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India ruling party's IT cell used AI to show smile on arrested protesters' faces

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Re: India ruling party's IT cell used AI to show smile on arrested protesters' faces

#141

Post by dartharva »

throwaway384629 wrote: post #70
ilrwbwrkhv wrote: post #37

What's with India and the shift towards the right? I thought it had too many religions and different cultures to pull this off.

BJP in India does not fight elections based on any development agendas like education/healthcare or social security. They pretends to the majority Hindu public that "Hindus are in danger from Muslims" and only BJP can protect them. They also project themselves as true nationalists and anyone having anti-government views is declared a "Pakistani" or anti-national. https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/4/7/spike-in-anti-…

Which political party in India primarily fights elections "based on any development agendas like education/healthcare or social security"?

If there was one, how much "development" has that party achieved when in power?

Re: India ruling party's IT cell used AI to show smile on arrested protesters' faces

#142

Post by deno »

pmontra wrote: post #126
deno wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

I take an authentic image with a camera, crop out the part of it that it's not aligned with my goals, put a reference to the authentic image. How do you get the authentic image to compare it with my edit? And how do you solve the problem of a powerful entity telling you that the cropped image is authentic, or there will be consequences? People know what's going on, they bend for fear of breaking. No technology is cha…

You have to provide authentic image with your image for it to validate, just as you have to supply any intermediate certificates in TLS. If you want to crop to hide information you have to do this while taking the photo in the camera app.

Powerful entity can tell you to install their root certificate just like it happens in China. This is a different problem.

Re: India ruling party's IT cell used AI to show smile on arrested protesters' faces

#143

Post by eunos »

ilrwbwrkhv wrote: post #37

What's with India and the shift towards the right? I thought it had too many religions and different cultures to pull this off.

these days lots of Indian twitter accounts that shown on my feed are itching for Hindutva.

P.S Not an Indian so Idk how they appeared on my feed.

Re: India ruling party's IT cell used AI to show smile on arrested protesters' faces

#144

Post by hiatus »

pimlottc wrote: post #77

I’m wondering if someone can comment on the cultural aspect here. It seems like adding the smiles was intended to discredit the protesters, by somehow suggesting the protest was insincere. But I feel like you could interpret this the other way too: even in the face of brutal treatment, they maintain a positive and peaceful attitude and don’t let their opponents break their spirits. “Turn the other cheek” and “love yo…

Think to yourself, would a captor modify the images of the imprisoned for a benevolent purpose?

Re: India ruling party's IT cell used AI to show smile on arrested protesters' faces

#145

Post by tdehnel »

collsni wrote: post #13

Just the beginning, what happens when it becomes impossible to parse fact and fiction? I mean rsa 2048 can be currently broken in 104 days, and we'll be at quantum levels sooner than we realize. How we validating anything after that? Biometric?

Most people think information is transmitted from source to receiver. This is actually wrong.

What happens is the information is creatively formed in the mind of the receiver, by the receiver, in all cases.

In other words, people form an explanation for the observation in their minds and judge it compared to other competing explanations.

So instead of the post-truth, doom-and-gloom world that you fear, another possible outcome is that people get better at forming or identifying good explanatory knowledge. In other words, the bar for what you call truth actually goes up and people get smarter.

An example of this happening would be door-to-door sales people. They basically no longer exist. Because people learned not to answer the door when a random person knocks.

The old explanation “someone I want to talk to is here to see me” got replaced with a new better explanation of “some time wasting stranger is probably at the door.”

Re: India ruling party's IT cell used AI to show smile on arrested protesters' faces

#146

Post by api »

lolinder wrote: post #138
juujian wrote: post #6

That is getting real freaking dystopian. Sure, we would have been able to do this before, and the Soviet Union did a ton of photo editing. But doing this particular edit must have been so easy. No cost at all, no mental barrier. You would almost think 'why bother'. And before anyone says 'yeah, but the truth came out'. Well, we saw it, but how many of the particular audience of whatever that outlet was will never see…

This phase won't last long in the grand scheme of things. We've had about 150 years in which people have been conditioned to trust anything that they see in a photograph, but it's always been possible to fake it and for the last 30 years it's been getting dramatically easier. AI just brings us full circle back to the era of woodcuts—just because you see a photorealistic image or hear an audio recording does not mean…

The era of easy to reproduce but hard to fake media is actually the historical outlier.

