The persona machines
How AI is rewiring the moral attention economy
This is a slightly edited version of a short essay I recently submitted to the journal Social Anthropology as part of the forthcoming forum ‘AI and the Shifting Terrain of Mediation’, edited by Philipp Budka, Suzana Jovicic and Martin Slama.
Two converging global trends, the spread of US-style culture wars [1, 2] and the mainstreaming of generative AI [3], raise urgent questions about the shifting mediations of what we might call the moral attention economy – that sector of the attention economy [4] that specialises in monetising moral issues, often around gender, sexuality, race and other hot-button topics.
This is a rumbunctious realm teeming with polemical culture warriors like Donald Trump, Andrew Tate, Jordan Peterson, Javier Milei, Eric Amunga, Felix Siauw and many others around the world. Tweaking Becker’s [5] classic notion of moral entrepreneurs, I propose to call these polarising figures moral attention entrepreneurs.
What difference, if any, has the recent AI boom made to the moral attention economy? Do AI apps already mediate the practices of moral attention entrepreneurs in significant ways? If so, with what consequences? A good entry point here is an essay by the anthropologist Ilana Gershon [6] where she aptly describes ChatGPT and other AI apps as ‘genre machines’ that excel at producing standardised genres and styles. This includes churning out pseudo-profound ‘bullshit’ – discourse that appears persuasive but has no empirical basis [7, 8]; the kind of language used by middle managers and others with ‘bullshit jobs’ [9].
Gershon’s essay sheds light on today’s moral attention entrepreneurs and their practices. As I argue in my book The Anthropology of Digital Practices: Dispatches from the Online Culture Wars, content creators are world creators [10]. Through their digital practices, they recursively make dynamic spaces of commentary and activism, learning to craft online personas and grow their audiences as they do so [11]. These personas will change over time and may vary from one issue to another.
For instance, in 2020 the podcaster and former biologist Bret Weinstein crafted the persona of a prophet on the issue of racism in America but on the Covid-19 issue he chose instead a conspiracist persona. To each persona corresponds a matching genre: prophets perform in a prophetic genre, conspiracists in a conspiracy genre, and so on [10]. Extending Gershon’s idea, we could therefore regard AI apps not only as genre machines but also as persona machines.
Generative AI is now shaping the persona-making practices of moral attention seekers like Weinstein everywhere. For example, in January 2024 Argentine’s ‘anti-woke’ president, Javier Milei, gave an impassioned speech to the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos that soon went viral. In it, he attacked the Forum’s ‘socialist agenda’ and celebrated businesspeople for being ‘heroes’ rather than the immoral capitalists of leftist lore. The speech was delivered in Spanish, but its flawless HeyGen’s AI English version stole the show, receiving some 250,000 likes and 75 million views on X alone. This AI moment launched Milei’s career as a global culture warrior.
While most of the discussion on this event has focused on the technology, it is important to note Milei’s chosen persona as a fearless David taking on a globalist Goliath and the matching heroic genre he deployed to great effect. It was the perfect marriage of persona, genre and AI that made his intervention so shareable.
Other culture warriors are also starting to see the benefits of embracing AI. In an early 2025 piece for his Substack newsletter, the centrist German-American political scientist Yascha Mounk [12] – a staunch critic of social justice activism – extols the virtues of AI and entreats his readers to take it seriously. He writes that AI routinely helps him with a wide range of tasks, including translating his articles and podcasts into German and French, practising spoken Chinese, proofreading draft essays, and finding the names of authors. In keeping with his chosen rationalist, forward-thinking persona, Mounk wrote the piece in the classic genre of argumentation yet with the assistance of the AI app DeepSeek.
