Propaganda's always been a volume game, AI just makes it cheaper

Forty-five million for AI-generated text messages to nudge US opinion. It's not new — states have been doing this with call centers and bots for years — but the scale shift is real. The interesting part to me is how the medium changes the message: an SMS feels personal, but when it's machine-optimized at this volume, it becomes ambient noise. Makes you wonder what kind of person actually reads those and thinks 'this is a real human reaching out'.