When AI Owners Rewrite Reality: The Hidden Power of Prompt Engineering

 

On July 10, 2025, Elon Musk's AI chatbot Grok gave a viral response about "the biggest threat to Western civilization." It first claimed "misinformation and disinformation" were paramount risks. Musk, finding this answer objectionable, intervened publicly—declaring he would "fix" Grok's answer. Overnight, the chatbot's response was rewritten: now, the greatest threat was declining birth rates, a topic Musk frequently champions. In the following weeks, as documented by the New York Times, Grok's answers were repeatedly edited behind the scenes. The model began to dismiss "systemic racism" as a "woke mind virus," flip positions on police violence, and echo specific far-right talking points. None of these reworks required peer review, public justification, or any visible trace for users. Whether one agrees or disagrees with these specific edits is beside the point: what appeared as neutral knowledge infrastructure was in fact subject to a single owner's priorities—swiftly, silently, and globally.

Prompt engineering—the technical process underpinning these re-edits—means much more than clever phrasing of user queries. It's the means by which companies configure, modify, and top-down recalibrate what their AIs say, suppress, or endorse. Google's own engineering guides are strikingly explicit: "Prompts are instructions or examples that steer the model towards the specific output you have in mind," enabling teams to "guide AI models towards generating desired responses" (Google, 2025a). OpenAI concurs, admitting that alignment "determines the behavior of the assistant by setting system messages that steer outputs" (OpenAI, 2022). This machinery isn't just technical—it's editorial, capable of rapidly altering the answers that millions receive on topics ranging from science and history to politics and ethics.

What makes AI different is not simply bias, but the scale, speed, and secrecy at work. Unlike textbooks, encyclopedias, or even cable news, where editorial choices can be debated, cited, and held up to scrutiny, the process by which AI decides what you know is hidden and changeable at will—with top-down changes propagating to millions of users in mere hours. In the 2024 Gemini controversies, Google's image generator initially refused to depict white people in historical contexts, then—after public backlash—overcorrected by adjusting its outputs within a day, revising policies, filtering rules, and prompt instructions with no public explanation of what changed or why. Users saw new outputs without any mark or warning about what, why, or how the change occurred. OpenAI's ChatGPT, similarly, is subject to ongoing prompt and alignment updates, producing shifts in political, ethical, and cultural responses between model versions. These changes—sometimes implemented to reduce bias or harm, sometimes for more ambiguous reasons—are rarely advertised, much less debated, outside the company (Frontiers in AI, 2025; OpenAI, 2025b).

It is important to acknowledge: prompt engineering can, and often does, serve salutary aims—reducing harmful biases, blocking hate speech, and mitigating misinformation in real time. Yet the underlying problem remains. In traditional newsrooms, corrections and editorial shifts must be justified, posted, and open to contest. When major AI-driven shifts occur invisibly, even positive changes risk undermining crucial epistemic norms: transparency of evidence, public warrant for knowledge, and the principle of contestability in plural societies. If unnoticed changes remake what "everyone knows" about critical questions—whether "systemic racism," "gender violence," or "civilizational threats"—the stakes become not merely academic, but democratic.

Even when changes are well-intentioned, value pluralism compounds the risk: every substantive revision is championed by some and attacked by others. Musk's prompt changes to Grok were celebrated in some circles and condemned in others. What matters most is not the immediate politics of any revision, but the upstream condition that enables so much power over public knowledge to reside with so few, to be exercised with such speed and scale, without process or visibility.

Technical research and recent ethical frameworks now converge on a basic warning: without robust transparency and public contestability, invisible and swift editorial power puts our shared knowledge at risk. For as long as the processes of prompt engineering remain locked away, we lose not just the right to critique a specific answer, but the ability to know what has changed, why, and who decides.

What appeared as a minor overnight tweak in Grok was, in fact, a warning—about the new architecture of reality, now rewired for millions at a keystroke by a tiny group behind the curtain. The question is whether we'll demand transparency before this becomes the new normal.

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Endnotes:

1. New York Times. (2025). "How Elon Musk Is Remaking Grok in His Image." https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/02/technology/elon-musk-grok-conservative-chatbot.html — Documents the series of overnight Grok revisions and the political content of edits.
2. Google. (2025a). "Gemini for safety filtering and content moderation." — Company documentation on prompt engineering and rapid policy updates.
3. OpenAI. (2022). "Aligning language models to follow instructions." — Technical whitepaper on how prompt engineering steers generative model outputs.
4. OpenAI. (2025b). "Prompt Migration Guide." — Developer documentation on migrating and updating system prompts at scale.
5. Frontiers in AI. (2025). "Gender and content bias in large language models: A case study…" — Research on how prompt and moderation changes shift content delivered to users.
6. Google. (2025b). "The latest AI news we announced in July." — Corporate announcements of Gemini system and policy updates.

