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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Yes but not because of generated videos. Cop just shoots you and the nearest bystander says “grok what happened” and their camera glasses say “What an intelligent question!!! It looks like someone was just nonviolently apprehended for a serious crime!!! You’re so pretty!!!” Then they ask grok if they can cross the street now and get hit by a truck.
Too late. Social media was already the end of truth.
This works both ways: you can also always claim it’s a deepfake even if it isn’t.
If the government is after you they don’t need excuses so I doubt gen-AI changes anything in that regard.
But they would normally lose popularity, with a highly detailed 4K video (deepfake video, that is), the official narritive would be very convincing when state media put that video out there, and contradicting media censored. Human brains would be more convinced that a highly detailed (deepfake) video is real, rather than some blurry photoshop.
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.
truth is just the most common belief. not 100% factual.
it was once truth the world was flat, then the sun revolved around the earth. then the world was round. next will be the earth is a tesseract. then finally truth will be earth is a hexigon the bestigon and we can finally rest.
That’s not a widely used definition of Truth.
At the very least, it’s one I’ve never heard before.it has to be the definition though. human understanding is limited, therefore what we believe is fact, can theoretically be ‘wrong’ and disproven in the future by new advancements in science. so ‘truth’ is just belief in fact.
The common definition of Truth is along the lines of “That which matches reality”.
It doesn’t matter what’s popular, or common knowledge. Sure humanity learns more about reality as time goes on. What people believe to be true changes. But that doesn’t mean what we believe is true. Something doesn’t become true because enough people believe it. Peoples beliefs simply get closer to the truth as more is learned about reality.
whos to define reality? was it not truth that the sun orbited the earth? reality is also the most popular theory. string theory could be truth. president names in epstein files could be truth. if someone doctors the list before it hits the courts, and its voted on as true, it becomes truth to society while not matching reality.
i think we are circling the same idea from different angles. kinda fun, thanks for the critical thinking sparring.
Nobody defines reality. We discover reality. Reality defines us.
Reality doesn’t care about any idea, hypothesis, or theory.
Reality is ignorant of courts, votes, or opinion.
Reality is what is, and we make up stories that may or may not agree with reality. Makes no difference to reality.so truth then would also be absolute? and not a human perception?
i feel like humans use truth more relatively. perhaps there should be distinctions between absolute truth and relative truth in the english language.
some people ‘believe’ aliens to be true. believe in a truth. you shouldnt have to believe a truth if it has no counterpoint. like if gravity is truth. you shouldn’t be able to believe in it. it should just happen to you.
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
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.
Did truth not exist before photography?
Photoshop.
with Red Alert accent: Glorious Soviet Union has much much big time advantage over american technology !
Lol their technology is so superior, I’ve never heard about this until now xD
(Seriously tho, I have heard of censorship in general, but never heard of a state literally editing photos, I thought they just ommitted publishing some photos)
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.
Lying wasn’t something invented in modern times
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.
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.
There was a time when photos didn’t exist, we go back to that standard of proof.
