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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

#231

Post by remote_phone »

pjc50 wrote: post #38
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…

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.

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

#232

Post by renewiltord »

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.

It has lots of religions and cultures, yeah. But there is a dominant one. And like the US is a Christian nation de-facto, India is a Hindu nation de-facto.

The bigger driving thing is that the party in power has two massive things in their favour: widespread economic growth and prosperity.

While India mostly runs through coalition politics, there are two broad bands: the nationalist religious-fundamentalist market-economics band and the high-regulation nominally-secular band.

It's quite nuanced, but ultimately, India has raised 400 million out of poverty in the last 20 years, electrified vastly, and built rail and road infrastructure at a crucial moment in their demographic transition.

The resulting goodwill is of the "it's about the economy, stupid" sense but also a national feeling that perhaps the "others" were, after all, "holding us back" because the current opposition presided over a period of administration over many decades where setting up businesses required paying off the right guy, etc.

To make it worse, the opposition coalition head is a dynastic scion who is not very smart.

So, the shift to the right is natural because the right is the only one giving them anything.

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

#233

Post by ridiculous_leke »

blackoil wrote: post #139

India is a fine specimen for anyone wanting to observe 1930s-40s first hand. A far right party with a popular/charismatic leader is using religion as a basis to all the problems India faces. We have extra-legal forces acting as vigilantes against people of a community. They have a very strong support in the majority. Media is in totality controlled by ruling party and social media is saturated with noise and false di…

The world has gotten well along with dictatorships like China, Saudi Arabia, and Russia (till they directly threatened the West). I am sure they can work with an authoritarian India.

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

#234

Post by shri_krishna »

alephnerd wrote: post #219
dagmx wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The sheer amount of hubris in your post is astounding. So any opinion other than your own is propaganda fed by the west, but the only true reality is the one you agree with that paints India in a flattering light. Using “the world happiness index” as some kind of gotcha propaganda is hilarious, when we’re discussing actual issues like arresting protestors. Just ridiculous. I won’t be replying again to you because I d…

Not OP (and not a fan of his whataboutism plus you don't deserve to be downvoted) but I think the issue is that India is so large and diverse that commentators can be right and wrong at the exact same time when painting a brush with the term "India". When social and political norms can vary within individual states, let alone the entire country, it causes people to feel reporting about very negative or very positive…

> Add to that the fact that most Western media isn't biased (I've worked with them)

Have you forgotten the New York Times job ad for South Asia Business Correspondent for India?

Since you say Western media isn't biased and that you have worked with them, I would like to see at least one huff piece published by Western media on Modi/BJP. Surely there has to be at least one article to counter all the anti-Modi/anti-BJP articles we keep seeing propping up in the Western media. If you can't find even one piece that can counter-balance the mainstream narrative about India and its ruling political party then it isn't actually "unbiased". The tilt towards one side of the political spectrum is pretty obvious to all those who have been seeing Western media play its game.

> so large and diverse that commentators can be right and wrong at the exact same time when painting a brush with the term "India"

Yeah and since when has Western media ever understood this nuance? The bias is deep seated and pretty obvious to observers like me who fall on the other side of the political spectrum.

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

#236

Post by Utkarsh_Mood »

sremani wrote: post #169
borissk wrote: post #18

India slowly joining China, Russia and Turkey as a dictatorship...

Hold your horses, this is false equivalence. India is no where near China or Russia, Turkey may be closest thing but that is also kind of false. State governments in India are powerful and that complicates many things.

Exactly this, The ruling party has literally lost elections in Karnataka, they're very far from exerting unilateral influence on the entire country, much less becoming a dictatorship

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

#237

Post by Utkarsh_Mood »

forgetfulness wrote: post #199
kalam_throw wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most Indians were never secular. Before, they hadn’t got a voice or representation. BJP came into power by tapping into the latent sentiment in majority of Indians. It's much like how Trump was elected. If you think that majority of Indians were ever secular, I think that you never left the bubble of upper middle class, city based society. Hindus are, generally much more advanced than Muslim in terms of education, fi…

BJP is also hard at work at creating a single, homogeneous Hindu and Indian identity, where something more of a cultural sphere existed, to create fanatics to their cause. They're re-engineering Indian society in a way that we've seen end up in tears for everyone in the past, in other places.

>BJP is also hard at work at creating a single, homogeneous Hindu and Indian identity

can you give particular examples of actions or legislation you think they've taken that exemplifies this?

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

#238

Post by scarface74 »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #230
AnimalMuppet wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

A lot of what enables this is centralized infrastructure. If you have your messages and browsing history and files on your own device, and you make end-to-end encrypted connections to the people you talk to, it's a lot harder to do this kind of thing. Because you have your own personal copy of the thing from when it first happened and if you remember it you can go back and verify it yourself. Then you can point that…

And governments in Australia and the EU are trying to pass laws that make e2e encryption without a back door illegal…

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

#239

Post by ridiculous_leke »

lagolinguini wrote: post #19
isanjay wrote: post #14

BJP is proper Authoritarian. This is coming from a right leaning person.

The sad thing is they will probably win again in 2024. The damage that 15 years of BJP has done to the social fabric of India, and the undermining of the core founding principles of the republic will last for generations. It's hard to imagine it going away :(

We are used to a time when constitutional rights were suspended and state governments were dismissed on the whim. Regardless of what happens to BJP, India will continue to move ahead.

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

#240

Post by Utkarsh_Mood »

dagmx wrote: post #59
isanjay wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not like other parties have any morals in the first place. Well none of my state parties have morals and sure as hell Congress doesn't have any morals

While Congress and other parties have many faults, they’re still a damn sight better than the party that is trying to degrade human rights for non-Hindus. Sometimes you just need to hold your nose and vote for the best option, even if they’re flawed. The road to a better tomorrow is paved with compromises that get us there.

>While Congress and other parties have many faults, they’re still a damn sight better

This is clearly an inflammatory opinion with no substantial backing provided, I'd love to hear your reasoning for coming to this conclusion. Indian politics isn't as black and white as you're making it out to be.

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