81–90 of 119 posts
A few weeks ago my girlfriend made me discover Instagram filters. Obviously they're not in "deep fake" territory but I was still massively impressed by the quality of the face recognition and tracking coupled with some rather advanced 3D reconstructions on top. 15 years ago that would've been science fiction, today it's a free gimmicky feature in an app running on commodity hardware. There are also apps that will smo…
Are we though? Or is it just becoming much more obvious the limitations of relying on the media in general. This very well might lead to a better understanding of truth, and our personal responsibility in understanding it.
At the very least, it's not a foregone conclusion that this will lead to worse outcomes than what we have today. It might be what tips us in a new and better direction.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> But if the NYTimes does the same thing, it carries a lot more weight. Sure, and that's part of the danger. Convincing deep fakes will be used to delegitimize mainstream news organizations, as with what happened with Dan Rather - a trusted source presented faked documents.
That trusted source didn't bother to vet the faked documents and instead rushed it onto the air. That trusted source continued to push that narrative even going so far as to say, "fake but accurate," destroying all credibility and ultimately retiring. The only difference is today, they don't retire out of shame, they just keep on doing it, keeping viewership via emotional draw rather than rational news. Real news has…
A few weeks ago my girlfriend made me discover Instagram filters. Obviously they're not in "deep fake" territory but I was still massively impressed by the quality of the face recognition and tracking coupled with some rather advanced 3D reconstructions on top. 15 years ago that would've been science fiction, today it's a free gimmicky feature in an app running on commodity hardware. There are also apps that will smo…
> We're getting deeper and deeper into a post-truth world. Are we though? Or is it just becoming much more obvious the limitations of relying on the media in general. This very well might lead to a better understanding of truth, and our personal responsibility in understanding it. At the very least, it's not a foregone conclusion that this will lead to worse outcomes than what we have today. It might be what tips us…
What we'll continue to see are rising sects of flat-earthers, anti-vaxxers, cultists, polarization and deniying of anything not-in-my-bubble, a complete lack of trust in journalism and media, and futile attempts of fact-checking while we're all drowning in fake news shared endlessy on unsuspecting users. It takes a lot of effort to show something was manipulated digitally, and you'll have to fact-check by yourself, that doesn't scale at all.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It gets increasingly cheap to manufacture convincing fakes, but it doesn't get any cheaper to do quality journalism. The risk as I see it is that there is such an overwhelming tsunami of manufactured reality that it becomes impossible to tell truth from fiction.
It was never that expensive to manufacture fake text. Minorly expensive to manufacture fake images. And we've been hit by tabloids, spam and so on before. None of that is new. Overwhelmed by content is/was/will be a problem that is solved very simply: people limit the distribution lanes they consume, and naturally establish "trust networks" and hierarchies. Nyt didn't become "trusted" by accident. People aren't as du…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It gets increasingly cheap to manufacture convincing fakes, but it doesn't get any cheaper to do quality journalism. The risk as I see it is that there is such an overwhelming tsunami of manufactured reality that it becomes impossible to tell truth from fiction.
It was never that expensive to manufacture fake text. Minorly expensive to manufacture fake images. And we've been hit by tabloids, spam and so on before. None of that is new. Overwhelmed by content is/was/will be a problem that is solved very simply: people limit the distribution lanes they consume, and naturally establish "trust networks" and hierarchies. Nyt didn't become "trusted" by accident. People aren't as du…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> We're getting deeper and deeper into a post-truth world. Are we though? Or is it just becoming much more obvious the limitations of relying on the media in general. This very well might lead to a better understanding of truth, and our personal responsibility in understanding it. At the very least, it's not a foregone conclusion that this will lead to worse outcomes than what we have today. It might be what tips us…
I do not agree this _might_ leads us in a better direction. What we'll continue to see are rising sects of flat-earthers, anti-vaxxers, cultists, polarization and deniying of anything not-in-my-bubble, a complete lack of trust in journalism and media, and futile attempts of fact-checking while we're all drowning in fake news shared endlessy on unsuspecting users. It takes a lot of effort to show something was manipul…
The fact that we're more aware of flat-earthers today, is probably a good thing too. I'm not 100% sure that there are more of them today than before, or if they're just more noticeable. But in either case, we should be very careful to draw too many conclusions when we look around today because we're living in a time of great transition. We're basically in our teenage years of this technology.
Just as you shouldn't judge an adult by who he was at 14, I don't think we should assume we know what the adult internet will look like because we see some acne on it today.
Remember, technology to fake voices has already be done. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I3l4XLZ59iw
Certainly interesting times ahead.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I do not agree this _might_ leads us in a better direction. What we'll continue to see are rising sects of flat-earthers, anti-vaxxers, cultists, polarization and deniying of anything not-in-my-bubble, a complete lack of trust in journalism and media, and futile attempts of fact-checking while we're all drowning in fake news shared endlessy on unsuspecting users. It takes a lot of effort to show something was manipul…
The problem is that we have always accepted what we see because we've assumed that things are more or less as they've been presented to us, we've mostly blindly accepted the story from the social truthmakers. We've had no reason to question them. This will lead to humanity doing a lot more questioning. I think this very well might lead to some very positive outcomes. The fact that we're more aware of flat-earthers to…
Even this is too simple. Many people have lived under propaganda regimes, yes, many have bought into them, and many people have seen through them.
Each new wave of information technology provides new ways to “pull the wool” over peoples’ eyes.
And though a propaganda machine has power... like all things it creates and equal an opposite power that eventually destroys it. The question for individuals is only: where am I in the cycle, how long will this cycle last, and what is my role to play?