The Atlantic (Gift Article), the information war will be fought through chatbots. “Journalists and other sources may be cited by the bots, but the people who control these AI products, such as Musk, now have a greater ability to manipulate how events are reported. This is a deeply troubling development—one that threatens to leave the public less informed, with fewer checks on those in power.” So yes, I worry about the technology. But I worry more about the owners of that technology, who have already shown a willingness to sacrifice the public good for personal gain…Hours before President Donald Trump announced Nicolás Maduro’s capture, on Saturday morning, people had questions for Grok, Elon Musk’s chatbot. Footage was circulating on X of explosions in Venezuela, and some users assumed the United States was responsible: “Hey @grok why is Trump sending US airstrikes to bomb Venezuela. Do you think they deserve it or not ?”one person asked. “@grok what is the reason why America is bombing Venezuela,” another asked. This is to be expected. Today, chatbots are treated as a source of information by many people. Millions in the United States alone use them to get information, and the number is growing. This means that tech companies such as X, Google, Anthropic, Meta, and OpenAI now play a central role not just in delivering information to people—as some of them have for decades, through social-media platforms and search engines—but in actively shaping what that information is: which facts are included and which are not. Journalists and other sources may be cited by the bots, but the people who control these AI products, such as Musk, now have a greater ability to manipulate how events are reported. This is a deeply troubling development—one that threatens to leave the public less informed, with fewer checks on those in power. There are already signs that some amount of influence is occurring. For starters, there have been a number of egregious incidents in which Grok has spread false details about a purported “white genocide” and aggressively posted in support of Musk himself. At one point, Google’s Gemini was directed to prioritize diversity in its responses, resulting in AI-generated images of racially diverse Nazis. Chatbots reflect their programming and training data, not only reality…”