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Post-truth society is near

mindprison.cc

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Re: Post-truth society is near

#61

Post by hindsightbias »

swayvil wrote: post #35
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.

How are people hip when they’re all the same?

Re: Post-truth society is near

#62

Post by fnordpiglet »

ssnistfajen wrote: post #24

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…

Truth has been a struggle in humanity since the first two people communicated. Even the Christian origin story involves deception and distorting fact. Propaganda and scientific mass deception are modern concepts but extend back over a hundred years. In modern times the assault has become pervasive and persistent, and to an increasing extent automated and personalized at scale. The very nature of truth has come into question and the idea of personal truths has become weaponized at extreme scales. Generative AI just improves the quality, scale, automation, and personalization dimensions of an endeavor that is as old as humanity - manipulating people to act in a way that benefits you at their own expense by warping their perceived reality.

Re: Post-truth society is near

#63

Post by aeternum »

huytersd wrote: post #39
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.

A single person can also fool a lot of people.

Re: Post-truth society is near

#64

Post by 13years »

modeless wrote: post #58
huytersd wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

They are talking about physical robots. Replicants/cylons, as referenced in the article. I agree with them. Sci-fi style androids will definitely be feasible soon. Some of them will be capable of acting like humans, displaying convincing emotions, forming relationships, etc. However, they will definitely not be indistinguishable from humans at a physical level; not even remotely close. Even AGI will not achieve that…

AGI may only be a momentary transitional state. It is assumed that ASI almost immediately follows AGI as once the machine is self aware and can improve itself then exponential intelligence takeoff is achieved.

Re: Post-truth society is near

#65

Post by mrshadowgoose »

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?

Trusted hardware running remotely-attested trusted software can capture imagery that can be highly assured to be real.

Trusted timestamping, when correctly implemented, completely prevents the generation of imagery after-the-fact. Any false imagery would need to be pre-prepared prior to an event in time, or generated in real time. And a trusted device would need to be exploited to "record" it.

PKI allows individuals/organizations/governments to cryptographically associate their reputation with specific pieces of content.

There will always be the possibility of exploitation of trusted hardware. Apple's eternal fight against the jailbreak scene is evidence of this. However, the combination of these techniques would go a long way towards making the production and distribution of fake imagery difficult.

But, as already stated, the actual problem is societal. People don't really care that much, and enjoy living in their echo chambers.

Re: Post-truth society is near

#66

Post by aeternum »

13years wrote: post #4
trebor wrote: post #2

Uh... Post-truth has been here awhile. They’ve had the capacity to fake/alter live events for decades now.

"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,…

This argument around cost of fake content would be more convincing if it weren't already used countless times throughout history. Socrates saying that writing will atrophy people's memories. The priest's fear that books will replace them when it comes to preaching. Gessner and his belief that the unmanageable flood of information unleashed by the printing press will ruin society.

The social dilemma, and all those that were convinced social media would spell the end of modern society.

Instead each of these technologies improves access to information and makes it easier for most to determine the truth via multiple sources. I'd imagine in the future there will be many AI agents that can help to summarize the many viewpoints. Just like anything, don't trust any one of them in isolation, consider many sources, and we'll be fine.

Re: Post-truth society is near

#67

Post by codetrotter »

reducesuffering wrote: post #54
codetrotter wrote: post #9

> Cylons/Replicants are going to likely become real within our lifetime. Great! So if me and some of my friends can afford to buy a few replicants together, we can agree offline on some gestures we will make using our replicants ahead of time and then we can witness important events with our replicants, and we will discretely gesture during the events. This will then allow us to determine if the feeds we are seeing f…

Naive to think you won’t have a compromised software stack on your replicant.

What I am saying is that because we agreed offline on what we would do at the event, we will be able to recognise when the feeds from our replicants do not match what we expected to see.

This way we detect that what we are seeing in the video does not match the real events at the place where our replicants are.

Re: Post-truth society is near

#68

Post by mrshadowgoose »

shadowgovt wrote: post #34
croes wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 cryptographic…

Hmmm, how does "trusted timestamping" and "remote attestation" fit into your assumption?

Re: Post-truth society is near

#69

Post by ssnistfajen »

jacquesm wrote: post #60
ssnistfajen wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's the meaning of "further" weaponizing something that has already been weaponized?

Doing it at scale by non-technical people without leaving a trace.

Troll farms have already achieved scale and they are rarely staffed with solely technical people. The trace part never mattered and will continue to not matter.

Re: Post-truth society is near

#70

Post by heresie-dabord »

shadowgovt wrote: post #29

This essay equates "human-generated" with "truth." That doesn't match to my current experience online; more than half of what humans generate is already false. What if it ultimately doesn't matter if the source is human or machine-generated?

It's interesting to note how short a time it took, after the rise of social-media business as a for-profit enabler and cultivator of on-line resentments and madness, for dire social upheaval to be the new normal.
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