> At least in the US, society has been well on it's way to collapse before the LLM came out. "Fake news" is a great example of this.

IMO you can blame this on ML and the ability to microtarget[1] constituencies with propaganda that's been optimized, workshopped, focus grouped, etc to death.

Proto-AI got us there, LLMs are an accelerator in the same direction.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microtargeting