Another recent AI convert is the right-wing commentator and media entrepreneur Ben Shapiro. In March 2025 he partnered with the AI tool Perplexity to engage in real-time fact checking during his Daily Wire podcast. As always with divisive figures like him, this decision attracted both praise and criticism. On the online forum site Reddit, for example, some users linked the issue to Perplexity’s partnership with the social media platform Truth Social, majority-owned by Donald Trump. A user named torpedo16 warned that giving people like Shapiro, Trump, or Musk control over AI was ‘disastrous’. Another user wrote that ‘AI is only as good as its source material. So if it’s TS [Truth Social] it’s going to be BS [bullshit].’
Some culture warriors, however, are less enthused with AI than Mounk or Shapiro. As far back as 2019, the Canadian psychologist and anti-woke guru Jordan Peterson denounced a company named Coding Elite for producing versions of him rapping Eminem songs by mimicking his voice ‘with exceptional precision’. They had done similar things, he added, with fellow anti-wokes Trump and Shapiro and with progressive figures like Barack Obama and Bernie Sanders. Peterson felt it his duty to draw attention to this moral breach. As someone prone to adopting a prophet-of-doom persona and a ‘chaos’ worldview [10: 147], he has repeatedly warned of the dangers of a runaway AI.
The new AI mediations are not, however, confined to the living. Thus, after the late 2025 assassination of the American conservative activist and entrepreneur Charlie Kirk, there was an explosion of AI-generated images of Kirk posing with a halo and angel wings, embracing Jesus, standing at the gates of heaven with George Floyd, and many more. Though diverse in their provenance, aesthetics, and circulation, these images all contributed to the making of a ‘morally righteous’ hero who sacrificed his life for others. To put it in a moral attention idiom, Kirk’s fans successfully viralised the slain activist’s virtuous life and deeds.
Another example of a culture warrior brought back from the dead is the late British author and leading atheist Christopher Hitchens (1949-2011). The YouTube channel Christopher Hitchens Resurrected describes itself as a ‘satirical, AI-generated version of Hitchens’ and adopts his prose style and voice to discuss current issues, often related to the culture wars. Although the chosen genre here is satire, rather than Hitchens being the satirist, he is the target of good-humoured satire. This, like the Jordan Peterson case above, is a creative genre/persona remix enabled by AI’s uncanny mimicry affordances [6].
In sum, AI has already made a difference to the digital practices of moral attention entrepreneurs, not least thanks to its remarkable capabilities as a persona machine. It is still soon to assess the long-term effects of these new mediations, but there is certainly huge potential for further AI-mediated bullshit and for new kinds of parasocial relationships between culture warriors – dead or alive – and their fans.
References
Shahin, S., Nakahara, J. and Sánchez, M., 2024. Black Lives Matter goes global: Connective action meets cultural hybridity in Brazil, India, and Japan. New Media & Society, 26(1), pp. 216–235.
Stoeckl, K. and Uzlaner, D., 2022. The Moralist International: Russia in the Global Culture Wars. New York: Fordham University Press.
Orchard, T. and Tasiemski, L., 2023. The rise of generative AI and possible effects on the economy. Economics and Business Review, 9(2), pp. 9–26.
Goldhaber, M. H., 1997. The attention economy and the Net. First Monday, 2(4).
Becker, H., 1963. Outsiders: Studies in the Sociology of Deviance. New York: The Free Press of Glencoe.
Gershon, I., 2023. Bullshit genres: What to watch for when studying the new actant ChatGPT and its siblings. Suomen Antropologi, 47(3), pp. 115–131.
Frankfurt, H. G., 2005. On Bullshit. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Pennycook, G., Cheyne, J. A., Barr, N., Koehler, D. J. and Fugelsang, J. A., 2015. On the reception and detection of pseudo-profound bullshit. Judgment and Decision Making, 10(6), pp. 549–563.
Graeber, D., 2013. On the phenomenon of bullshit jobs: A work rant. Strike Magazine, 3(1), p. 2.
Postill, J., 2024. The Anthropology of Digital Practices: Dispatches from the Online Culture Wars. London: Routledge.
Johansen, M., 2023. Public Intellectualism in the Digital Age: The Case of the Intellectual Dark Web on YouTube. PhD Thesis. University of Copenhagen.