Is it unethical? Maybe. Gas lighting people because they believe the Wrong Thing™ and the end justifies the means.<p>People have conversations with others attempting to convince them of things. Is that unethical? Often, people do this from a disingenuous perspective. Is that more or less unethical than an LLM doing it?<p>What about scale? You can deploy LLMs to do this without feeding them. But we already have TV, one person can control hundreds bots on the internet, "the algorithm" in search engines and social feed creation, it would appear to me that propaganda is already industrialized to the point of diminishing returns, taking Howard Beale out of the loop is not going to increase the efficiency by that much.<p>Ethical or not, people will always try to increase their power by convincing others to behave in ways beneficial to themselves. It's the world we live in, if you don't want to be a tool you must remain vigilant, the tools being used don't change that at all.