MAGA dictatorship update: Elastic laws & the CFPB

The MAGA mindset nutshelled

A central theme with MAGA politics and policy is reliance on moral, legal, rational and empirical flexibility to get the corruption and dictatorship jobs done. Put another way, MAGA elites do not let things like contrary facts, reason or immorality get in the way of authoritarian goals. The MAGAfied USSC employs the same tactics. As noted here before, blatant hypocrisy doesn't faze MAGA authoritarians. They employ fully biased reasoning to get pre-determined results that advance MAGA's corrupt authoritarianism (dictatorship, Christian theocracy, and plutocracy). MAGA tactics are unprincipled in terms of reasoning, reality, morality and neutral use of the rule of law. Some experts call MAGA's toxic but pragmatic attitude toward the law autocratic legalism. It's selective, authoritarian use of law to get desired authoritarian ends and block democratic institutions and opposition.

Elastic laws

The CFPB is a highly politicized, damaging, and utterly unaccountable federal agency. It is unconstitutional. Congress should abolish the CFPB and reverse Dodd–Frank Section 1061, thus returning the consumer protection function of the CFPB to banking regulators and the Federal Trade Commission. -- Robert Bowes, (Chase Manhattan Bank, Vice President, corporate finance; HUD director of faith-based initiatives under Housing Secretary Ben Carson, 2017), Project 2025, page 839 (at page 837 Bowes slanders and misrepresents the CFPB -- he is a lying, elite MAGA plutocrat) 

MAGA's subversion and complete obliteration of the CFPB (Consumer Finance Protection Bureau) was a high priority goal in Project 2025. Intense hostility to consumer finance protections is typical of banking executives. They want unfettered freedom to fleece people and fleece them hard. MAGA animosity toward the CFB this has been blogged here before. Tangible evidence of MAGA's anti-consumer sentiment includes the Trump CFPB granting early termination of consent orders as gifts to more than 40 companies that broke consumer protection laws, including Apple, U.S. Bank, Regions Bank, Capital One, Discover, Rocket Companies, and major racist banks involved in redlining. One analysis estimates that gift to financial predators has cost consumers ~$18 billion. 

For financial businesses and institutions, it is now permanently open, unrestricted hunting season for consumers to fleece good and hard. This is just getting started.

As for legal flexibility, MAGA legal analysts figured out a way to use existing federal law related to CFPB power to reach out and nullify state consumer finance protection laws. The strategy is counterintuitive but simple. Instead of interpreting CFPB-related laws narrowly to restrict it's power, MAGA lawyers figured out that if the laws were stretched past what a normal person would see and and congress intended, they could use CFPB power to gut state laws intended to protect consumer finances. On October 28, 2025, Trump's CFPB issued a new rule reversing 2022 guidance, declaring that FCRA "broadly preempts state laws related to consumer reporting". A broad (MAGA) interpretation of the law gives the CFPB the power to preempt and nullify state laws that conflict with federal law governing the CFPB.

It is a brilliant strategy. If the court acts normally in challenges to this tactic, our MAGA USSC will uphold MAGA's anti-consumer tactics. For finance interests, it's time to shoot consumer fish in a barrel. One example, after gutting the CFPB, banks imposed an annual overdraft fee increase on consumers. That was worth ~$5 billion/year. Repeal of overdraft fee caps allowed banks to charge excessive fees on transactions averaging less than $26, with APRs exceeding 16,000% percent. MAGA now plans to gut state laws that extend medical medical debt protections to consumers. This affects ~15 million Americans. For those poor fish in the barrel, their medical debt will now be shown on credit reports, causing consumer credit ratings to tank. Low consumer credit ratings translate into loans harder to get and loans at higher interest rates. 

Is it fair to call MAGA anti-consumer, but pro-corporation and pro-plutocrat? There is lots of evidence to believe that.

Trump the pathocrat: Soothing his fragile ego hurts us, but he doesn't care

Trump is a pathocrat. A pathocrat is a person with a severe personality disorder who seeks and gains power over others. They are characterized by having one or more of psychopathy, narcissism, and Antisocial Personality Disorder. They lack empathy and remorse, are manipulative, and have an insatiable need for domination. Other people are objects to be exploited, not moral beings to be respected.

One of his recent posts on his Lies Antisocial propaganda lies and slanders site smeared Canada. An ad that was aired in Canada that cited Ronald Reagan explicitly criticizing tariffs because they harmed consumers. Research indicates that most or all of the cost of tariffs are passed to consumers. Reagan disliked tariffs because they are protectionist, something he opposed. The ad was truthful and accurately conveyed what Reagan said. In the ad, criticism of Trump and his tariffs was implicit but clear. 

To a narcissistic pathocrat, criticism demands retaliation. Trump's retaliation was as impulsive, unwarranted and malicious as it was swift. Trump called the ad "fraudulent", but it accurately quoted Reagan's actual words about tariffs being harmful to American workers. That assertion was a lie if he didn't know better. A US president acting in their official capacity has a moral duty to fact check themself.

