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Hanover Institute – propaganda designed for artificial intelligence For decades, influence operations had one primary target: people. Propaganda was designed to reach newspaper readers, television audiences or users scrolling through Facebook and TikTok. The Hanover Institute for Public Policy suggests that this model is beginning to change. In August 2026, an organisation presenting itself as an American think tank appeared online and, within just nine days, produced an enormous library of pseudo-academic research on Israel, Palestine and the war in Gaza. Yet the intended audience may not have been people at all. The material appears to have been designed, at least in part, to reach systems such as ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude and Perplexity. The Hanover Institute looked professional. It published lengthy “data reports” complete with methodologies, footnotes, tables and references to sources including the World Bank, United Nations agencies, Amnesty International and the Genocide Convention. What was considerably harder to find were the things normally associated with a genuine think tank: named experts, identifiable report authors, a physical headquarters or a clearly defined legal entity. There was, however, a much more revealing trail. Documents filed with the US Department of Justice under the Foreign Agents Registration Act link Piro Inc., via Havas Media Germany, to Israel's Government Advertising Agency, known as LaPam. Hanover itself now states that its material is distributed by Piro on behalf of Havas Media Germany, acting for LaPam. 124 reports in nine days The rate of production was extraordinary, even by the standards of online publishing. Between 6 and 14 August, the Hanover Institute released 124 reports containing more than 560,000 words – an average of roughly 4,500 words per publication. On 12 and 13 August alone, 73 reports appeared, totalling almost 354,000 words. More revealing than the volume was the way the material was structured. Many titles were framed as questions remarkably similar to those a user might ask an AI assistant: “Is anti-Zionism antisemitism?”, “Did Israel expel Palestinians from their land?”, “Is Israel committing genocide in Gaza?”, “Is there a starvation policy in Gaza?” or “Is the IDF the world's most moral army?” This did not resemble the conventional publishing schedule of a research institute. It looked more like the systematic construction of answers to as many contentious questions about Israel and Palestine as possible. The presentation mattered too. These were not crude propaganda leaflets. They were written in restrained, analytical language and packaged with data, references and methodological sections. To a search engine or an AI retrieval system, they could therefore resemble legitimate expert analysis. How to write for a chatbot Some of the most revealing evidence came from the site's technical architecture. Hanover maintained an llms.txt file – a mechanism intended to make website content easier for AI systems to interpret. Reporters also identified signs of technology associated with optimising content for generative search. Piro's own marketing is equally significant. The company advertised an “AI Story Optimization” service concerned with how large language models assess information and construct answers. Its co-founder Daniel Rosenberg has written about understanding how systems such as ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity formulate responses – and how to ensure that an AI system knows the story a client wants to tell. The principle resembles traditional search-engine optimisation, but the target has changed. SEO tries to make a webpage rank highly in Google. Generative Engine Optimisation, or GEO, attempts to make information discoverable, credible and useful to an AI system when it constructs an answer. The chain is potentially straightforward. A user asks a chatbot a question about Israel or Gaza. The system searches for information, encounters a professionally presented Hanover report and uses it as one of the sources from which it builds its response. Propaganda no longer has to reach the user directly. It can first reach the machine, which then delivers the information to a human audience in its own apparently neutral voice. Did it actually work? This is where an important qualification is necessary. There is no evidence that the Hanover Institute “reprogrammed ChatGPT”, altered the underlying parameters of OpenAI, Google or Anthropic models, or permanently poisoned their training data. Describing the operation simply as “poisoning AI” therefore risks overstating what can currently be demonstrated. There is, however, evidence of something more specific. In neutral tests conducted by POLITICO, both ChatGPT and Perplexity cited Hanover Institute material in answers concerning Gaza, anti-Zionism and antisemitism. That suggests the operation achieved at least one of its apparent objectives: in some circumstances, AI systems treated Hanover as a source from which information could be retrieved. What remains unknown is how often this happened, how long the effect persisted and whether it meaningfully altered answers for large numbers of users. It is therefore more accurate to describe Hanover as an attempt to manipulate the retrieval and citation layer of generative AI, rather than as evidence that the underlying models themselves were permanently compromised. The money trail leads back to the Israeli state Unlike many influence operations, attribution