|
Honestly while I have major problems with a lot of AI, specifically the political implications I don't think are actually all that bad. Specifically because if you talk to the extremists, they didn't become that way by way of convincing fake news: They became that way by extremely unconvincing fake news that suited their pre-existing prejudices. And I'm not going to both sides this in an attempt to look unbiased: there are certainly weird and shitty corners of the left, but by and large, misinformation trades on the right. Even many people on the right are aware of this, it's not a secret. People who are racists didn't need to hear Obama call his healthcare bill Obamacare to oppose it on those grounds, even as it benefited them: and we know that because Obama never called it that. Republicans did. People who are anti-trans due to the widespread (and wrong) belief that trans-people abuse children didn't need to see trans people abusing children, they needed to be told it was happening by a figure they trusted. People who hear the call phrases like "cultural marxism" have no idea what the hell that means, beyond "the things I don't like" and the thing that it's being attached to, if it isn't within their Things I Don't Like set currently, will be added to it with little thought or consideration for why it's there. Why all this happens is a larger topic that we don't really have the space here for and I'm probably already skirting HN's rules on politics pretty hard so I'll digress and just say: bigots are bigots, they were bigots before they heard whatever talking head they like say whatever really inappropriate and disgusting thing that they are now parroting, and now they're just a bigot that has that new thing to say. And humans are excellent at motivated reasoning: once they've decided a thing, like that Democrats eat babies to attain eternal life, you will be hard pressed to make them understand that they don't. It's probably why a lot of these same people also trend very well in religion: there's a subset of humanity that just really likes the idea of nice sounding bullshit that confirms whatever bullshit they heard before, and if you're willing to feed it to them, you can parlay that into attention and eventually, money. While I certainly oppose the use of AI tools being used to generate photorealistic evidence of Biden consuming babies on the weekend, and it will almost certainly be used for that, I have a hard time seeing that as really changing the field at all. There is a huge, huge section of the populace that would already believe that and having it rendered in perfect HD video would... certainly be upsetting, but in the age we're in, if you're aware that AI video can be created that way, to that quality, you would already assume this is a forgery, unless you were motivated enough to resist that thought. At which point it doesn't matter, it could be VHS quality that looked like it was taped next to a rare earth magnet and transmitted through a fun house mirror room, and Biden had seventeen fingers: you'd still believe it. |
If it all it did was agree with pre-existing prejudices, that's not how they got that way.
And, IME, post political extrenists didn't get that way from fake news at all, but the problem with convincint fake news (whether AI is involved or not) isn’t that it creates extremists or otherwise influences ideology, but the reactions it creates in people applying their non-extremist ideology through the lens of false factual premises.