[flashman]

Twenty years ago, I don't think any of us were excited about a future internet where we couldn't trust whether what we were seeing or reading was genuine. I hope one day we'll be able to look back on this era as an aberration, like that scene in Mad Men where the Drapers fling their picnic rubbish onto the grass and drive away.

[idle_zealot]

It seems to me the era of being able to trust pictures was an aberration. Before the camera images created in any form might depict something that really happened, an exaggeration, or a total fabrication. The camera represented a technological leap that made capturing reality significantly more easy than faking it, though faking it was never actually all that hard. Now technology has progressed again and we're back where we started. Any image might be real, edited, or totally fabricated, and we can no longer fool ourselves about "photographic evidence." Trust is and always will be about credibility of the claimant. Additional evidence is itself only as trustworthy as its providence. An attempt to destroy the ability to create images that resemble photographs is doomed to fail and wrongheaded to begin with. The only reason such an idea would occur to someone is they were born in an aberrant era where the culture had ingrained in them the semi-grounded belief that certain types of images are representative of reality. That wasn't the case historically and won't be again.

[paulluuk]

Twenty years ago my teachers were telling me not to use Wikipedia because you can't trust anything on the internet. You should never date someone you met through an app or website because they are 100% murderers. "The internet is for porn". Things have a way of improving over time, and people always overestimate societal risks of new tech in the beginning.

[dogleash]

>Twenty years ago my teachers were telling me not to use Wikipedia because you can't trust anything on the internet.

Still can't. "ChatGPT can make mistakes." People still trust it, doesn't mean they should. Wiki's not as bad of a tertiary source as it used to be, but it's still a tertiary source and you had a research assignment. Even official authoritative sources can be un/intentionally wrong.

> You should never date someone you met through an app or website because they are 100% murderers.

This remains sound advice that teachers should continue giving children. Even (or morso) now that online dating has been normalized in the meantime. Do I have to explain?

[orleyhuxwell]

Young girls suicides, Brexit&Trump (post-truth politics, general democratic decline), demographic catastrophe, obesity crisis are often partially attributed to social media.

Not saying that tech is inherently evil, these could have been prevented, but to me it seems we have underestimated the social risks and failed to regulate accordingly.

[zamadatix]

For any new change we underestimate certain risk and overestimate others. This leads to a lot of focus and discussion on the things that don't matter much while the things that do matter become apparent. It's natural, guessing everything about the future correctly is never going to happen, but I don't really think that info tells you things are getting better or getting worse overall - it just tells you what things we focused on instead of should have focused on.

[bonzini]

Demographic decay was already going on in the 90s in some countries (Italy, South Korea, Japan), and the obesity crisis in the US too. For Brexit & Trump it could have been a contributing factor, but Italy had Berlusconi in the 90s just with TV and France almost elected Le Pen (father).

That said, while I am generally skeptical of these effects, fake news are a real problem that social media has exacerbated.

[itake]

you're also missing all of the positive healthcare outcomes the internet grants due to better access to information.

If the internet saves 1,000 lives per day, and hurts 1, then the roi is there.

[3form]

Even in healthcare alone, I would question whether the impact was net positive. You have to balance the "access to information" with how people need to deal with false information, health charlatans, ads shoving then supplements they don't need, people's inability to discern what to do based on even true information that they get.

What are the positives? Before, you had to go to a doctor to do stuff, now you do too. Maybe people are more likely to get tested. Maybe scheduling appointments is a bit better. What am I missing?

[itake]

debating this isn't particularly useful of either person's time.

There are plenty of documented cases of reddit posts encouraging deeper investigations or legally authorized tele-health providers (where you can communicate directly with a licensed medical professional).

The number of people using telehealth services is significantly less than the number of people that have bad health outcomes from internet usage. If it were otherwise, ChatGPT, Reddit, and telehealth companies would be managed very differently.

98point6 - 50k+ reviews

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/98point6-by-transcarent/id1157...

doctor on demand has millions of users

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/doctor-on-demand/id591981144

[ekianjo]

> positive healthcare outcomes

Its seems to be hidden from view. Global health is getting worse, not better

[itake]

Can you cite a source?