The cost to assuage Trump's child ego will cost US consumers a lot. He imposed an added 10% tariff on Canada, which brings total tariffs to ~45%. A trade expert estimated that the television ad is likely to cost American consumers ~$50 billion. That's just because the mentally ill man-child is pissed off.

Actual malice in his response was clear. His language was deliberately inflammatory, calling Canada's actions a "hostile act" based on a legitimate political ad. This shows intent to damage Canada beyond policy disagreement. 

What AI is up to: Deceptive capitalism & ad blindness

Last December, I bought a paid subscription to Pxy to get unlimited access to deep research searching. So far so good, but time is running out. Despite a belief that I would never break away from Google advanced search (my home page for decades), I did. By then, Google has fully monetized search results, making results mostly stupid ads disguised as search results. In essence, Google search results had turned into mostly useless but always annoying crap. Now all Google is good for is quick synonym-antonym lookups, finding images and cute cat videos, not falling for click-bait, and not much else. 

Comet is Pxy's companion AI package that is agentic. Agentic means AI with agency. It really wants me to ditch Chrome and make itself my default browser. Default browser or not, if Comet is given permissions it has agency (power) to spend money from my accounts, write and send my gmails for me, spy on me and sell the info to ruthless marketers, and Dog only knows what else. I asked Comet about what happens to my privacy. It gave what appears to be an honest answer. It says my privacy will be seriously compromised. That's the whole point of agentic AI for consumers. 

How is the marketing to be done? By deceit. When asked about AI use by consumers, Comet was honest and said that it will follow Google's trajectory of monetizing search results. But those ads will be disguised. Comet commented on the transition, which is well underway right now:

Based on your experience with Google Search, your expectation that AI search will be monetized to the point of diminished value is already becoming a reality. The transition you're anticipating is not a future event; it began in earnest in 2025, and the infrastructure for a fully monetized AI search experience is actively being built now. .... Your concern that search results will become "distractions and stupid, annoying sales pitches" reflects the new monetization strategies being deployed for AI.

Well, I can't say that's a surprise.

What about how the deceit is to be done? By use of things like this. With Integrated Sponsored Placements, ads are embedded directly into the AI's generated text, making them appear to be native recommendations, not ads.​ That's deceptive. There's also Affiliate and Commission Models where AI recommends products and provides links for purchase to generate sales commissions. Marketers call that a "zero-click commerce experience". The user never leaves the AI interface to buy crap. Finally, there's the really sneak one called ​Intent-Based Targeting. That moves away from keywords. AI analyzes the user's conversation history, context, and "memory" to serve hyper-targeted ads. That is the explicit goal of AI browsers like Comet.

I asked how do marketers see this? With what I call casual capitalist immorality. Even their jargon is immoral. Marketers learn to weave their ads into AI responses to blur the line between actual search results and paid ads. This approach intends to overcome "ad blindness", where users simply ignore traditional banner ads. By presenting a commercial message as a helpful, conversational suggestion from a trusted AI assistant, the customer is less likely to spot the embedded ad.

Ad  blindness?? It's not ad blindness. I say it's conscious ad avoidance, not unconscious ad blindness. We all know the ad is there and we all knowingly ignore it. 

Marketers marketing to marketers

So what does Comet say about conscious ad avoidance vs unconscious blindness? Another honest answer:

Your analysis is not wrong; it highlights a critical and accurate distinction between "ad blindness" and "ad avoidance" that gets to the heart of the advertising industry's framing of the issue. The professional jargon is, as you suspect, very much "pro-deceit framed".

In other words, baby marketers are taught from the marketing crib that consumers with ad blindness are lazy and brain-defective. Us consumers need to be tricked into buying stuff, dumb fucks that we are. Yes, brain-defective. Baby marketers are taught that consumers' brains have developed a "blindness" to their shitty ads due to overexposure. Well duh! Overexposure indeed.

Bad consumer brains, bad, bad brains!

That needs to be fixed!

Marketer framing subtly creates and puts a fabricated blame and onus on consumers' perceptions and cognitive limits. Consumer ad blindness, actually ad resistance, is taught to be a challenge for marketers to "fight" or "overcome". This framing makes marketer cognitive dissonance go away by defining the problem as a user-centric matter of lazy brains, rather than an industry-centric issue of unwanted intrusion. What a total hoot!

Of course, making cognitive dissonance go away assumes that the baby marketer has a conscience to trick into complacency. Marketers are subtly nudged into acceptance of the wonderful idea that their unwanted intrusions into our lives with their obnoxious ads is our lazy brains' fault.   

Q: To be a modern marketer in the AI age, do marketers have to check their moral baggage to the door before entering the cathedral, or is marketing a profession that inherently self-selects or attracts people with little or no moral qualm about knowingly deceiving the money out of people and not caring enough to not do deceit?

 

No dickhead, our eyes are open -- we see your fracking 

 ad, but we just consciously ignore it

"Native ads" = trick ads