This is very believable to me.
12-13 years ago I built a laser interferometry system that collected PB of data (2GB/s) and I built a rocks HPC cluster and trained neural nets to predict multiphase flow rates inside oil and gas pipelines from 2-3 miles away.
This was before transformers so it was very hard, but managed to get it working with a tonne of reference data that we collected at NEL.
Bought some German SWIR laser interferometers, and stuffed the beams through long fiber optic loops to get huge Fabry-Perot distances, and we had insane picometer/second accuracy on surface velocity or space-time vibration (depending on your reference frame), we had 3.2 million samples/second so could get out to 1.6MHz on our FFT.
We creating insanely high fidelity multispectral spectrograms (frequency, time, power), and this was the training data we used to train our very crude AI to predict physical reality.
We could detect a.n.y.t.h.i.n.g. it was Star Trek sensor tech.
Alysa Liu recently went viral for her Teen Vogue rant on the state of the information environment and the population's cognitive resilience.
"We really are living in a cognitive wild west. Most people have near-zero memetic defenses or cognitive security suited for the online age". She adds, "any semblance of it is easily brute-forced by the onslaught of information & the situation is even worse when it comes to AI agent-orchestrated psyops."