When a generated photo or video becomes indistinguishiable from reality, does reality just collapse? How do we know what’s real anymore, and if society deems an image/video as false, how do we know it isn’t just a government cover-up?
Just a few words into a Gen-AI program and there will be a video on the news of you commiting a terrorist bombing of a pre-school, even tho you were never anywhere near there. They can send the secret police to murder people, then post a video of the people they’ve killed as “resisting arrest” or “trying to shoot the officers on scene”, even tho they were unarmed and cooperative.
Like… do governments just get to shape the world as they see fit?
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Truth has not been around for a long time now. AI will make it worse.
Did truth not exist before photography?
We don’t need gen-AI to produce realistic looking videos. We already have the technology for decades, but reality hasn’t collapsed yet. With gen-AI it is just cheaper and quicker to make.
Lying wasn’t something invented in modern times
There was a time when photos didn’t exist, we go back to that standard of proof.
Like… do governments just get to shape the world as they see fit?
This is not new, most likely in history class you’ve heard about Soviet propaganda and saw how Trotsky was removed from photography.
The interesting part is now every stupid ass can forge photograph without complex techniques and a long training. IMO it’s great, people will finally understand that a photo/video is most likely fake.
It will help them to use their critical thinking skills and check the context
Like others have said, this is an age old question. Plato’s Cave is my favorite rendition of the question.
The simple solution would be reason. Unless we live in a dystopia in full effect, like in 1984 or Fahrenheit 451, there will usually be multiple sources and perspectives on an issue or event, AI or not. Get info from all sides, and make a well informed personal decision with the info available. Never believe something initially and only do so if it is confirmed by multiple sources. Use logic, science, reason, ethos, or even faith as tools to seek and verify truth
We are just asking old questions here. The printing press, novels, and pamphlets were the end of truth! We struggled, many people died, but life moved on. Then newspapers, more death, radio, world wars. Television, photoshop, the internet - fewer deaths in between but still. And life moved on.
Every new medium brought a phase of uncertainty (and possible carnage). That’s where we are right now. Every time we think “this is the worst EVER.” Until the next thing comes around. We will figure out the slop tsunami as well. I think fewer people will die than during the reformation.
Some people will successfully bend truth to generated video or whatever. But in the end, most will not succeed. Because we get wiser at spotting the bullshit. Q Anon showed us the learning isn’t a linear development; it follows more of a two steps forward, one step back pattern.
An arguement could be made that good governance is the responsibility of citizens/voters.
So it’s up to us (in the broad sense) to elect goverments that do not engage in cover-ups and do not shape the world as they see fit.
But this means once a country becomes authoritarian, or for those already in authoritarian countries, its over. Its would hard for any resistance to be able to trust each other.
Lile you see a video of your fellow revolutionaries apparantly colluding with the government and spying for them. Do you trust the video? What if its fake? And what if its actually real? If gonna make everyone suspicious of each other. Its gonna fracture your rebellion.
You need really need genAI for a country to become authoritarian.
My bigger point is that it’s counterproductive to think of a government as an external black box. At the end of the day it’s a reflection of society (at least to some degree).
What to do about it is another question. But IMO the first step has to be recognition of “how things got to be this way”. If you can’t do that, the discussion around the impact of genAI are IMO moot.
Take russia as an example. In the 90s they had a relatively open media landscape, chaotic and influenced by oligarchs, but critique was allowed and it was very prominent.
But the russians elected a KGB goon in 2000 and then reelected him in 2004 after he shut down most independent media in his first term.
To this day, the russian opposition continues to look for scapegoats (90s liberals, Yeltsin, etc.) and reject any responsibility of society more broadly (revanchism, supremacist ideas, imperialism).
If you can’t even do that, then how are you going to deal with the impact of genAI?
My bigger point is that, IMO, genAI is almost a red herring. There will always be tech that can be used to enable authoritarianism. There is no magical tech solution to what is fundamentally a social issue.
It used to be that only the rich and the powerful had access to fake videos. Many people believed in such videos because of that.
Now that fake videos are common, more people become suspicious of the authencity, which might be a good thing.
During the Tibet unrest in 2008, Chinese media produced videos of the “riot” which were obviously CGI. Nobody doubted because it wasn’t comon to have fake videos at the time.
Photos have been staged and lies have been printed as soon as those technologies were invented.
AI generated stuff will cause video evidence to be weaker in court. Other than that we will quickly adapt as a society to become as resistant to fake videos as we are to fake photos or text.
The major news outlets ran interference on a literal genocide for years now. I don’t think AI will change much besides making the rubes rube harder.
