In addition to the $111 billion Paramount/Warner Bros merger just being foundationally bad for creatives, labor, and consumers, the Ellison family-owned company’s executives just keep demonstrating why they’re not really the kind of folks you want dominating the lion’s share of U.S. media.
That’s included calling deal critics “antisemitic,” cozying up to foreign authoritarians, constantly threatening to take Paramount out of California, or, more recently, using a fake consumer group (dubbed the “Neighbors for Strong Communities“) to try and create bogus public support for what’s a pretty broadly unpopular deal.
Neighbors for Strong Communities doesn’t disclose its funding donors and insists it’s not being “directly funded” by Paramount, but it has all the telltale signs of “astroturf,” or fake public interest advocacy. One of the things the group does is generate comments to California AG Rob Bonta urging him to drop the 12-state antitrust lawsuit against the merger. You know… for the children.
Rachel Antell at The Contrarian took a closer look at the Neighbors for Strong Communities website, and tried to fill out a letter to Rob Bonta opposing the merger, only to see something curious happen: The website’s AI-assisted letter system simply changed her writing to not only express support for the merger, but make up an entire fake backstory about her. This is not what she told it:
Antell notes the astroturf group’s letters leverage Influent, an AI vendor founded by a guy named Tanner Kelly, who registered as a California lobbyist last year. Antell herself is an archival producer who founded the Archival Producers Alliance and has crafted guidelines for the use of generative AI aimed at more transparently disclosing when it’s being used.
U.S. corporations have a very long history of flooding regulatory comment proceedings (or the press) with completely artificial support for what’s almost always bad policy few people actually support. You may recall how the telecom industry was caught using fake and dead people to support the Trump administration’s destruction of net neutrality rules and other consumer protections.
This stuff was bad before AI, now everything’s been taken to the next level. There’s no meaningful effort afoot to stop or identify it anywhere in the U.S. government. It exists as an effective way to drum out genuine public interest opinion and replace it with lazy cack that supports whatever shitty policy companies drum up (gaining merger approvals, gutting oversight).
In this case, that means creating fake workers who are super excited about a merger that’s going to result in thousands of layoffs as the bigger company’s executives offload their massive new debt obligations to labor and consumers. How do we know this? It’s what happens literally every time regulators rubber stamp more media consolidation — particularly when Warner Brothers is involved.