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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

#171

> 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…

Such a weird comment. Yes, what is wrong with emptying the label of any meaning and letting any misinformation trash account buy it for a few bucks? You might be terminally online but then not everyone is.

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

#172
post #22

As an NRI, I continue to be disappointed by the country I called home for most of my life. Between the politics and the pollution in Delhi, I fear I can never really return home. The last time I was home, I was struggling every day to breathe because Delhi has crazy air in the winter. While high school friends were telling me about how they don’t believe in equal rights, justifying any means to achieving a Hindu coun…

For non Indians, NRI = Non Resident Indian i.e. an Indian who lives outside India. In case someone wondered. It is easy to shit on the party in office which is BJP right now but show me a country that can have hundreds of languages, all religions and still survive for centuries as one country. Europe couldn't do it. They broke into EU (for better or worse). There are flaws but India is a complex country of various cu…

Is "Congress party also bad!" still a primary defence of Mr. Modi who is in power for about 10 years now?

I think NRIs are praising Modi because he is helping with the fall of Rupee as compared to other currencies so NRIs get maximum return when they send home USD.

Will you be able to share some examples of "at least doing some work in various areas"?

1. I see BJP government as expert in data manipulator and creating smoke screens through their network of social media cell and mainstream TV channels. [1]

2. As per Govt data, over 80 crore people in India currently depend upon government for free food. [2]

3. Modi government manipulated the GDP calculation method to show higher GDP growth. [3]

4. Modi government changed the calculation method to measure the length of highways. Going by lane km, the total length of highways constructed during 2017-18 fiscal comes to 34,378 km as against 9829 km if counted linearly. [4]

[1] https://zeenews.india.com/india/get-maths-lessons-bjp-faces-...

[2] https://www.livemint.com/news/india/over-80-crore-people-to-...

[3] https://scroll.in/article/954986/the-daily-fix-is-modi-gover...

[4] https://www.hindustantimes.com/india-news/now-new-concept-to...

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

#173
post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I corrected the means by which the president is chosen (it’s a vote by the electoral college so it wasn’t completely incorrect to say vote though). Thanks for mentioning that. I don’t think I agree with your other points. But I do hope your optimism pans out because right now things feel bleak.

The reality on ground is different from what you read in the press or even online. We see the work being done. When work wasn't being done (recent example of Karnataka), people voted BJP out. The alternative (Congress) came to power promising loads of freebies. Now voters on the ground are pissed off (plenty of videos where people are not willing to pay electricity bills or public transport fares because Congress sai…

I absolutely hate the way fellow Indians will just try and deflect negative stories about India as western propaganda.

You do a disservice to your country by following that tired playbook.

Did you ever stop to consider that I am actually well informed and genuinely disappointed with my country.

Criticism of the country and party doesn’t mean I’m simply misinformed. I was critical of things when I lived there, I consume my news directly from Indian news sites.

Maybe you need to ask yourself why you feel the need to assume it’s western propaganda?

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

#174

> 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…

Also, twitter shows the comments from "verified" handles on the top of other comments. Government sponsored trolls have unlimited flow of money to buy verified status and dominate the general public accounts. This is how BJP government uses public money to run troll campaigns on social media against opposition leaders. [1] Possibly hundreds or thousands of persons or "journalists" are getting funds from government to…

> Also, twitter shows the comments from "verified" handles on the top of other comments.

This is the exact main problem with paid Verification. Blue tweets surface to the top, disproportionate to the attention they actually receive, meaning you're more likely to see them. You're effectively paying for attention.

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

#175
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…

[dead]

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

#176
Deep fakes were always a huge concern for me in AI. That's just one way AI can be weaponized, and this example is very clear on the damage caused. Thankfully Twitter quickly corrects the issue, but sadly only because it became viral. Sadly, Twitter won't be able to correct all of the little cases of AI misuse that don't go viral.

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

#177
post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unless some AI has doctored the images

shit on a stick we really can't trust anything

Journalism will have to go back to trusting individual creators. If Joe Bloggs signs an image then at least I know Joe Bloggs asserts that image was correct. If that's a trustworthy person (someone I find trustworthy), that's one way.

Of course how well that scales is another matter, but if Joe Bloggs loses my trust then I remove him from my "trusted sources" list.

The chain of integrity will be there, defined by more than just a byline. I may trust say Steve Rosenburg to tell me the truth if he posts a picture of something in Moscow, but if he misleads me then he loses that trust.

Ultimately it's of no difference to trusting what someone writes or says. I might trust a story with a byline on www.cnn.com, that's one thing. I won't however trust a screen capture of something implying it was shown on CNN.

Of course the main stream view for the last 15 years is to believe that journalists are always lying to you and always wrong, which is fine, you just have to accept that if you want to "do your own research" on say what's happening in Turkey with the election, you need to go to Turkey, spend a few years there getting to know and trust many different sources with many different world views.

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

#179
post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That world is increasingly the world we live in I think the point of the postmodernists was that was always the world we live in, it's just that the Internet has made it much more visible and we can see the fraying and the contradictions. It's just that, for a fairly narrow window of time and societies, there was enough of an honor culture about being caught lying that the discourse-reality matched fairly well the…

I think you capture it, but to make it clear, post-modernism existed before the Internet. I’ve never considered the post-truth perspective as having anything to do with intentional misrepresentation, but rather relativism (which is dangerous in other ways, imho). Outright lying has been used by authoritarians, but it really seems like we need a term to describe societies controlled by blatant, obvious lies (which is…

I have a suggestion for the word to describe the current situation in the US:

Agitprop.

It's not just blatant, obvious lies. It's lies *designed to agitate people". I mean, the goal is "media engagement" (and secondarily, "political engagement"), but that comes downstream from getting everybody stirred up.

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

#180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For non Indians, NRI = Non Resident Indian i.e. an Indian who lives outside India. In case someone wondered. It is easy to shit on the party in office which is BJP right now but show me a country that can have hundreds of languages, all religions and still survive for centuries as one country. Europe couldn't do it. They broke into EU (for better or worse). There are flaws but India is a complex country of various cu…

Is "Congress party also bad!" still a primary defence of Mr. Modi who is in power for about 10 years now? I think NRIs are praising Modi because he is helping with the fall of Rupee as compared to other currencies so NRIs get maximum return when they send home USD. Will you be able to share some examples of "at least doing some work in various areas"? 1. I see BJP government as expert in data manipulator and creating…

Ok I will bite. I travel to India once or twice a year for both pleasure and business. I can only tell you what I feel and see. I see incredible infrastructure changes even though India still has long way to go compared to other developed or even developing nations. Tons of airports being built and improved. Many highways being built and even completed in last few years.

"changed the calculation method to measure the length of highways."

Do I think Modi Govt doesn't manipulate some data ? Oh you bet they do. But I see real progress regardless and you cannot just throw some stats to change my mind. I see progress and I commend it and welcome it. Most people who live there don't care that Govt is manipulating how they measure the length of highways. They see that highways are being built. Congress didn't do shit for decades when my parents grew up in real shit 3rd world infrastructure. We are much better off in last decade or so.

I will agree with you that India has a long way to go but change is happening no matter how slow.

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