End of trust, not truth.
Back in my day, we assumed that if it was on TV, it was a lie or likely not the whole truth. When the Internet began to rise up, we extended that mistrust to the Web.
Lately, people have become too trusting of the Internet and I’m glad that trust is starting to roll back.
Back in my day, we assumed that if it was on TV, it was a lie or likely not the whole truth.
Maybe you as a person, but a lot of society generally trusted broadcast television news. I think that part of the problem with old people going down the MAGA news hole is that they grew up in a time where you didn’t need a lot of media literacy to the level you do now.
Maybe I worded that poorly. Yeah, we generally trusted the news, but for the most part the TV was the “idiot box” and was not to be trusted. At some point, the news — I think, largely, FOX News at first, but the others weren’t far behind — became “news entertainment” in the same way WWE was “sports entertainment.” It was either not real, or at the very least it was heavily biased. Whenever The Newsroom came out — what a lot of people know for a 3 minute YouTube edit about why “America is no longer the greatest country in the world anymore” but was really more of a love letter to the way the news used to be. They told real news in a way that was entertaining, but through a character (portrayed by Jeff Daniels) who was trying to tell the news the old way. Give people the facts and let them make up their own mind. But by that point, I think most news on TV was fake/heavily biased.
Some kids make fake ‘fairy’ photos in 1917 and lots of people believed them. As others have mentioned, the USSR removed people from photographs. A forged will in the middle ages let the papacy claim authority over Europe, and shaped the western world as we know it today.
There have always been lies and fakes, and there’s always people who’ve ignored real evidence claiming it’s been fake. AI certainly makes things worse, and will be used to discredit legitimate evidence as much as it is used to fake shit. But humanity has lived most of its existence without a “pics or it didn’t happen” attitude, and will continue to figure stuff out (and make mistakes) through investigation, interpersonal trust and community.
In the Hunger Games, people learned to communicate by holding up 3 fingers. You could force a news cameraman to cut the feed by strategically saying one name. You don’t even need me to recite the name here. Humans created AI; don’t let your juiced-up amygdala convince you a tool we made is more powerful than the human spirit.
No, it doesn’t.
I’m so mad about people buying into the fake hype.
The death of truth was social media. Or squishy human brains on social media, I suppose. We just came from a massive argument about whether vaccines work, whether masks are useful in the middle of a repiratory virus pandemic and a bunch of Americans believed there was a pizzeria pedophilia vampire ring so much they elected a fascist turd president. Twice.
What the hell is marginally better photo doctoring going to do in that context? Who gives an actual crap?
The only real concern you should have is you now shouldn’t trust phone calls that sound vaguely like someone you know from a phone number you don’t recognize. And maybe if you get a video call from a celebrity standing suspiciously still don’t wire them all your money.
Otherwise we’re just as boned as we were five years ago.
You know how Google gives you AI summary at the top now? It’s great, isn’t it?
No longer do you have to sift through multiple results to and give your device ad cancer just to get a simple answer to a question. Google just gives you the answer directly! It’s so great and helpful.
Except when it’s not, but it never says “I don’t know, check the results manually”, it just makes shit up. The other day I googled “geely pixel 9 wireless connection” because I couldn’t connect my pixel 9 to a geely car wirelessly. Google (the maker of the pixel 9) confidently described how the “Geely Pixel 9 is a device made by Geely…” and went on to give useless instructions.
This was a inconsequential query. What happens when you look up a serious topic and the sites that maintained that knowledge online no longer find it financially feasible? What happens when you rely on the trained model and that’s the only option? What happens when it hallucinates convincingly? Are you sure it hasn’t fooled you yet?
Social media created bubbles of ignorance and fake news, AI replacing search intends to eliminate the non-bubbles the rest of us seek and count on. What are you gonna do, drive to the library and read books every time you need to learn something new?
You act like before Google we couldn’t figure things out. Sometimes not taking the easier/easiest way is better. We existed until the year 2000 without this futuristic computer in our pocket (technically longer) and we did just fine and we still had to suffer fools. Great example would be the emergence of AIDS spreading through the heterosexual community. Lots of disingenuous and lost humans and not a Google in sight. AI is computer driven and it’s counterpart will also be computer driven. . . I am convinced there will be a counterpart. We’ll have a “detect AI button” or something similar. If the program has language the program can be spotted. Scams, lies, propaganda, shilling, etc will always exist and the intelligence that creates these things will also have the chance to defeat these things. This is maybe naive or optimistic, but . . . so it goes.
