Associative Saturation in Narrative Warfare & Propaganda

[Written with GPT-6 Instant, and a loooot of hand-holding. Doesn’t quite get at everything I want to get at, but an acceptable placeholder for now!] Traditional propaganda attempts to establish a particular [linear] narrative. It connects events, people, and ideas into a story designed to lead an audience toward a specific conclusion. A leads to B, B explains C, and C becomes evidence for D. But there is another, less recognized attack surface around generative AI, one that doesn’t require a coherent story or even a specific conclusion. Instead, it relies on flooding the information environment with fragments that repeatedly associate certain people, organizations, events, and ideas. The goal is to make those associations so prevalent that they become part of the background context from which AI systems construct answers. This is associative saturation. Imagine thousands of articles, posts, and websites repeatedly mentioning a particular institution alongside corruption, foreign…