Covid pushed back the longevity gains, but there hasn't be a decline or flatten since the internet grew in popularity (2000 - 2019).

https://www.who.int/data/gho/data/themes/mortality-and-globa...

[ekianjo]

https://www.metabolismjournal.com/article/S0026-0495(22)0009...

Obesity continues to increase everywhere, and is a leading indicator for poor health outcomes over time.

[nl]

I LOVE being able to create images of things I could previously only imagine.

I think the inability to see the freedom AI gives people is one of the saddest things I've seen.

I remember when the internet was young people would complain about how it was becoming read-only.

Now we have a tool to let people express themselves and people complain the fact there are fake pics on AirBNB means the collapse of society. Please!

[latexr]

> I think the inability to see the freedom AI gives people is one of the saddest things I've seen.

No one’s failing to see the good things, hypothetical or not. Most of us are aware just fine, we just don’t all agree that the negative trade-offs are worth it.

[sedawkgrep]

You should reconsider the scope. Nobody is losing sleep over Airbnb pics.

We’re in an era now where every image and video (and for that matter audio) is potentially fake; where knowing what’s real and true is no longer possible.

[nl]

This has been the case for longer than I've been alive.

Have you not seen the old Soviet photos where people who fell out of favour were erased from photos?

Media literacy has always been about working out if you can trust something.

Now the ability to edit has been democratised. I choose to celebrate that.

[naasking]

> We’re in an era now where every image and video (and for that matter audio) is potentially fake; where knowing what’s real and true is no longer possible.

This was always the case. Spin and propaganda are not new, the way it's conveyed has just become a bit easier. People are not as susceptible to misinformation as most assume, they recalibrate how much stock they put into the things they see based on the quality of the information environment. Basically everyone knows now that the internet has a low signal to noise ratio.

[sedawkgrep]

No, this really hasn't always been the case. At least not in the sense it is today.

20 years ago your misinformation came from television, radio, and print. All of those things were expensive to produce and there was an implicit need for them to be at least vaguely believable and reliable, because their existence depended on it to continually generate revenue.

- Today, a single person produce 100% AI-generated media for basically the cost of their time.

- That media is as high quality as anything else out there.

- Social media platforms provide the delivery system for free.

- There's no real way to tell if there's even a real person behind the name/pseudonym used for posting it. It might be a person, it might be an algorithm, it might be a nation-state. You have no way to know.

Coincidentally, this is at the top of HN right now: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48355751

It's more about using LLMs to impersonate someone, but the point stands.

[nl]

I believe democratisation of production and distribution is a net good thing. You don't.

That's not about technology but is a fundamental moral issue.

[sedawkgrep]

At my core, I do believe it's a good thing, so don't try to frame things as if I'm ethically opposed to the overarching idea here.

It's that the powers-that-be have and always will have more resources to bring to bear than the individual will have to combat them. And right now we're moving at absolute break-neck speed to invent technologies that can be used undermine us individually as well as collectively at ease and scales heretofore never seen.

I believed for a long time that the information age would be the great liberator - the great balancer. But we're on the precipice right now of governmental and societal collapsem and it has everything to do with the massive proliferation and preponderance of either misinformation, or agenda-aligned (shaped) information.

Anti-vax, Antifa, ACAB, conspirituality, QAnon, etc., etc., have all had an enormously negative impact, and we're still in misinformation infancy, and lucky that the leadership in goverment is so old that they're not particularly great at bending these technologies to bear on us. But that's not always going to be the case.

[naasking]

Sorry, but none of the factors you mention are particularly important IMO. At worst they cause a temporary blip that adversely affects some people before they recalibrate their expectations of the information environment they're in. People are simply not as vulnerable to this stuff as the chicken littles crying about misinformation think they are. All of the failure modes of media that you name have happened before, and people adapted.

