| >imagine if the pizzagate conspiracy theorists had had access to an un-censored sound-and-video GenAI tool They didn't but a huge number of other conspiracy theorists still running their own ideas do have access to all that with today's AI, and we don't see a vast watershed of billions of people being brainwashed into believing complete nonsense to any degree greater than has already been the case for a long, long time before AI came along. People do have a certain level of discernment, even when absolutely bombarded with propaganda and fakery. Usually, it seems to take, finally, coercion to make them simply swallow too much of something obviously absurd. This too was the case before AI and, simultaneously now, widespread access to information sources that let you verify the veracity of nearly anything you like in minutes as long as it's not grossly complex to untangle. Even the Nazis of the 1930s and the bolsheviks earlier, despite all their mass efforts at convincing through propaganda and misinformation (applied to people with less ability than today to find contrary sources of information) ultimately didn't convince as many as they'd have liked voluntarily. They had to coerce them into just never openly disagreeing. I don't think we're in danger of AI by itself doing anything major to suddenly make billions of people behave much differently in their beliefs from how they already have for centuries at least. |
Current video tools are easily distinguishable from reality if you pay attention. Sliding feet, distorted geometry, occasionally even lacking object permanence.
They're improving rapidly and I have no reason to expect this is the best they'll ever be.
Even still-image tools often still generate things with fundamental errors that can be noticed, and despite this they are already being used because "you can fool all of the people some of the time, and some of the people all of the time"; even the current tech still moves the needle on that.
Of course, the (preexisting) mere existence of the possibility is itself a convenient source of deniability for anything that you don't want to believe — I wonder how many people refuse to believe that Trump really stored boxes of classified documents in a bathroom in Mar-a-Lago despite the photo?
> Even the Nazis of the 1930s and the bolsheviks earlier, despite all their mass efforts at convincing through propaganda and misinformation (applied to people with less ability than today to find contrary sources of information) ultimately didn't convince as many as they'd have liked voluntarily. They had to coerce them into just never openly disagreeing.
And the former won power in the first place in a democracy.
Likewise Rwanda, the violence followed from the propaganda.
Conspiracy theories don't need everyone to believe in them to cause problems — that's why I gave the Pizzagate example where (IIRC) the biggest harm was someone firing a gun in the restaurant demanding to see the basement it didn't have.