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Artificial Intelligence
How AI Manipulates You Daily (and How to Defend Yourself)
Protect your most important “currency” from those who seek to take it from you.
Posted April 11, 2024 Reviewed by Ray Parker
Key points
- Almost any internet content you can click on aims to influence or manipulate you.
- Those who are trying to influence you include both other people and the AI they employ.
- Adopt a mindset and practices that minimize your chances of being influenced in ways that don’t benefit you.
Like most Psychology Today readers, you are probably an intelligent and thoughtful person. And you also understand that the role of power and influence in human interactions and society is extremely important and can’t be overstated. You pay attention to your own words and actions, taking care to say and do what’s effective and not what feels gratifying at the moment. You likely also pay attention to the political dynamics of any organizations that you’re a part of and try to look for opportunities to influence and persuade others while, at the same time, trying to protect yourself from being manipulated by others in common ways.
Even for someone like you, however, it can be easy to forget everything you’ve learned about influence during one very simple act that we all do every single day: go on the internet. Given how much of our lives we live online, this presents a problem for anyone who wants to take greater control of who they permit to influence them and in what ways. In my last post, I wrote about interpersonal skills and how, by definition, they are the one area that artificial intelligence (AI) cannot beat you at. But it’s possible to excel at interpersonal skills and still let AI “beat” you, and it usually happens when you’re on social media. So let’s talk about how to protect yourself.
How AI Has Power and Influence Over You
If you think about it, almost anything you can possibly click on over the internet wants to influence you in some way. Even if it’s not explicitly an advertisement and the goal isn’t literally to sell you a product or service, it wants to influence you somehow, whether it’s getting you to think something, feel something, or do something (and, quite often, buy something).
Take this post, for example. Through it, I am encouraging you to internalize the ideas I present and then apply them in your own life in what I hope is a beneficial way. You could say this is a positive kind of influence. (Remember that one of the key ideas behind this post is that influence can be used for good.) As the writer, at least I’d like to think so. But it is an influence nevertheless. The point is that if you don’t recognize when people are trying to influence you, then you become susceptible to the bad kind of influence.
But if I want to influence you, and I’m a human being, what does this have to do with AI? Behind every blogger, YouTube personality, and social media influencer, there are the companies that own the platforms these bloggers and influencers use: YouTube, Meta, TikTok, Instagram, and the rest. Generally speaking, the goal of these platforms is to keep users on them as often as possible for as long as possible insofar as this increases the likelihood of those users clicking on targeted ads, which is what the sites' monetization models rely on. Where AI comes in is that it powers the algorithms designed to keep users on for as long and often as possible, using the users’ data to serve the content most likely to elicit their emotions and keep them engaged.
Obviously, AI itself has no emotions. It doesn’t “want” to influence you or to have power over you, but it does simply because, in the context of the internet, that’s what it’s been programmed to do. Even the people who wield AI as their tools don’t have some explicit wish to cause you harm actively; they’re simply trying to accomplish the goal of any company, which is to be as profitable. It just so happens that within the dominant business model of social media and online content, the kind of content that’s effective at keeping people engaged often happens to be emotionally charged: sensational, controversial, polarizing, triggering, or misinformative. Unfortunately, due to its massive computing power, AI is very good at understanding your psychology (often better than you do) and, therefore, utilizing content that is most likely to “push your buttons.”
How to Protect Yourself From AI-Powered Algorithms
In a previous post, I wrote about being data literate. Well, the first step towards protecting yourself against AI’s influence is to become social-media literate. This means being conscious of the fact that we live in an attention economy in which much of the business occurs between companies that want your attention and the content platforms that provide it to them. This means you are the product. Unless you enjoy being a product, here are some basic steps to resist being bought and sold.
1. Stop giving away your “money” for free. Think of your attention as a form of currency or “money” that you are constantly giving to others. Sometimes, you give it in exchange for something of value, but other times you don’t. Of course, it’s not just your attentional “money” that companies want; many of them want your actual money as well. To prevent too much of your attention or money from being given away, however, you have first to become aware of 1. that it happens, 2. how often it happens (i.e., most all of the time), and 3. why it happens. This means that just by reading this post, you are already taking the first step. Congratulations.
2. Be skeptical or suspicious about everything online. Cultivate a healthy level of skepticism or suspicion towards just about everything you see on the internet, especially on social media. Remember, much of what you’re seeing is being custom-served to you by AI based on the extensive data it has about you with the goal of keeping you clicking.
3. Consider who’s trying to influence you and why. Even though AI is definitely influencing you via customized content, behind the curtain there are people trying to influence you as well, both individuals and organizations. A useful exercise you can, therefore, do while browsing the internet or social media is to take note of the platforms you’re on and remember that nearly all of them want to keep you clicking—again, not necessarily out of maliciousness but because that’s how their business models work. This doesn’t mean the sources you’re using are necessarily untrustworthy; it’s just useful to remember that your intellectual growth is not at all their priority.
Next, for anything you click on, note who posted it. If it’s an ad from a company, you know right away that they’re trying to sell you something. This doesn’t mean don’t click the ad or don’t buy the product, just be aware that you’re being influenced by marketing professionals who know what they’re doing.
Even if it’s an article, whoever posted it is still trying to “sell” you something—a certain viewpoint, let’s say, or the idea of engaging in a certain action. What do you know about this person? If it's nothing, what can you find out by reading their bio? Are you comfortable with what you’ve learned from their bio? At the very least, let this inform how you receive their content.
4. Remember the limits to social media literacy. Being internet or social media literate doesn’t make you immune to being influenced. It’s like I wrote about critical thinking: it’s certainly preferable to be social media literate than illiterate, but if you view yourself as literate, that in itself can make you vulnerable to viewpoints that confirm the biases and internal narratives we are all subject to. Because of this, you just have to accept that any time you browse the internet or social media, you’re probably going to be influenced in some way.
5. Try taking an occasional break. For the precise reason that there’s no way to avoid being influenced on the internet completely, you might want to take breaks now and then. Most of us rely on the internet for work to some degree, so it may be impossible to get off it completely. However, even just taking breaks from social media would vastly reduce how much you’re being influenced in undesirable ways. In fact, this is one of the reasons why computer scientist Jaron Lanier argues for deleting your social media accounts entirely because it’s the only guaranteed solution.
Lanier has a point, but you don’t need to do anything that drastic. Remember: We’re not necessarily trying to prevent ourselves from being influenced at all, which is arguably impossible. We’re just trying to make it less likely to be influenced in ways that don’t benefit us, especially without being aware of it. Adopting a discerning mindset and practicing the steps discussed can go a long way toward making your time online much more productive and efficient.
