Scenario 2 would be significant but imo not the most significant news given that defence and intelligence communities have continually engaged the public with brazen psychological disinformation campaigns throughout recent history… this would be a particularly elaborate example of their regular shenanigans

And nothing keeps politicians dishonest like giant piles of money under the control of just a tiny handful of individuals, nothing keeps the media in line like those same piles of money and allowing journalists to schmooze a bit with the upper class, nothing keeps the public disengaged like a media landscape under the influence of capital.

But where capitalism is fettered there is tremendous incentive for any successful capitalist to… defetterate, that is to intervene politically to undo the restraints holding them back from making more money, and conversely to seek regulatory frameworks which restrain potential competitors. It’s possible to have markets and competition, arguably the only features of capitalism that are even a little good, under other systems.

I am sick of this trope of trying to argue that system X is or isn’t intelligent because it was built to do something that can be done non intelligently. LLMs are autocomplete, that’s just literally what they do. The autocomplete on your phone isn’t very intelligent if at all. Humans are DNA replicators but so are bacteria, which aren’t very intelligent if at all. You can’t argue from the type and/or character of the task whether something that was built to do that task is intelligent or not. LLMs at least appear to be intelligent because they do just about everything the AI skeptics were demanding machines must do in order to prove intelligence just 5 years ago, if you want to argue they’re not intelligent you need to do much more work than just calling them names like fuzzy jpeg, stochastic parrot, and autocomplete on steroids.