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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

#221

Post by gpm »

jeromegv wrote: post #30
capableweb wrote: post #8

> Verified account @wokeflix_ tweeted the same image in a meme > Verified account @randomsena tweeted the same image > Another verified account, @RealAtulsay, tweeted the same image Isn't "Verified" on Twitter just a subscription now, meaning it's just that these people have given Twitter money? Why it matters (in a journalistic sense) who has paid Twitter or not? And why are only some of the verified accounts mentio…

Well let’s see what Twitter says about their new blue program Your account must have no signs of being misleading or deceptive Your account must have no signs of engaging in platform manipulation and spam So Twitter is telling us that those accounts should not be deceiving. Yet, they are. https://help.twitter.com/en/managing-your-account/about-twit...

If you're running an article on how Elon is changing twitter into a disinformation machine, the fact that they're verifying deceptive accounts would be relevant.

If you're running an article on how the India ruling party used AI to paint protestors in a false light, it isn't relevant. Worse bringing attention to it like this could give less-informed readers the false impression that "verified" actually meant something like "verified by the government".

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

#222

Post by LightBug1 »

ceejayoz wrote: post #91
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.

But the conclusion becomes “you can’t trust anything ”. I worry about a civilization that can’t agree on even the most basic of facts.

Welcome ... to the desert of the real.

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

#224

Post by pjc50 »

api wrote: post #205
pjc50 wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anyone doing history knows that all the sources are biased. You have to corroborate evidence and adjust for knowing the context in which the work was produced to determine how reliable it is.

Sure. But there was an era that lasted around 100 years when a photo alone was pretty reliable. Photos and especially videos were at least hard to fake. That era is over. Absolutely anything can be faked cheaply and easily.

Really early photography was so poor compared to modern HD images that obvious fakes fooled "serious" people https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cottingley_Fairies vs Arthur Conan Doyle, for example. But yes, it required more effort, and the effort reduction for fakes offered by AI is extremely powerful.

(There is also the sad business of the 1932 Pulitzer https://www.pulitzer.org/news/statement-walter-duranty )

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

#225

Post by sbmthakur »

throwaway384629 wrote: post #182
screye wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is a conundrum, because the same NRIs oppose bills that would solve India's problems. The ban on crop burning (main cause of Delhi's pollution) was central to the farm bill. But protesting farmers (widely supported in the west) opposed it, and the bill died despite having democratic approval (both national opinion and sufficient votes) > dared to vote a great scientist to president We do not vote for Presidents in…

Wow! Most of what you mentioned is plain wrong. Not sure if you are mistaken or lying knowingly. >> The ban on crop burning (main cause of Delhi's pollution) was central to the farm bill. Crop burning is already outlawed in India and enforced with fines. Why you need to make a new law for something which is already illegal? Below was the actual central idea of the farm bill: "The laws would have deregulated a system…

Stubble burning was long banned but it's still being practiced and contributes to Delhi's pollution. In fact, one of the demands of the farm protests was to release those who were arrested for stubble burning[1].

> Again, wrong. The 2022 Indian presidential election was held on 18 July 2022 to elect the president of India.

It's not a general election. Only MPs and MLAs get to vote for the president.

> Source please? You must be living in an alternate world.

There are indeed concerns on job growth but infrastructure growth and economic policies have caught pace in the last decade. There's a reason why Meta, Google and Aramco want to pour money into the country.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020%E2%80%932021_Indian_farme...

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

#226

Post by deno »

pjc50 wrote: post #181
deno wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I like a green checkmark next to a photo better than giving more power to whoever you think should be the one determining and enforcing those consequences.

The consequences I mean are those of the public: proving that the ruling party forged images isn't going to get people to change their votes. You can build the green checkmark, but you can't get people to care about it.

I see this as completely different issues. Whether AI exists or not this is and was a problem. I’m proposing technical solution because AI fakes are a technical problem. And yeah if people get used to green checkmark you can’t just pump fakes willy nilly, you actually have to put some effort, as before AI. I guess the problem I want to solve is having to live in a world where you have to assume absolutely everything is 100% fake all the time. Because this just puts everyone in their respective truth bubbles even more. Any objectivity we can return to the world is a good thing, IMO.

