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

> as a meta point.

I mean, it's a stretch. I could use that stretching metaphor as an excuse to talk about taffy for 4 paragraphs, but it doesn't contribute anything meaningful to the conversation. Scrounging up discussion about Web3 on an Indian government exposé is off-topic, and readers will flag it. It's equally substantial as those "this is good for Bitcoin" posts that get flagged under every article about a government treasury.

> the topic is literally about how to authenticate things when you have an opposing central authority.

If so, his flagged post didn't reflect it. It was a vapid comment that made no attempt to reconcile either topic.

> his point was about how unpopular opinions are being proved correct

If you want to argue that the Blockchain could have prevented this from happening, then by all means - write that comment. But that's not what his flagged post was. It detracted from the conversation and quite literally read as flamebait.

> if you were downvoting/disagreeing with opinions about how AI is going to make it hard to authenticate information online, then you were wrong

Spoilers: it has been hard to authenticate information online for as long as the internet has been around. In fact, the most significant events are corroborated with real life occurrences that challenge these lies. These women can attest that they did not do this in the photo. If government officials insist that the version with them smiling is the true master copy, then you're the fool for believing them.

I'm baffled that this is even being used as a platform to discuss Web3, a collection of technologies mostly reputed for... being manipulated and exploited by bad actors that cannot be incentivized to stop.

Photos have authenticated timestamps.

Older photo is the real one.

We are looking at a ruling government who uses AI to demean olympic winning athlete to protect a serial molester. Somehow even after all this heinous acts I can see bunch of so called educated techies defending that ruling class. Is the hate for "other" religion so strong?

No, they cannot. LLMs are LANGUAGE models, not KNOWLDEGE models. They do not "know" what algorithms mean any more than they know what everything else they "talk about" mean.

What they are more than capable of is to produce really convincing hype, which claims that LLMs can do anything and everything.

So I mean, postmodernism is a pretty "diverse" field, and while there are some who would claim to be full relativists, they aren't usually taken very seriously.

What someone like Herbert Marcuse would claim is that there is something like a "definite negation," or Jacques Derrida would call a "trace;" that is, there, sitting behind every signifier (of de Saussure's structural linguistics) its negation of another signifier that defines its position in an ordered chain or a symbolic network. They would not argue that things are relative; rather, social life is regulated by these vast signifying networks that one becomes "subjectivated" in (begins to understand oneself as a subject), where one's "agency" also stands at the limits of this intelligibility: as they say, everything you "decide" is already pre-conscious; every notion of what is "possible," is limited by what is already "intelligible," i.e. what operates in the social-symbolic function as it, like an algorithm, constantly moves and exchanges its various symbolic orderings in what we call the "economy." To be a true agent means to do something which radically restructures this network and radically redefines all its terms: Foucault's "fearless speech," Badiou's "Event." The latter thinker actually explicitly rejects relativism (and is in some ways a platonist--actually many so-called "postmodern" thinkers, Whitehead among them, are considered platonists.)

The position you claim is from "post-modernism":

>"claims of truth are just assertions of power"

finds its origins in Nietzsche, who famously claimed that truth, morality, beauty, etc. were invented by the weak because they feared the powerful and they were jealous of the fact that they couldn't kill their enemies, eat fully, and have sex all the time (Master Morality, which was just doing whatever you wanted). So they rose up, took over, and invented these categories and systems of valuation in order to justify a new regime of power where nobody was able to do what they wanted, and everything was regulated by vast systems of control justified by these metaphysical notions (he refers to this as "Christian Morality.") He claims that Christian morality, after centuries of struggle, has finally won out in the Bourgeois revolutions of the 18th and 19th centuries, but now "God" has been subordinated to "Science" while retaining all the metaphysical baggage of christianity "truth, beauty, morality," etc. This is from Nietzsche's Genealogy of Morals, the argument from which was expanded in Foucault's Discipline and Punishment (the most widely read book from what most people would call "postmodernism").

>truth that is actually true, true in the old sense of corresponding to the reality of what is

The so-called "correspondence theory of truth" is considered a fallacy of the layman in academic philosophy. Truth has always been, in logic, a category: a value, specifically a boolean value. One can make claims about the structure and order of logic and the relation of that to psychological, social-processes (as Frege, Husserl, and many other "anti-psychologists" of the 19th and 20th centuries did); but to claim that language, a signifying act, somehow directly corresponds to the physical objects that it categorizes, can't really be valid: as Shakespeare said "a rose, by any other name, would smell as sweet." There is no reason why the words we use have any correspondence to experience--even if there is surely some reason why words can evoke experiences, emotions, like when one hears the name of a past-lover. But that can be attributed to what the "postmodernists" claim: the name evokes an entire symbolic structure and brings it to the surface of consciousness.