> If it's just making powerpoint presentations why do AI companies whose whole raison d'etre is that they can make these powerpoints in seconds for pennies spend millions on lobbying instead?

Because you need meat puppets to identify what arguments are going to be compelling to which politicians, and go into an office and spoon feed it to the staffers.

> Lobbying is cheap because it identifies the relatively small number of leverage points it takes to send society down one track instead of another and targets the spending there. Buy the right guy dinner and you get what you want just the same as if you'd spent billions on ads to convince millions of people to vote for the guy who's gonna do what you want.

If that were true, then the price of doing that would get bid up. It's extremely rare that you have an issue where there's not people with deep pockets on both sides of the issue.