[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.