Picture thousands of digital personas flooding social media. They debate. They like. They argue with nuance. No one suspects they’re not human. Researchers now warn these AI swarms could fabricate public opinion at scale, tilting elections and eroding trust in democratic processes. A new paper in Science lays bare the danger. “Fusing LLM reasoning with multiagent architectures, these systems are capable of coordinating autonomously, infiltrating communities, and fabricating consensus efficiently,” states the abstract. Authors Daniel Thilo Schroeder, Meeyoung Cha, Andrea Baronchelli, Nick Bostrom, and others from institutions like the Max Planck Institute define malicious AI swarms as networks of persistent agents. These maintain identities, vary tones to seem diverse, adapt in real time, and pursue shared goals with little human input. The result? Synthetic grassroots movements that mimic organic discourse. Organized manipulation on social media has exploded. From 28 countries in 2017 to 70 today.…