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?
No, it isn’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 respiratory 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.
This is true. I had been thinking my previous post was a bit too optimistic, actually. For the sake of making a point I implied that conspiracy theorists, anti-vaxxers and anti-maskers didn’t previously exist. They absolutely did. There was plenty of public conflict about masking and social distancing in the 1918 flu. The AIDS panic was horrific and obviously this isn’t the first time that hate discourse puts fascists in power in a major superpower, let alone in a country overall.
The real issue with the Internet isn’t the flexibility of truth, it’s the ease in diseminating the satisfying falsehood. With no source of authority over which truths are acceptable and what lies are shameful you end up in a worldwide radicalization engine. It’s not that the old gatekeepers told you the truth, either. They still don’t. But at least we all had some culture-wide baseline for acceptable narratives.
But hey, people can keep hating ont he obvious boogeyman of AI. At least it’s a start of realizing what the pattern is. It’s still not “the end of truth”, but like I said elsewhere, if it gets people to start noticing these things we’ll be better off than when social media was doing the exact same thing to us as a global society without anybody realizing.
It does say “check the results manually”. Not that this changes anything. For the record, always double check anything any AI tells you unless you can verify the response off the top of your head. Also for the record, double check anything anybody else tells you. If you haven’t seen it from more than one source, you don’t know if it’s true.
Hell, if the thing people learn from AI summaries is to never believe anything the see on the Internet without double checking it we’ll be better off than we were before.
Also, every negative impact you assign to AI is applicable to traditional search. I was hearing communication scholars warn people of the issues with algorithmic selection and personalized search back in the 90s. They were correct.
I am endlessly fascinated by the billions of boiling frogs that hadn’t realized their perception of the world was owned by Google until Google made a noticeably change to their advertising engine. Did you think them getting to select which answers you got at the top of the page and which ones to bury past the fold was any less misleading? I am increasingly glad that AI is as unreliable as it is at this point. We definitely need a change in how people acquire information.