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The big difference is, there was a very high bar to forging photographs, and most news was gated (with the ability to easily find, and sue those guilty of slander/libel). Now it's utterly simplistic to forge, to libel, to slander, and there is no easy path in many cases to sue. While you can say "yes, but..." to the above, that's the reality that we've lived with for 150 years, less extremely rare edge cases. All this has changed over the course of a couple of decades, with most of that change in the last 10, and focuses on the last 2 years. Beyond that, it took significant effort and labour to create fake stories and images. People had to be experts, or be wordsmiths. Now, click click, and fake generated stories abound. In fact, they're literally everywhere. There's absolutely no comparison here. Now, in the time it used to take one person to generate one fake story, you can generate millions and trillions if you have the cash. Really, it's the same problem with spam phone calls, and with spam email. You didn't get 1000 spam letters in the mail in the 80s, because that cost money. Email was free, thus spam became plentiful. The same with spam phone calls, it cost hard cash for each call, now it's pennies per hundreds of automated calls, so spam phone calls abound. The same is happening with all content on the internet. Realistically the web is now dead. It's now gone. Even things such as wikipedia are going to die, as over the next 2 to 3 years LLM output will become utterly and completely indistinguishable in all aspects. |
Like I said, people have been saying this exact thing for a couple years now. I'm sure I'll be hearing the same in a couple more.