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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

#251

Post by JieJie »

salawat wrote: post #156
flagrant_taco wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Centralization is technology. There will always be people looking at any advancement and figuring out how to leverage it to expand their personal capability to project power. Nothing is immune to it. Even primitives of decentralization can be leveraged in a way that defacto centralization is the inevitable outcome. You don't research things that can't be centralized. You just don't centralize. The cost there though.…

Watching Mastodon and the Fediverse expand is an experiment we can watch in real time.

Newcomers to the technology clamoring for it to be more centralized is a daily occurrence. It seems almost entropic, the push towards centralization. It seems to require constant effort to keep it decentralized.

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

#252

Post by scarface_74 »

ryandrake wrote: post #162
gtirloni wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. Even when a major TV channels was busting fake news in my country, people just switched to other govt-sponsored (bribed?) channel to hear what they wanted to hear. It became a common meme to say that major TV channel has an agenda (and either silence or whataboustism ensues once people are questioned about the actual fake news).

People will always switch to the brand of media that shows the truth that validates their existing beliefs. Today, there are a handful of "belief buckets" to choose from. In the USA, you have conservative news channels and mainstream news channels. You can pick your favorite source of truth, but they come as a package deal. If you strongly believe X is factual, you'll tune in to the channel that presents X as factual…

I kind of knew that. But I didn’t realize how bad it was until the last few years.

The WSJ, Forbes and the National Review were what I considered reliably conservative sites that I use to be able to quote to conservative friends. Once they turned against Trump, they became part of the untrusted “mainstream media”.

Then when FoxNews called the 2020 election fairly, then they became sellouts and people started flocking to NewsMax. Whatever I thought of FoxNews over the years, I always thought their election night coverage was straight down the line.

RedState kicked out all of their neverTrumpers because they were losing readers.

Then conservatives started criticizing NewsMax when they would slightly push back against the “election was stolen” claims.

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

#253

Post by crooked-v »

aziaziazi wrote: post #188
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…

Isn’t Verified a feature to (supposedly) attest someone identity instead of attesting the trueness of their tweets? For my understanding the purpose was to help newcomers to distinguish @realDonaldTrump with @veryRealTrump. It is supposed to prevent impersonating, but that’s just a shift of trust from your own judgement to the Twitter chosen fraud algorithm or whatever method they choose. Can’t see how 10$ add more c…

They got rid of the identity part. Now all it indicates is that you pay Twitter.

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

#254

Post by lolinder »

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.

Photography has always been less reliable than many people thought it was, even without considering photo doctoring. Like statistics, the frame you choose in a photo can completely alter the story it's telling. It might be that entering an era where complete fabrication is easy will make people more resistant to the subtler tricks that have worked well hitherto.

Bill Watterson had a series of strips about this in Calvin and Hobbes in 1992 [0].

> CALVIN: This is what I like about photography. People think cameras always tell the truth.

> CALVIN: They think the camera is a dispassionate machine that records only facts. But really, cameras lie all the time! Select the facts and you manipulate the truth!

> CALVIN: For example, I've cleared off this corner of my bed. Take a picture of me here, but crop out all the mess around me, so it looks like I keep my room tidy.

> HOBBES: Is this even legal?

> CALVIN: Wait, let me comb my hair and put on a tie.

[0] This is the one I quoted, but the one before and after it are related: https://www.gocomics.com/calvinandhobbes/1992/09/17

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

#255

Post by passion__desire »

thisisit wrote: post #197

I am amazed that the title is allowed to stand despite the original title and the content. The origin of the image is unclear. Sure, one can speculate that "India ruling party's IT cell" is behind the morphed image. This is what this comment section is for. But without hard proof the title is as much of an propaganda as are the morphed image. Are we going to tag everything a Democrat does as "US ruling party's" doing…

Do you think it is possible for one side to doctor images and make it viral by planting it in the opposition's filter bubble (possibly by your embedded twitter agents) only to be easily outed like Alan Sokal did. We live in interesting times.

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

#256

Post by Roark66 »

remote_phone wrote: post #231
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.

The Dallas shopping center shooting was the first time in my life I couldn’t tell the difference between online truth and lies. I’m very good as finding out the truth vs lies but this time I couldn’t. Usually disinformation is easy to spot but this time it came out so fast that I had no idea what was real vs fake. It’s a scary time to be living in when you have no idea what is real anymore.

Personally after I was involved with some "news" that was then reported completely wrong (not by malice, but pure incompetence) I've stopped believing anything I read or hear in the media. This was 25 years ago and the trend has only increased. Yes, there is quite a bit of fakery, but 99% of "bad news" is a result of the: 1. No expectation by the public credible sources are quoted when news are reported. 2. Reporters not knowing their arse from their elbow. 2. Their editor/writers"trying to spice it up a little". 3. The speakers making bloody mistake after mistake when reading from a teleprompter in the most important stuff. 4. Other media picking it up and adding their own spin.

It's like "Chinese whisper". I can't count the number of times my partner tells me when I come home "have you heard, there is this horribly stupid law that is coming into effect next month". Then I check, and it's not a law, but a proposal, it hasn't been even accepted to be discussed yet and the details are completely different too.

I understand, not many smart people these days go into "traditional news reporting". It's a pity, because good news reporting is a prerequisite of a well functioning democratic society

It will only get worse, as revenue from traditional news drops they'll be more and more dssperate to make money the only way they can, by increasing the emotional load of the stuff they report. Everything has to be extreme, outraging, horrible etc.

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

#257

Post by adrr »

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.

World has moved towards authoritarian governments. Haven't seen a good reason why this push but there seems to be correlated to the amount information people have access to(eg: social networks, digital media etc).

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

#258

Post by dmbche »

shagie wrote: post #92
dmbche wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We're good! It's a risk assessment - nothing has been broken, but they propose that with a computer with these specs it could be done. I wouldn't worry too much about encryption being easily broken soon.

For those who worry about it, it isn't that it's broken soon , but that it will be broken within a timeframe that the data is still useful. Veritasium : How Quantum Computers Break The Internet... Starting Now - https://youtu.be/-UrdExQW0cs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harvest_now,_decrypt_later

I'm not sure what encrypted data produced today would be relevant in 40 years time? Thinking about how some cases can't be prosecuted since it's been too long since the offence

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

#259

Post by flagrant_taco »

Varqu wrote: post #50
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…

I think the primary issue is that, while internet users usually question the authenticity of photos (as a normal practice), they tend to subconsciously trust what they see in videos. It will require a significant mental shift to now question practically every single piece of audiovisual content.

I'd hope that people don't like in a world where they believe they have to question the authenticity of everything they see. Why would they keep using the internet at all? And what psychological impact does that have when you view the world assuming everything may be a lie?
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