there is the amplification of the message that is occuring and guiding conversations that is the work on troll farms

Absolutely. But far more often than not, the calls are coming from inside the house.

Peter Thiel and The Mercer Family are producing orders of magnitude more right-wing social media flak than any foreign government. Hell, I'd wager that groups like the Oathkeepers and the Proud Boys are producing more flak than any foreign government.

This more natural “grass roots” conversation is what I’m likening to their concerns about AI.

We've had call-and-response bots for decades now. The threshold by which automated systems can engage with a human participant and goad that person into some kind of activity is disturbingly low. You don't need some kind of sophisticated AI technology to string people along. Chaturbate bots have been doing this successfully since the 2010s, for instance.

Displacing all this shit onto "Russia" really blinds people to the native (and very often for-profit) nature of these operations. The vast majority of these spam bots and engagement farming tools are just MLMs wearing political insignia. And you don't even need to confine yourself to the Republican Party to find them. Online presences like Joshua4Congress and The Lincoln Project were more than happy to farm liberals and leftists for cash by pushing these comically overly-optimistic campaign messages in order to draw in donations that they simply paid out to themselves as consulting fee kickbacks.

AIs might be better at churning this crap out faster and distributing it farther. But the impact will be marginal relative to what people have been up to manually for some time.

It’s not like the Republican party was engaged in a large scale effort to cultivate disinformation from Russian trolls.

The Republican party spent somewhere north of $4B on the 2016 electoral cycle. I believe the Russian troll farm shit was on the order of a couple hundred grand. It just got picked up by national media as a scandal and received tons circulation through free publicity.

And it wasn’t “a few dozen Facebook ads” – it was a pretty large amount of activity

The national news coverage and social media spectacle was orders of magnitude beyond the ad buys themselves. Much like the Trump campaign, the ads got tons of free media - often from the same domestically owned and operated conservative publications - that inflated their presence far beyond what was paid for.

Having a million “ordinary citizens” extol the virtues of some position often just works better as a persuasive argument than having one or two celebrity endorsers

You tend to see one follow the other. So a celebrity will key in on something and kick off a domino effect of "ordinary citizens" talking about it. Conservative media revolves around the cultivation of right-wing celebrities to serve as nexuses for talking points. So a guy like Steven Crowder will sift through the backwash of Forwards From Grandma and pick a few of the stinkiest turds to mainline. Then his horde of followers trend the shit on Twitter in order to make it a national conversation piece.

In this case, the Russian ads were of high enough production quality that they became attractive bait for right-wing media to hash. And so domestic conservative media boosted the foreign propaganda far beyond its initial scope, simple because it resonated with their pro-Trump message.