@david_chisnall Why am I reminded of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toyah_Willcox?

@Daojoan More prosaically, if this AI thing had anything to offer, surely we'd be inundated with feel-good stories about how it was positively impacting local communities with new initiatives that presented (warning: linkedin-like speech) a "step-change" or "cutting a Gordian knot" in terms of dealing with entrenched thinking to present novel and far-reaching solution-oriented stuff.

@randahl I'd look at all that in a different way:

1) models will never be complete; they'll always need to scrape the internet to pick up on different forms of dissent
2) rather than worry about the models (and whether they have predictive power or not) focus on "a group of people will (pretend to) use AI to (pretend to) predict anti-AI people.
3) Sure, those people have an axe to grind and they'll use any excuse to attack their perceived enemies

2nd para...

1) most people who start out to write an anti-AI book will fail; no need to build an AI to prove that
2) it doesn't matter about percentages; if they want to attack you, they'll find some other pretext
3) I think that people power is much more important than getting elected to parliament if you want to effect change, so hobbling her in this way is kind of like a Hollywood movie script more than a realistic future event

In summary, it doesn't matter if they use AI (even if it turns out to be good/useful). The important thing is that there are certain groups out there who are anti-freedom, anti-privacy, anti-anything that doesn't fit their narrow, bigoted worldview and they'll use whatever tools are available to enforce their views on the world.