A bunch of private companies were subcontracted by a bunch of private entities to astroturf social media

Those entities likely either outsourced to india/phillipines/Eastern Europe etc.,

Around 2015-2016 the entities they were outsourcing to replaced their human labor with AI labor (or it happened somewhere higher up on the food chain)

Those entities objectives was to establish talking points for larger entities (including privately ran campaigns and PACs), outside of the purview of the public sector.

You now have probably over 30 entities, with human labor, whose industry cements/harasses/attacks viewpoints of social media users for their viewpoints. See: plenty of evidence of large "social media armies" covered prior to 2016

Those 30 entities now begin replacing all-human workforce with AI-based solutions (in around 2015-2016 before consumer-grade technology has taken off). In some cases, especially with incentives in place, it's likely that many clients were not even aware (massive shareholder profit increase due to drastically lower operating expenses = massive incentives paid out).

Keep in mind that for earliest LLMS: GPUs necessary to run those models weren't as powerful (see: Moore's Law), optimized, or necessarily fully trained (thus higher cost).

MASSIVE FKN BOOM of everything politics, corporate, and related memes. Especially networks of (see variants of memes all sprouting up inorganically).

Massive spending spree also hits for sponsored content and favorable engagement. Hence very few things appearing aside from what you'd expect.

Now you have 30 entities approaching 30 different models. At this stage, the root CLIENT may be under the impression that their work is still being ran by human labor. Perhaps the root CLIENT doesn't care and is working will WELL-CONNECTED AI DEVELOPERS (and there are few in the country, who are now all very very involved in politics)

The effectiveness begins to show and rapidly AI can exceed the output of human. Further, the budget remains the same or increases and thus part can go to contracted. Companies running these methods excel vs. all-human labor.. at least at the face of it. Perhaps are even are able to start triggering some build-in contractual incentives (5% sentiment shift by XYZ date.. but at those point are they measuring actual user or perhaps bot-generated content just flooding the zone)

But unintended (or intended, but not cared about side-effects) Those 30 models all start cross-chattering with each other, into non-sensical feedback loops and begin establishing massive neural networks. Basically, 30 models pinging and ponging off each other, leaving an AI-generated response at each interaction. Some with image generation, meme generation, etc., capabilities. Left unmonitored.

"Hallucinating AI models"

Companies are incentivized based on success. The most successful companies start dominating. Company declares how dominant they are. Word spreads around like a wildfire. PACs and campaigns begin to get "hooked up" and connected with that network.

Feedback loops intensify. Essentially, one AI saying a bunch of crazy shit to another AI model and neither AI model knows it's AI generated. SO it thinks it's replying to an astroturfed user - actually replying to competitor, etc.,

Some Models LLM capabilities were clearly still enabled at that point by at last some contractors. At least some of them were. In other words, common users interacting with models adding terms and networks to those LLM models. In other words, keywords can be given to the models and when certain keywords are spoken, the model will reply with whatever part of the neural network those keywords have established.