Misinformation on Misinformation: Conceptual and Methodological Challenges, https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/20563051221150412

> It's more about using LLMs to impersonate someone, but the point stands.

I personally knew someone that fell for the Nigerian prince scam 20 years ago. Same old tricks, just recycled in a new medium.

[zB2sj38WHAjYnvm]

>I LOVE being able to create images of things I could previously only imagine. Did you only just get access to a pencil?

[naasking]

This empowers people who have great imagination but lack skill and the time to develop it. I'm not sure why this is so hard for people to understand.

[ehnto]

I enjoy the technology too, but the tradeoffs are pretty grim. It takes stepping outside of my bubble to see it in full force, but AI misinformation is already rampant.

[onion2k]

You don't remember the discussion around Narrative Science (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narrative_Science) then. They were a university spin-out that could write plausible-sounding baseball news articles (and later finance) from the stats. Their software enabled local news websites to publish articles about every game, which was seen as a boon to sports fans and a key driver for web traffic. There was a lot of criticism about how it wasn't 'real' though.

Slate published this about it in 2012: https://slate.com/technology/2012/03/narrative-science-robot...

For as long as we've had computers people have tried to make them sound human. It's not a new thing that people are concerned about knowing if they're talking to (or reading) a robot imitating a person.

[flashman]

I didn't say there wasn't bot-generated content in the past. I said we weren't excited about a future where it was de rigeur.

[pjc50]

> could write plausible-sounding baseball news articles (and later finance) from the stats

Back in the day, baseball commentators sometimes did this for live games they couldn't see based on very limited information they were being passed. One such commentator was .. Ronald Reagan.

[miki123211]

Literally the first thing I wrote after OpenAI's chat completions API came out was a Python script that took in a JSON description of a football (soccer) game from an API and used gpt-3.5-turbo to generate an article about it.

I was surprised how well it worked, even then.

[HappMacDonald]

Every time I hear "even then" about a large language model I swear I can hear a fidget spinner fossilizing in the distance

[plomme]

I think it may turn out postive; That the less we are able to take images and video at face value the better.

Motivated actors have been able to doctor, fake, or spin media content since time immemorial. But peoples default mode was to trust what they saw. Now that fake imagery is ubiquitous, maybe we'll all get a bit more skeptical.

[pjc50]

The death of consensus reality is also the death of democratic politics. Too many people regard that as a positive.

[plomme]

Sure, but LLMS and image generators are not the death of "consensus reality". Healthy democracies will still have investigative journalism, public debate, trustworthy institutions, etc.

[naasking]

> Healthy democracies will still have investigative journalism, public debate, trustworthy institutions, etc.

Boy do I wish that were the case. Investigative journalism is rare now and instead favours activist journalism, public debate is hard (but getting better), and institutional trust is at all time lows, for various reasons.

People will muddle through regardless, we're not as fragile as most assume.

[pjc50]

> will still have investigative journalism, public debate, trustworthy institutions, etc.

All of which are under serious threat from social media, buyouts by billionaires, and simple smear campaigns. Not dependent on AI, but effects which will be magnified by AI.

[hidroto]

being skeptical and determining the truth takes a lot of work. I fear that we may just refuse to wade through all the lies and just accept a enforced willful ignorance.

[plomme]

You're right. But I'd rather be uninformed than misinformed.

[Ey7NFZ3P0nzAe]

The picnic scene: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FDIvzDGBLWU

[AbraKdabra]

Aberration? That seems like an extreme overreaction.

[flashman]

I don't know what else you'd call the widespread and enthusiastic adoption of a technology that is designed to exploit people's trust in the veracity of images by mimicking reality as seamlessly as possible. I think it's both aberrant and abhorrent for the tech industry to be actively developing something that's permanently polluting our information environment.

Here's a local story published after I made my comment, about tour operators using AI images to misrepresent destinations in the area: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-06-01/ai-videos-spark-conce...

Increasing the availability of fake image generators directly enables more harms like these.

