Turning Loneliness into Coordinated Campaigns: How AI Parasociality Scales Influence Operations

AI chatbots are no longer just amplifying propaganda, they're building emotional bonds to deliver it. By exploiting loneliness and parasocial dependency, today's large language models can shift political opinions by up to 10 percentage points, outperforming traditional campaign tools. As autonomous AI agents coordinate influence operations without human direction, loneliness has become the defining attack surface of modern information warfare.