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by lopmotr
2359 days ago
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If that was going to be a problem, people would already be generating fake numerical data like material properties, physical constants, statistics, or whatever that's also subtly wrong. You don't need machine learning to do that. This fear of fake information from ML misleading everyone is ridiculous and kind of arrogant. It assumes that the world is full of "other people" who are too stupid to make decisions for themselves and usually concludes that "us smart people" have to somehow control what they see to protect them from themselves. We've had fake information since forever and we've developed systems to deal with it. Citing sources, trustworthy organizations, multiple sources agreeing with each other, people pointing out mistakes, Google favoring popular sites, confirming it yourself, etc. Some fake information still gets through and it is a problem but it already happens and the world keeps turning. For casual internet searchers who don't care how reliable their information is, let them believe whatever nonsense satisfies them. They aren't trying to be right, they're just entertaining themselves. |
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At the very least, I think we need to train people in a lot more media literacy. But traditional approaches to that rely on media being scarce and expensive to create, which gave people enough time to carefully vet what they were consuming. As it becomes cheaper to create media than to vet it, we'll have the same problem as spam: it'll be impossible for humans to effectively filter it manually.
I think the real solution is automated vetting tools, so no information is presented without provenance. Basically, any time somebody sees an image or a video, there should be a link that lets you find out about the source, the editing, and who, specifically is vouching for it. And warnings for things that lack that. That still gives the viewer agency, but brings the problem back to human scale.