| Continued erosion of reality. The bulk of people are utterly gullible. You don't have to look past any of the creative writing exercises on r/tifu that make the front page of reddit. The major application of AI/deepfakes/etc is going to be to continue to bombard the internet with fake information, driving a wedge between people and reality. The result is going to be more conspiracy theories going mainstream, more people believing "counterintuitive" things about how human systems work, etc. I don't see us generating an immune-system-like response to this anytime soon, and suspect it will require some kind of massive WWII-scale tragedy before policymakers stop treating it as a game and taking it seriously. This won't be done by "terrorists", it will be done in bulk by nation-state actors and billionaires and their proxies. Right now we can still identify the obvious bot accounts on twitter, reddit, etc. In the future, ChatGPT-like accounts will be running continuously building up accounts with months of history on random subjects (although consistent subjects per account) before they are employed to reinforce some narrative. They'll even get properly offended and flip you shit when you accuse them of being bots. The only way out of it may be certifying identity through the government who is real and mandating that people use their real identities on social media and requiring social media to collect proof of who their users are. Which is its own dystopia. |