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

#227

Post by notjulianjaynes »

jahewson wrote: post #209
AnimalMuppet wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah. The postmodernists (as I understand them) have been talking about "post truth" and "claims of truth are just assertions of power". And I've always thought that their position was insane. Now they look more like prophets. That world is increasingly the world we live in. The question becomes, how can we stay sane in that world? How can we find enough actual truth (truth that is actually true , true in the old sen…

> Now they look more like prophets. Not to me. They just look like another group claiming grand and sweeping theories of truth.

That's somewhat ironic since "postmodernism is an intellectual stance or mode of discourse characterized by skepticism toward the 'grand narratives' of modernism."[1]

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postmodernism

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

#228

Post by prox »

flir wrote: post #163
prox wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting, what are your views on that?

I've only thought about it superficially. I think web of trust is a better model for how humans work, but whenever someone tries to translate it to the digital world it fails. (Lets call this approach digital villages for the sake of argument). We have lots of examples of digital villages working - forums, subreddits, chatrooms, MUDs, etc etc. Maybe it's a case of worse is better? Or maybe everyone who implements web…

I tend to think the small scale worked better for more meaningful connections (high signal to noise, content to interest, less counting likes and subs, less ads) My best experiences online aren’t Big Social : it’s small forums, IRC chatrooms with high engagement, high trust scenarios like people being themselves immediately without anonymity.

I tend to think lots of social spaces have been engineered by engineers, not people. The tech has been more important than the value it can bring in a human context. (Exaggerating for emphasis here, it’s not black and white but functionally true)

Big fan of the Six Idea’s (M.J. Adler) for meaningful life that is fairly universal: Truth, Goodness, and Beauty - the ideas we judge by; and Liberty, Equality and Justice - the ideas we act on.

I feel a food online social space should strive for high marks in these areas.

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

#229

Post by hn_throwaway_99 »

pjc50 wrote: post #38
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…

That is what a lot of us think the real threat of "AI" is: not that it will autonomously produce bad outcomes for humanity, but because it's a tool that's indifferent to truth or falsehood it allows any kind of truth or reality based politics to be totally flooded out of the public sphere. Everyone ends up fighting in the hall of mirrors.

100%. And the thing I've personally found quite shocking is how the past 5-10 years or so have shown that even when the truth does come out, there are enough "mirrors" as you put it so that people can question anything and believe whatever they want to believe, facts be damned.

A couple weeks ago when the Patriot Front had a white supremacist rally and march in front of the Washington Monument (now of the "red bike guy" fame), many prominent right wing Twitter talking heads tweeted that it must be a left wing conspiracy to make conservatives look bad and that the marchers were federal agents, despite 0 evidence of this, and indeed despite plenty of evidence that they were just actual Patriot Front members. It was difficult for me to tell if they actually believed that fairy tale, or of they felt that it didn't really matter because they knew if they shouted "fake news" loud enough they could get enough like minded people to upvote it.

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

#230

Post by AnthonyMouse »

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #58
pjc50 wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is what a lot of us think the real threat of "AI" is: not that it will autonomously produce bad outcomes for humanity, but because it's a tool that's indifferent to truth or falsehood it allows any kind of truth or reality based politics to be totally flooded out of the public sphere. Everyone ends up fighting in the hall of mirrors.

Yeah. The postmodernists (as I understand them) have been talking about "post truth" and "claims of truth are just assertions of power". And I've always thought that their position was insane. Now they look more like prophets. That world is increasingly the world we live in. The question becomes, how can we stay sane in that world? How can we find enough actual truth (truth that is actually true , true in the old sen…

A lot of what enables this is centralized infrastructure. If you have your messages and browsing history and files on your own device, and you make end-to-end encrypted connections to the people you talk to, it's a lot harder to do this kind of thing. Because you have your own personal copy of the thing from when it first happened and if you remember it you can go back and verify it yourself. Then you can point that out, and anyone else can go into their own copy from however long ago and see that the fake doesn't match the original.

Social media companies notoriously blocked users from sending a story to each other in DMs a couple of years ago. It's not a stretch to go from there to deleting past messages in order to memory hole something. And the companies may not even be doing it by choice if they're being pressured by a government.

They can't do that if your data is yours and they can't read it, instead of the only copy being on their servers.

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