|
> When it's all writing, all art, all music and all commentary on those things, it seems catastrophic. The whole cave is flooded with shit. But writing in itself has been obviously untrustworthy since it started existing - something being written down doesn't in any way make it trustworthy. The fact that audio recording, photography, and video enjoyed this undeserved reputation of being inherently trustworthy was an accident of technology, and has come to an end. Just like with writing, though, this doesn't signal a real problem of any kind. You should still only trust writing, audio, or video based on the source - as you always should have. All that's ending is the era of putting undue trust in audio/video from untrusted sources. Of course, the big problems will be in the transition period, when most people still think they can trust these sources, or will think they can't trust actually trustable sources instead. But this will be temporary as things readjust. And again, audio and video have been untrustworthy for a long time, for sensitive things. You should not have trusted video in itself even in the 40s - 50s, and audio and photos probably even in the 1910s were already somewhat easily manipulated. And this is even true in a legal context - audio or video evidence is not evidence in itself, it is only part of a witness testimony who can attest to the provenance and veracity. |
Any one person's writing was always untrustworthy, but the majority of that bad writing didn't make it to a printing press, nor was it mass-distributed.
Let's accept the proposition that all forms of media have always been full of lies. We can say that debunking always follows lies, truth spreads more slowly than fiction. The quantity and velocity of additional misinformation - especially when machines are involved in writing infinite amounts of it in the blink of an eye - lays waste to the normal series of events where a lie can be followed by a debunking with linear speed and velocity. With LLMs and social media manipulation, falsehoods gain traction exponentially while truths remain linear.
There is likely not a "transition period" where people will adjust to this, precisely because there is no mechanism to inform them they're being swindled and screwed faster than the takeoff of the algorithms that are now screwing them.