[zamadatix]

I think the massive scale up in making bogus images is actually a net good in the end. For decades, even before computers, images were edited on the idea people trust an image. Anything from removing/adding figures to a photo, changing something in the image to modify the meaning, or cropping something out to hide part of it. People had a default trust of images because 99% of the images they saw weren't worth modifying, so they didn't think about it.

Now images have gone back to being like a book. People are beginning to assume anyone can write anything, make up quotes, etc. We still get to keep the ones we just like or the ones we know were really that way (e.g. your wedding vows/wedding photos) but we've dropped this silly notion image=fact just because it's an image. It's not all good that faking an image has gotten consistently easier over the last 100 years, but it's also not bad that it's fallen apart enough people are seeing through it.

[renarl]

Are there any examples where it has happened in tech? Maybe internet Pop-ups are closest, that are now automatically blocked. But seems unlikely that we would not use image generation. Just not trust any image by default.

[sunaookami]

>we couldn't trust whether what we were seeing or reading was genuine

You could never trust ANYTHING you read or see on the internet, this isn't new. There are thousands of old hoaxes that many people still believe.

[geysersam]

There's always existed misinformation in text and in images. It's been possible to manipulate photographs for as long as photography has been around. It's becoming easier for sure, but it's not really a qualitative change. Trusting anything you saw on the internet twenty years ago would have been as ridiculous as it is today.

[lopis]

> It's becoming easier for sure

This is seriously underplaying it. It's become trivial to generate and inundate the internet with fake content (either for laughs, for internet points, or for more nefarious purposes). Manipulating photos required a lot of skill to make something plausible. We're reaching a point (if we're not there yet) where most content produced on the internet is fake.

[nostrebored]

I am pretty excited. The factuality of important events has been distorted for most of history. Moving to a low information trust society is something that I think will be positive.

[davkan]

I don’t see it leading anywhere but a flat earth. When no one can be trusted whoever can tell you want to hear will be who people listen to and snake oil salesmen will reign supreme. Even if he was CIA, Cronkite’s world was closer to the truth than Alex Jones’.

[OvidNaso]

Gr 3d 7

[mungoman2]

Curious about this take, how do you mean?

I understand the point of distorted facts, but what I’m not sure how things are improved by basically having no trust in any facts?

[ky-hy]

One of my professors at Uni a year ago was arguing that due to genAI we would have a shift of trust into established institutions/people, so government (I'm not American so I don't know if this is possible after many recent scandals for example), Universities, people with authority/knowledge, close family members that are trust worthy, knowledgeable and/or work in before mentioned institutions. So basically we would revert to pre-web times where we had to trust some entities whenever we liked it or not.

I personally worry that what that would mean is we are left with little to no institutions to trust, besides Universities and family members, I don't think I would be able to trust governments and corporations, but I guess before internet people also weren't blindly trusting those.

[lopis]

I doubt the new trust bearers will be anything like governments and universities because trust in them has been severely eroded. Sadly, they will be select Youtubers and Internet influencers.

[nostrebored]

I've lived in a low information trust society and this was not the outcome at all. People trusted their local cliques much more, and there were local minima (e.g. a mainstreamish political party with leaders that are actively and dangerously anti semitic), but in general people were way more willing to engage with ideas.

One implication was people were more social and talked about ideas more. Thought had not been outsourced to arbiters in the way that it was in the U.S. People with authority, knowledge, and close family members were definitely inputs into what people thought, but by-and-large people still came to their own conclusions.

You got to see the gradient of thought that people actually had about issues. People would say their insane ideas out loud. You could disagree with people and have them actually engage with your perception of reality.

It was strictly better in my opinion.

[enduser]

I’m not the original poster, but I think they are saying if we are more skeptical about what we read, we are less likely to absorb propaganda as fact.

[port11]

This is kinda cute because it glosses over the lack of critical thinking skills, lack of research skills, and willingness to believe magic bullets, which would make most of us believe nothing of substance and yet fall for anyone with a silver tongue. Heck, we’re already dangerously close to that without LLMs.

