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?
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.