“Subscribers to X Premium, which grants access to Grok, have been posting everything from Barack Obama doing cocaine to Donald Trump with a pregnant woman who (vaguely) resembles Kamala Harris to Trump and Harris pointing guns. With US elections approaching and X already under scrutiny from regulators in Europe, it’s a recipe for a new fight over the risks of generative AI.”
I suspect the greatest threat is not that politicians and billionaires can create realistic images of their enemies, rather they can deny any evidence of their own misdeeds.
Harris’ airport crowd serves as an example. Whether or not it really happened (I assume it did) MAGAs will have cause to plausibly believe it didn’t.
Not that evidence to the contrary of belief systems has ever been effective at deprogramming those invested in their worldview.
While I share this sentiment, I think/hope the eventual conclusion will be a better relationship between more people and the truth. Maybe not for everyone, but more people than before. Truth is always more like 99.99% certain than absolute truth, and it’s the collection of evidence that should inform ‘truth’. The closest thing we have to achieving that is the court system (In theory).
You don’t see the electric wiring in your home, yet you ‘know’ flipping the switch will cause electricity to create light. You ‘know’ there is not some other mechanism in your walls that just happens to produce the exact same result. But unless you check, you technically didn’t know for sure. Someone could have swapped it out while you weren’t looking, even if you built it yourself. (And even if you check, your eyes might deceive you).
With Harris’ airport crowd, honestly if you weren’t there, you have to trust second hand accounts. So how do you do that? One video might not say a lot, and honestly if I saw the alleged image in a vacuum I might have been suspicious of AI as well.
But here comes the context. There are many eye witness perspectives where details can be verified and corroborated. The organizer isn’t an habitual liar. It happened at a time that wasn’t impossible (eg. a sort of ‘counter’-alibi). It happened in a place that isn’t improbable (She’s on the campaign trail). If true, it would require a conspiracy level of secrecy to pull of. And I could list so many more things.
Anything that could be disproven with ‘It might have been AI’, probably would have not stuck in court anyways. It’s why you take testimony, because even though that proves nothing on it’s own, if corroborated with other information it can make one situation more or less probable.
I don’t have the hope you do. The sheer number of people that believe the moon landing was faked is just plain crazy. There were soooo many people involved with that process, yet it’s still not believed.
I have a similar hesitancy, but unfortunately that’s why we can’t even really trust ourselves either. The statistics we can put to paper already paints such a different image of society than the one we experience. So even though it feels like these people are everywhere and such a mindset is growing, there are many signs that this is not the case. But I get it, that at times also feels like puffing some hopium. I’m fortunate to have met enough stubborn people that did end up changing their minds on their own personal irrationality, and as I grew older I caught myself doing the same a couple of times as well. That does give me hope.
And well, if you look at history, the kind of shit people believed. Miasma, bloodletting, superstitious beliefs, to name a few. As time has moved on, the majority of people has grown. Even a century where not a lot changes in that regard (as long as it doesn’t regress) can be a speed bump in the mindset of the future.
The Internet disproved the theory that more access to facts leads to more truth
I respectfully disagree. Sure, it didn’t cure the world of ignorant people like we hoped, but they are not the average rational person. It massively increased the awareness of people about international issues like climate change, racism, injustice, and allowed people to forge bonds abroad far more easily. The discourse even among ignorant people is different from 20 years ago. However, the internet that did that might no longer be the same one it is today.
But honestly, “more facts leads to more truth” wasn’t the point of my message. It was “more spread of falsehoods leads to higher standards of evidence to back up the actual truth”, which isn’t quite the same. Before DNA evidence and photographic / video evidence, people sometimes had to rely on testimony. Nowadays if someone tells you a story that screams false you might say “pics or it didn’t happen.”. That’s the kind of progress I’m referring to.
Someone presenting you only a single photo of something damning is the hearsay of yesterday. (And honestly, it’s been that way since Photoshop came out, but AI will push that point even further)
People are and always have been divorced from reality. Some people barely understand how their own house works, but nobody ever understood everything, and at no point you could be sure you know with absolute certainty what was going on 1000 miles away from you.
Let us not act like generative AI is going to break the 4th wall of our perfect world. And I don’t even mean video or even image manipulation - basic text can and has been used for manipulation forever.
Perhaps we should reexamine things we’ve had for decades, like signing content with PGP and building actual trust around the world.