Automated Masspersonal Social Engineering

Manipulative communication, including disinformation, propaganda, con artistry, and fraud, is not only being aided by artificial intelligence, automation, and machine learning. It is going to be dominated by such practices in the near future. In this chapter, we will draw on the central concept from our recent book (Gehl & Lawson, 2022), masspersonal social engineering, and show how this form of manipulative communication is and will continue to be automated. Masspersonal social engineering is comprised of distinct stages – trashing, pretexting, and bullshitting. We’ll show how those stages are automated, and argue that automation does not necessarily make any stage more effective – rather, automation can intensify each stage, or act as a prosthesis to human communication. We’ll conclude by considering how automation can help with the ultimate goal of masspersonal social engineering: penetration, arguing that communication-as-penetration and automation share many assumptions about the role of communication in society.