Post-truth society is near

I guess my question is if that actually makes things worse. The people who were likely to believe falsehoods unquestioningly probably already do. How much does the ease of making new convincing falsehoods ensnare new people vs. causing the wary to just get paranoid and unlikely to believe things without overwhelming evidence?

At some point, getting people to believe things, let alone care about them, is already something that is generally known to hit diminishing returns, mostly in terms of reach. The percentage of the population that even is following wherever you're posting your fake content isn't 100%, even if you're so convincing that it gets onto major news sources.

Post-truth always feels like it's brought up as "And then anarchy follows", but it's unclear to me that it's that different than what things were like in pre-internet society where "fake news" was just someone in your town telling you something they'd heard from someone the town over about something happening hundreds of miles away. It can be a regression, but it's unclear to me that it's necessarily worse for people, since it's not clear to me that the fact that I know about some natural disaster in Laos is good or important.

Post-truth society has already arrived in the mid-2010's. Making fake content was never expensive or difficult to produce to begin with. Misinformation is already expensive to tackle and in many cases nearly undetectable without invasive data collection. Generative AI doesn't change the equation and was never a requirement to successfully manipulate public opinon. Hell, most of these problems with misinformation are probably as old as the emergence of sedentary human societies.

Also, what's up with throwing some random unsourced statement about robotics/replicants in the middle of an article?

The first sentence is true, but the second raises the question: are we so gullible that the robots don't need to be indistinguishable in order to fool most people?

While the tech is great, if anything I feel like what OpenAI has revealed to us is that we're still a bunch of superstitious apes that are just not cognitively equipped to reason about what we've created.

It feels like a new age of religion is dawning in which we construct myths about the tools we build, instead of myths about the forces of nature. At one point we blamed bad weather on the gods. Our gods now are technological. The cryptocurrency movement was more belief than tool. The AI panic is more belief than tool.

We are apes and we have always worshiped falsehoods but now the falsehoods we worship are unknowable artifacts of technology, Arthur C. Clarke was prescient when he said - "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic"

Disinformation is a complete red-herring.

It's about presenting people with content that they want to believe. All sides are engaged in it.

The facts have never been either-or/black-or-white anyway.

It has always been more important to teach people to think for themselves, how to empathize with people who are different from you and have a grounded moral-center. I think if you find yourself completely agreeing with a major narrative in the media, you're probably missing one of the above three. Tribalism is cancer.

"Disinformation" is just a reframing of the narrative to pretend that only one side has all of the facts. The people shouting at you about how dangerous it is are the ones playing you.

Logistics, and the hard constraint that we can collect the votes without being able to tie a distinct vote to a distinct individual. That last part puts some hard limits on what we can use for validation.