The differences that jump out at me are in cost, scale and accountability.
It's work recruiting people to your cause. It's expensive, and takes time and attention and resources. People have consciences that might flare up, they have loose lips, they need training and guidance and oversight.
Letting a bot loose for your cause costs pennies. It can be updated with a few clicks. You can reverse course or fine tune with a few sentences; you can even tailor it to the vulnerabilities of your victims with just a few data points.
The brainwashing inflicted on people by advertising and the like has had a tremendous cost to society, and the planet; absolutely incalculable. It would be prudent to be alert to the danger of all that being exacerbated 100- or 1,000-fold.
it's not just cheaper, its eminently more reactive.
your human recruiter is going to have their own biases, could be tired, may not know how to deal with personality X or Y, they may not learn.
the bots can track how they do by upvote, react quickly, won't get tired or annoyed, and can use existing data to filter and target those who are extremely vulnerable.
hell, with real-time analysis by data mining companies (cough cough FB, reddit) they could even figure out if/when a normally stable-ish person is in crisis or has a bad week, and hit them at their most susceptible. 99% of the year they might be able to see through the BS, but this week things are hard and what they're seeing in their feed just feels right, for once...
It's work recruiting people to your cause. It's expensive, and takes time and attention and resources. People have consciences that might flare up, they have loose lips, they need training and guidance and oversight.
Letting a bot loose for your cause costs pennies. It can be updated with a few clicks. You can reverse course or fine tune with a few sentences; you can even tailor it to the vulnerabilities of your victims with just a few data points.
The brainwashing inflicted on people by advertising and the like has had a tremendous cost to society, and the planet; absolutely incalculable. It would be prudent to be alert to the danger of all that being exacerbated 100- or 1,000-fold.