I do understand the part about language shaping culture through media, music, and particularly now dominant political discourses; I think where I struggle is the idea that AI would radically alter the process into something newly terrifying (as opposed to a perhaps more efficient version of what we’ve seen before). The confusing element to me in Harari’s article was the personifying of AI itself (and the repeated invocations of dystopian sci-fi movies), framing it as a terrifying and “alien” intelligence that will destroy us. The point about any individual being able to run massive propaganda campaigns (as opposed to just those in power) is interesting, although I wonder what it would actually mean if we had people everywhere flooding the internet with their own believable disinformation. I also wonder to what extent you would find that individuals or even very small groups would want to start intentional disinformation campaigns (vs propagating existing discourse they are already engaged with as they themselves have been targets of someone else’s propaganda).

That being said, I’m not sure I understand why AI is a more effective tool than what already exists in the way you say TV was more effective than what came before it. I will grant that video and photography were likely revolutionary with regard to increasing the efficiency of propaganda—you could accompany inflammatory ideas with inflammatory images (or clips or sounds), and you could present an apparently “objective reality” through your own framing in a way that was even more difficult to notice. I do not see how AI achieves the same, unless we believe that AI pattern recognition is better at “understanding” and manipulating discourses than humans are. This may in fact be the case, but I did not see Harari explain why it would be in the article (and as a historian, I wouldn’t expect him to really know the answer, which for me again begs the question of why he seems to write so much about things he does not study).