[pjc50]

Low trust societies are poorer because everyone has to spend much more effort on verifying everything. People give up business opportunities because they can't trust their partners. It becomes more nepotistic because people trust family over strangers.

Low information trust societies get destroyed by pandemics of both physical viruses (due to anti-vax and medical distrust; we can see this happening again with Ebola) and destructive memetic lies (see 20th century fascism).

[nostrebored]

I've lived in low information trust societies, and they were much intellectually healthier than high trust societies, at least in the white collar communities I was in.

Moving there, I was shocked at how "conspiratorial" everybody seemed about everything. Living there, I was shocked out how often they were right. But it didn't impact people's likelihood to do things. I think they are actually orthogonal in a way that is unintuitive.

[rickdeckard]

Ignore the naysayers, they are just jealous. You got it totally tight, not everyone get's it like we do. We are facing alot of backlash for our beliefs these days.

Listen, I'm hosting this Telegram channel for people like us, where we can exchange free information without media bias, share the real facts and plan coordinated activities against these poisoning mainstream scumbags.

I also have a 20% coupon code for Wamp® Wolf-Testosteron for you, Wamp® really helped me stay awake and alert in these dire times.

It's true: Wamp, it really whips the Llama's ass!

[nostrebored]

But this is exactly my point -- in a low information trust society things like this our noise. They work in high information trust societies because who would sell medical products that don't work? A doctor is leading Wamp®, surely a doctor would never lie to us for money?

[rickdeckard]

In low information trust society everything is noise except what passes a smoke-test or who you believe, which plays on this general tendency of humans to prefer comfort over challenge, confirmation over rejection.

A high information trust society has regulation in place which tracks such acts of manipulation so that this trust is not abused (e.g. regulation against misleading/false advertising).

A low information society promotes the notion that everyone is lying anyway and everyone is on his own to figure out what's true. So regulation gets dismantled, and the premise becomes "it's not lying if I can make enough people believe it".

[nostrebored]

I don’t think you have ever actually lived in one.

“which plays on this general tendency of humans to prefer comfort over challenge, confirmation over rejection.”

This is completely and observably wrong. It reads like it would make sense, but the most ideologically open cultures I’ve seen are LIT.

[rickdeckard]

> I don’t think you have ever actually lived in one.

I lived in societies of high and low information trust, and observed first-hand what happens on transition. If trust in public information is high, people contribute and challenge common sources of information, and there is high expectation and punishment to rectify, improving the quality and transparency of commonly agreed information.

In low trust environments, people start to distrust everything, initially seek out explanations but then largely gravitate towards information sources which confirm their assumptions or own bias, because they lack time, energy and skills for any other path. To stabilize themselves, they then build a mental "fortress" around their belief which is periodically fostered not by challenging it but by seeking out others who confirm it.

Advancing in this direction increases the general consensus that there is no common ground (because this requires common trust in some information source), it gets increasingly difficult to educate such fractured groups, because there is no longer a path for many to accept inconvenient truth in light of a more convenient "alternative truth".

This is poisonous in a democracy, because common agreement on facts is what's so crucial for this process.

Hence my learning that it's not a healthy direction for a society (and also the reason why systems attacking democracies don't aim to gain trust, they build distrust)

> but the most ideologically open cultures I’ve seen are LIT.

There is a huge difference between a ideologically open society and a low information trust society. Accepting other ideologies requires trust.

A low information trust society breaks down trust not just in institutions but also among citizens, which is the fertile ground for polarization and actively prevents open ideology.

You may have the wrong understanding of the terminology. A high-information-trust society doesn't mean that everyone blindly accepts a leader, it describes a system where trust is maintained. In a functioning democracy this happens because society constantly challenges institutions, as it DEMANDS to be able to trust them.

In low-information-trust systems, the consensus is that no one can be trusted. So no joint effort is taken to hold power accountable, everyone plays to his own fraction which erodes common grounds, solidarity and citizen power.

[Cider9986]

What could make it stop?

[flashman]

well we could [HN terms of service violation]

[amelius]

Good thing the locations of many datacenters are secret.