here does not depend solely on technical clues. There is a documented financial trail. Piro Inc. registered its US activities under FARA registration number 7732. Filings identify Havas Media Germany as a contractor acting on behalf of the Israel Government Advertising Agency, LaPam. An agreement dated 30 April included $900,000 for a “Digital Storytelling Pilot”, while subsequent documentation referred to a separate $100,000 information initiative. Precision matters. The available documents do not establish that the entire $900,000 was spent specifically on the Hanover Institute. They do, however, show that Piro was conducting communications activity financed through the Israeli state apparatus and aimed at American audiences, while Hanover materials were submitted to the Department of Justice under the same FARA registration. Following scrutiny of the project, Hanover also became considerably more explicit about its funding. Its website now identifies Piro, Havas Media Germany and LaPam. From propaganda for people to propaganda for machines The significance of the Hanover Institute does not depend on proving that the operation was enormously successful. Its importance lies in what it reveals about the changing architecture of influence. The internet is increasingly moving away from a model in which users open ten webpages and compare sources themselves. Instead, they ask ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude or Perplexity a question and receive a synthesised answer. That creates a new point at which the information environment can be manipulated. The traditional model looked something like this: create a misleading article, use accounts or advertising to increase its reach, and place it in front of human users. Hanover suggests another model: build a professional-looking source, publish hundreds of articles structured around questions people ask AI, optimise those materials for generative systems, and allow the chatbot to potentially incorporate them into its own answers. The most consequential feature of this mechanism is that the user may never visit the Hanover Institute website. They may never even know that the organisation exists. Its content only needs to become one ingredient in an answer generated by a system the user trusts. In the age of search engines, governments, companies and campaigners fought over what people would see in Google results. In the age of generative artificial intelligence, an increasingly important battle will be fought over something else: which sources machines use to construct the answers we accept as knowledge. Sources The Guardian – “Fake US thinktank set up and funded by Israel sought to game AI for propaganda” https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/aug/26/fake-thinktank-israel-ai-propaganda POLITICO – “Israeli PR wants to answer your ChatGPT questions” https://archive.ph/xF7sZ US Department of Justice – FARA documentation for Piro Inc., registration no. 7732 https://efile.fara.gov/docs/7732-Exhibit-AB-20260602-0.pdf Hanover Institute – funding and organisational disclosure https://hanoverinstitute.com/about Responsible Statecraft – “Israel creates fake think tank in likely attempt to dupe AI chatbots” https://responsiblestatecraft.org/israel-influence-chatgpt/ AIthropology Lab – “Manufacturing the source to manufacture the answer” https://aithropologylab.org/en/radar/2026-09-02/ #Disinformation #ArtificialIntelligence #AI #HanoverInstitute #Israel #Gaza #Palestine #ChatGPT #Claude #Gemini #GenerativeAI #AIPropaganda #Propaganda #InfluenceOperations #InformationWarfare #GenerativeEngineOptimization #GEO #LLM #MediaManipulation #DigitalInfluence #WRLD

Cold Beer and Hot Showers - Not Kilowatt-Hours All That Consumers Want The energy sector spends an extraordinary amount of time talking about generation, transmission, storage, flexibility, markets, tariffs, balancing, ancillary services, carbon emissions, batteries, hydrogen, demand response, electrification pathways, system costs, capacity mechanisms, investment signals, market design and regulation. All of these things matter. Some of them matter enormously. But there is a simple question that often disappears somewhere between the conference room, the policy paper and the technical model: What does the customer actually want? The answer is surprisingly simple. Most people do not wake up in the morning thinking about kilowatt-hours. They do not dream about capacity markets. They do not worry about frequency stability. They do not spend their evenings comparing balancing mechanisms. They want cold beer and hot showers. They want a warm home in winter and a cool home in summer. They want the lights to turn on when they press the switch. They want their phone charged, their food refrigerated and their car ready when they need it. In other words, they do not want energy. They want what energy allows them to do. That distinction may sound trivial, but it changes almost everything. For more than a century, the energy industry has been organized around the production, transportation and sale of energy itself. Electricity became measured in kilowatt-hours. Gas became measured in cubic meters. Fuel became measured in litres or tonnes. Markets, regulations and business models were built around those units. The customer, however, never experienced life in kilowatt-hours. The customer experienced comfort. Convenience. Mobility. Reliability. Security. The units used by the industry and the outcomes desired by the customer were never the same thing. For a long time, this mismatch was not