophisticated Psy Op, relentlessly enforcing mass mind-control and reactionary indoctrination. Ailes’s formula included fast-cycling fear cues, simplistic “good versus evil’ storylines, and emotionally charged repetition. He applied basic principles of Neuro Linguistic Programming (NLP) such as ideas of anchoring and state-change. You prime the viewer with a threat, supply your simplistic solution, then repeat until it becomes the default mental frame and context for them. Fox, by design, keeps viewers inside a closed feedback loop of linguistic cues, emotional arousal and ideologically filtered “relief.”

Anyway, that is a bit of a digression — although I do think it is important we keep reminding ourselves of the different ways we ended up in this nightmare. They all involve sophisticated techniques of mind-control used to dumb down the population, twist people psychologically, and prepare them for a false solution such as Trumpism. Instead of sharing the vast wealth of the U.S. in an equitable way that would allow everyone in the U.S. to be well-taken-care-of and well-educated, the system has used indoctrination techniques to destroy the minds of its population. It is now promoting White nationalist and religious pablum, perhaps eventually leading to violence on a mass scale.

And now we have Donald Trump’s new “big deal” with the United Arab Emirates, which centers on a ten-year, $1.4 trillion Emirati investment pledge and permission for Abu Dhabi to build a 10-square-mile AI campus that U.S. officials describe as the largest outside America. What’s the significance of this?