[coryrc]

You and I remember pre-AI famous works. "Hey, I'm pretty sure Odysseus took a long time to get home". Somebody goes and prints 50 different AI-generated versions of the _Odyssey_, how are future generations supposed to know which is real and which is fake?

[walterbell]

> how are future generations supposed to know which is real

Reality/truth/history has always been an expensive pursuit in the face of evolving pollutants.

[coryrc]

That's definitely true. History has been thoroughly manufactured by humans. Naively, I thought the storage of computers might preserve first-hand accounts forever; it might, but it might not be discernible.

[noosphr]

This is literally how the Odyssey was passed down for the 2000 years before the printing press was invented.

Every work had multiple versions. All versions were different. Some versions were diametrically opposed to others.

Have a look at Bible scholarship to see just _how_ divergent texts can become by nothing more than scribe errors.

[coryrc]

They were real because they were made by people all along. Now you can't tell.

I think you're right my analogy is imperfect. I'm only human (or am I? :P)

[samtheprogram]

99.9999999% sure that was their point? Why else would they bring up that particular work?

[burnished]

Because they thought it was an ancient and unchanging text.

[coryrc]

No, but it was a bad example because I was thinking only of the authorship point of view.

A better example would have been the complaint tablet to Ea-nāṣir. We're pretty sure it's real; there might still be people alive that remember it being discovered. But in a hundred years, people with gen AI have created museums of fake artifacts but plausible, can future people be sure? A good fraction of the US population today believes wildly untrue things about events happening in real time!

[burnished]

Ah, thank you for clarifying and correcting!