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Post-truth society is near

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Re: Post-truth society is near

#31

Post by 13years »

hedora wrote: post #15
13years wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Some will make the argument “But isn’t this simply the same problems we already deal with today?”. It is; however, the ability to produce fake content is getting exponentially cheaper while the ability to detect fake content is not improving. As long as fake content was somewhat expensive, difficult to produce, and contained detectable digital artifacts, it at least could be somewhat managed." Yes, indeed. However,…

In the 90’s, the internet was cool, but you went to the library to do research. For about 20 years, that flipped. I think it is flipping back. For me, the eye opener was trying to diagnose a roof vent issue. The small local library has two relevant books, each with 2-3 pages of information. Those pages were more informative than a 6 hour internet search.

Yes, somewhat a different topic, but so much information now exists in video form versus written due to the ease of video recording.

So many videos on YT that could be 2 lines of text are 5-10 min videos of someone talking about something irrelevant until we find the part where the problem is discussed.

I suppose AI might actually be solution to this. Allowing efficient video search.

Re: Post-truth society is near

#33

Post by ofslidingfeet »

mvdtnz wrote: post #8

There is absolutely no chance whatsoever that robots that are so real they are indistinguishable from people will come about in our lifetimes. The amount of breathless speculation since OpenAI released a kind-of-decent text completion program is so far beyond ridiculous at this point.

Maybe you're much sharper than I am, but I am thoroughly convinced that what already exists could fool me for a long time under the right circumstances.

Re: Post-truth society is near

#34

Post by shadowgovt »

croes wrote: post #23
mrshadowgoose wrote: post #7

There is so much baseless hysteria about this subject. If society actually cared about this issue (spoiler, it doesn't), we already have all the required cryptographic tools (PKI, trusted timestamping, remote attestation) to create/record verifiably sourced content. Nobody really cares though. But people sure do like to whine about it.

How do cryptographic tools help against fake imagery?

They allow people generating fake images to sign them so that people believe they are human-generated.

Oh, sorry. I meant "They allow independent sources of truth to do the meticulous work of validating the pedigree of creations, so that with their cryptographically-secured seal you can be confident a human originated the content and a human authenticated it. Only after such work is done would a work be cryptographically signed as authentic."

You know, just like you can always trust the presence of an SSL certificate means a site is who they say they are. /s

Re: Post-truth society is near

#35

Post by swayvil »

isoprophlex wrote: post #16

Eh, what? Anti-vaxxers believing there's microchips in vaccines, 9/11 truthers, flat earthers, NFT peddlers, gamestop investors, moon landing deniers, qanon, believers in a shadowy cabal running the USA because there's an illuminati-looking eye on the 1 dollar bill... These did pretty well without GPT4 and SD. People need education, critical reading skills, reasoning skills. And they need at least the lower 2-3 rungs…

Everybody always thinks it's the other guy."Why can't those sheeple just wake up?"

The best way to tell who's drinking the cool-aid is probably numbers. The more people who believe it, the wronger it is.

Re: Post-truth society is near

#36

Post by noirbot »

13years wrote: post #11
RIMR wrote: post #5

Post truth society is already here. Disinformation has been on the rise the past couple of decades, and the results are clearly visible: conspiracy theories, election misinformation, and divisive politics where people's worldviews vary across their perception of reality. Photoshopping and lying your way to a narrative is now the norm in the age of social media. No doubt that AI will accelerate this, but to act like A…

Yes, the problem already exists, but we are approaching something uniquely different in magnitude that is significantly different than prior. I would add the caveat Post-truth is not the moment disinformation exists, but rather the point where the threshold is crossed where truth is no longer discoverable for the majority of content.

But that assumes that we've always lived in a "Truth" society where Truth was discoverable for a majority of content, and I'm not sure that was ever the case for more than like... 10% of the global population for more than a few decades. And it's not even clear to me that that was a net good for everyone involved in a practical sense.

A hundred years ago, even people in rich countries often had no simple way to verify the truth of anything. Even information local to them. Cut to 2000 and the scope of things you're expected to validate the truth of has expanded to wartime conditions in countries thousands of miles away, something that is often hard to discover the truth of in real time even if you're actively involved in the war there, and is often not fully discovered for decades or centuries after.

In my mind, optimistically, things are moving towards some people being more ok with just not having a hot take about something that they can't verify. Not to say people won't have unjustified opinions on things, but that folks will maybe revert to the sort of "that's happening over there, and maybe I don't need to know about it on a minute by minute basis" zone.

Re: Post-truth society is near

#37

Post by _8j50 »

So we're living in a "truth" society now or in the near past? How silly. For most of human history people believed things to be true based on the words of soemone they trust (clergy, teacher, village chief,etc..). People are just doing that using the internet now.

There was a brief few decades where TV and radio changed society so that everyone thought what's on TV was what everyone else outside their circle believed, this media centric truth seeking is what is going away.

A lot of people have crazy beliefs these days because the politicization of institutions that used to be far less polarized historically. This i ncludes academia,religion and the press. If someone lives, believes and acts in total contradiction of how you live, believe and act then the only way to accept their claims of fact is to be an expert in that field just as qualified as them and find out for yourself but most people can't do that so they turn to someone closer to their world views and life styles.

This isn't post-truth but the decentralization and segregation of trust at all aspects of society, because people are tribal and targeted ads make a lot of money.

Re: Post-truth society is near

#38

Post by O194673789 »

RIMR wrote: post #5

Post truth society is already here. Disinformation has been on the rise the past couple of decades, and the results are clearly visible: conspiracy theories, election misinformation, and divisive politics where people's worldviews vary across their perception of reality. Photoshopping and lying your way to a narrative is now the norm in the age of social media. No doubt that AI will accelerate this, but to act like A…

[flagged]

Re: Post-truth society is near

#39

Post by huytersd »

mvdtnz wrote: post #8

There is absolutely no chance whatsoever that robots that are so real they are indistinguishable from people will come about in our lifetimes. The amount of breathless speculation since OpenAI released a kind-of-decent text completion program is so far beyond ridiculous at this point.

ChatGPT could fool a lot of people already. Unless you’re looking to probe and check it’s an AI you probably won’t detect it over a chat session, especially with the right prompt giving it a background, context and the right speech/chat patterns.

Re: Post-truth society is near

#40

Post by notobmywarch »

isoprophlex wrote: post #16

Eh, what? Anti-vaxxers believing there's microchips in vaccines, 9/11 truthers, flat earthers, NFT peddlers, gamestop investors, moon landing deniers, qanon, believers in a shadowy cabal running the USA because there's an illuminati-looking eye on the 1 dollar bill... These did pretty well without GPT4 and SD. People need education, critical reading skills, reasoning skills. And they need at least the lower 2-3 rungs…

[flagged]
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