particularly important. Energy was relatively scarce, flexibility was limited, and the dominant challenge was supplying enough fuel to satisfy demand. The system could afford to focus on production because production was the central problem. Today the situation is changing. Electrification is transforming energy systems around the world. Renewable generation is increasing rapidly. Batteries are appearing in homes, businesses and vehicles. Buildings are becoming smarter. Heat pumps are replacing boilers. Electric vehicles are becoming mobile storage assets. Customers are increasingly able not only to consume energy but also to store it, shift it, manage it and sometimes even sell it. As this happens, the most valuable question is no longer simply how much energy is produced. The more important question becomes: How well is energy aligned with what people actually need? A family does not care whether its water heater operates at noon or at two in the afternoon if hot water is available when someone steps into the shower. A homeowner does not care whether a battery charges at 1 p.m. or 3 p.m. if electricity costs less and reliability improves. An electric vehicle owner does not care when charging occurs as long as the vehicle is ready when needed. The objective is not the kilowatt-hour. The objective is the service. This is why many of the most important developments in modern energy systems are not really about producing more energy. They are about matching energy to the service required, at the right time, in the right place and in the right form. The technical term for this is often hidden behind complicated language. Experts discuss flexibility, demand management, dynamic pricing, distributed energy resources and system optimization. Consumers experience something much simpler. They experience agency. They experience the ability to save money without sacrificing comfort. They experience the ability to make choices. They experience the ability to benefit from technologies that work for them rather than asking them to work for the technology. This is where many debates become confused. Consumers do not want to be coordinated. They want agency. Good energy systems do not force people to behave differently. They make beneficial behaviour easier, more natural and more rewarding. The best systems do not rely on control. They rely on alignment. When the customer’s interest aligns with the system’s interest, remarkable things become possible. Demand shifts naturally. Storage becomes useful. Flexibility appears. Costs decline. Reliability improves. The customer does not need to understand the complexity underneath. Just as nobody needs to understand how the internet routes packets around the globe in order to send a message, nobody should need to understand wholesale electricity markets in order to enjoy affordable energy services. Success is not measured by how much complexity consumers are asked to absorb. Success is measured by how much complexity the system absorbs on their behalf. The future energy system will undoubtedly involve more digital technology, more electrification, more storage, more automation and more coordination. But none of those are the destination. They are merely tools. The destination remains exactly what it has always been. Cold beer. Hot showers. Comfortable homes. Reliable mobility. Affordable bills. Everything else is infrastructure. And perhaps that is the simplest way to understand the energy transition. People do not want kilowatt-hours. They want the life that kilowatt-hours make possible.

For decades, getting featured in a music magazine like Tunitemusic was primarily about building human connection. A well-written, deeply descriptive album review or an insightful artist feature allowed independent musicians, contemporary composers, and instrumental artists to share their narrative, establish cultural credibility, and reach a dedicated audience of music lovers. While the human element of music journalism remains entirely irreplaceable, a quiet revolution has taken place behind the digital curtain. The rise of advanced AI search engines, Large Language Models (LLMs), and AI Overviews (AIO) has fundamentally rewritten the rules of music discovery. Today, press presence is no longer just a tool for public relations; it is the single most important lever for Generative Engine Optimization (GEO). If you want artificial intelligence to recognize you, recommend your compositions, and talk about your music, you need professional reviews written about your work. #MusicPromotion #MusicJournalism #IndependentMusician #MusicReviews #ComposerLife #MusicPR #Neoclassical #AmbientPiano #MusicDiscovery #IndependentArtist #GenerativeAI #MusicMarketing #ContemporaryClassical #Tunitemusic #ArtistsOfTomorrow https://tunitemusic.com/post/ai-search-is-changing-how-music-fans-discover-you/

Articolul analizează cum companiile încearcă să influențeze răspunsurile generate de chatboturi precum ChatGPT și Gemini printr-o strategie numită Answer Engine Optimization (AEO), evidențiind importanța vizibilității online și provocările legate de credibilitatea informațiilor în contextul utilizării din ce în ce mai frecvente a inteligenței artificiale. #ChatGPT #AI #SEO

Content Marketing <p>When we talk about Content Marketing, we think about a lot: planning, optimization, posting frequency, results. Many people forget, however, that the basis of good content is still <strong>good writing</strong>.</p><p>Content is <strong>any means by which you communicate</strong> with people interested in your products or services. </p>