Before that media was written text and everyone knows anyone can make up anything they want in that domain. Before that most people were illiterate so it didn’t matter much. Media wasn’t even much of a thing.

We are headed for the post-media era when any arbitrary piece of media depicting anything can be created for little or no money by anyone with a computer. Nothing can be believed unless you were there or hear it from a known reliable source that was there.

There’s going to be an ugly transition period when we have tons of people who haven’t gotten this memo yet. These people are going to be manipulated en masse with tremendous effectiveness. The push to deplatform misinformation is largely an attempt to stop this, but I think it’s futile. People just have to learn that media is dead and they can’t trust anything anymore.

Hunter Thompson was ahead of his time. The only journalism worth doing in this future is individual gonzo journalism where you go and experience and tell the tale directly to your audience. That of course is vulnerable to spin by the teller, but so are all tales. It’s the best we have. Hopefully honest tellers of first hand tales will exist and get the reputation for honesty they deserve.

Re: India ruling party's IT cell used AI to show smile on arrested protesters' faces

#147

Post by lolinder »

pjc50 wrote: post #71
shaan7 wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am hoping that AI tooling like this becomes even more widespread (Google Photos is doing that) that more people will finally understand that they cannot trust everything they see online. I hope.

That is not an improvement, because it turns "online" (which is basically everything everywhere - all news media, TV, newspapers) into a politically useless wasteland.

"Online" is already a useless, trustless wasteland and has been since at least 2014. If this causes people to finally see it then maybe we can collectively build something better.

Re: India ruling party's IT cell used AI to show smile on arrested protesters' faces

#149

Post by dagmx »

codegeek wrote: post #133
dagmx wrote: post #22

As an NRI, I continue to be disappointed by the country I called home for most of my life. Between the politics and the pollution in Delhi, I fear I can never really return home. The last time I was home, I was struggling every day to breathe because Delhi has crazy air in the winter. While high school friends were telling me about how they don’t believe in equal rights, justifying any means to achieving a Hindu coun…

For non Indians, NRI = Non Resident Indian i.e. an Indian who lives outside India. In case someone wondered. It is easy to shit on the party in office which is BJP right now but show me a country that can have hundreds of languages, all religions and still survive for centuries as one country. Europe couldn't do it. They broke into EU (for better or worse). There are flaws but India is a complex country of various cu…

All I see is a lot of whataboutism to justify some truly heinous actions that have been committed in the past several years.

Yeah, Indira Gandhi wasn’t great either. Congress has its flaws.

None of that justifies the actions of today. Yes, the BJP has done some good things, but that’s true of many heinous authoritarians in the past as well.

No number of good things simply wash their hands of the bad stuff along the way.

Re: India ruling party's IT cell used AI to show smile on arrested protesters' faces

#150

Post by tdehnel »

flagrant_taco wrote: post #124
tdehnel wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is nothing in principle which prevents us from solving this problem. We cannot predict which new knowledge will solve it. But we can say that if we don’t solve it, it will be our fault for not producing the required knowledge fast enough.

Alternatively, it could be our fault for creating a world in which that fast growth in knowledge is required. We didn't have to pursue technologies that make the centralization of power and control easier and easier.

Eventually, some thing that we cannot control (e.g. Giant meteor, pandemic, etc) will come to destroy us.

If it does, it will be our fault for not progressing fast enough in terms of knowledge.

There is no world in which we could, or would want to limit our growth in terms of scientific knowledge. Not to mention the fact that to do so would mean ceding full totalitarian control.

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