See, THIS is the criticism of AI I can actually empathize with, I might even agree with it somewhat

Honestly, most of what Cambridge analytica did was blackmail, illegal spending, and collusion between campaigns that were legally required to be separate.

Much of the data processing/ml was intended as a smoke screen to distract from the big stuff that was known to work and consequently legislated against. The problem is that they were so incompetent that the distraction technique was also illegal.

Maybe the machine learning also worked, but it’s really not clear.