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Humans aren’t mentally ready for an AI-saturated ‘post-truth world’

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Re: Humans aren’t mentally ready for an AI-saturated ‘post-truth world’

#451

Post by syngrog66 »

Humans are already great at generating propaganda and lies, in written and spoken speech form. at scale. coordinated.

and almost all of it "goes into the can" and becomes static propaganda artifacts which can and are redelivered and re-consumed over and over again, by the target audiences, and at near zero hosting cost. no AI/LLMs needed

(Disclaimer/credentials: I've worked for the US State Department on a closely related & overlapping problem in this space.)

I do feel that the increasing realism of trained NN-generated photos and video, intended to smear an opposing political candidate, is the biggest "new" threat. I had expected it to be deployed by Trump/GOP/Putin against Biden/Dems in the 2020 election, as an "October surprise." Shocked it was not, not really (IIRC).

I do expect they'll deploy it in the 2024 race. Especially in the closing weeks/days (Oct surprise), in order to gain biggest (however small it all adds up) sentiment shift with smallest possible time window for fact-finding efforts to debunk it.

As villains they'd be almost comically incompetent if they did not try anyway.

Re: Humans aren’t mentally ready for an AI-saturated ‘post-truth world’

#452

Post by listenallyall »

bcrl wrote: post #434
machina_ex_deus wrote: post #424

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So now it's the elderly. I've seen them fall for phone scams much more commonly, they usually don't have the technical ability to use the internet. You're deflecting from the disinformation narrative into elderly scam. Which I agree is a problem, just a completely different one than the disinformation narrative presents.

It's still disinformation. It doesn't matter what segment of the population falls for it. It's not a real video of Elon Musk, and the get rich quick claims are as fake as always. Showing these ads is still immoral and unethical promotion of disinformation for profit.

You are conflating an advertisement -- a separate category, which normal people and regulators recognize as often being deceptive and manipulative -- with "news," including statements from current and formal government officials, and even testimony in courts and congressional hearings.

Advertisements are often total bullshit (and I would likely consider anything created by AI to almost certainly be), but that is an entirely different phenomenon than today's concept of "disinformation."

Re: Humans aren’t mentally ready for an AI-saturated ‘post-truth world’

#453

Post by nagonago »

legendofbrando wrote: post #326

Counter point: sure they are. Humans are highly adaptable and like other changes to information availability in the past they will adapt. This is what societal norms and cultural memes are for. “Don’t believe everything you hear” “Don’t believe what you see on TV” “if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.” These are all ways that the human species uses memes and cultural norms to teach ourselves how not to f…

I liked how the Hard Fork Podcast compared it to Wikipedia. When Wikipedia first came out, people were up in arms about how dangerous and untrustworthy it was. Wikipedia is going to ruin society with widespread misinformation!

Then we adapted. People learned about Wikipedia's strengths and weaknesses. People use Wikipedia as a useful tool for research but don't trust it blindly. I think the same will happen with LLMs.

Re: Humans aren’t mentally ready for an AI-saturated ‘post-truth world’

#454

Post by krapp »

highwaylights wrote: post #397
krapp wrote: post #380

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Someone would argue that humans still haven't adapted to smartphones or the internet post-connected world and that constant connectivity is a cancer that's destroying our minds, emotions and civilization at large.

It feels weird that you can state something so obvious so far down a thread and it’s literally the only mention of it. We haven’t adapted successfully, we aren’t adapting successfully and we won’t adapt successfully. We were way better off before smartphones. Looking back on it now, we may have been even better off before the Internet. By any conceivable perspective you would care to measure we’re failing abysmally a…

>We were way better off before smartphones. Looking back on it now, we may have been even better off before the Internet.

Not to contradict myself, but I have to disagree.

Smartphones and the internet have improved the quality of life for a significant fraction of humanity. Given the choice between going back to a pre-internet technological paradigm of landline phones and total corporate control over media and communication, or somehow learning to deal with opening Pandora's box, I'll take the latter.

Re: Humans aren’t mentally ready for an AI-saturated ‘post-truth world’

#455

Post by bcrl »

listenallyall wrote: post #452
bcrl wrote: post #434

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's still disinformation. It doesn't matter what segment of the population falls for it. It's not a real video of Elon Musk, and the get rich quick claims are as fake as always. Showing these ads is still immoral and unethical promotion of disinformation for profit.

You are conflating an advertisement -- a separate category, which normal people and regulators recognize as often being deceptive and manipulative -- with "news," including statements from current and formal government officials, and even testimony in courts and congressional hearings. Advertisements are often total bullshit (and I would likely consider anything created by AI to almost certainly be), but that is an e…

Until recently, it was costly to fake a video of someone talking. Recent advances in generative AI have changed that.

One definition for disinformation is "deliberately misleading or biased information; manipulated narrative or facts; propaganda". The ad I viewed meets that qualification. This was not your typical advertisement trying to persuade the viewer that their product is better than others. It used a generated video of Elon Musk saying things that he did not say, endorsing a product he did not endorse in an attempt to appear legitimate. This is very different from traditional advertising.

The AI shitpocalypse is here. We get to watch it play out in real time over the coming decade.

Re: Humans aren’t mentally ready for an AI-saturated ‘post-truth world’

#456

Post by maxfurman »

chmod775 wrote: post #445
generic92034 wrote: post #423

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If I write “I’ll be back” you don’t hear it now in a thick German accent? Now you have made me curious. Where would the thick German accent be, when pronouncing those words? I can imagine other sentences (anything with "th", for example) where you would hear a German accent. But with "I'll be back"?

It's a Terminator quote: https://youtu.be/tYc2jQaM8gM?t=34 Maybe "in Arnold Schwarzenegger's voice" would've been more accurate, since I can't detect anything particularly German in the way it's said either.

Arnold is Austrian anyway

Re: Humans aren’t mentally ready for an AI-saturated ‘post-truth world’

#457

Post by cvoss »

aero-deck wrote: post #378
cvoss wrote: post #363

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Personally, that's not been my experience at all. I often find that when I have two friends with highly disparate and deeply held beliefs, the intense emotions they associate to these ideas are due to them not actually engaging each other but, instead, taking their emotional cues from their respective ideological silos (where no real discourse is occurring), and then proceeding to talk past each other. Learning how t…

engaging w/ someone is different from discoursing with them. "engagement" is what social media companies say they provide - but really they just offer "discourse".

Fair, but what does that distinction do to illuminate your or my arguments?

Re: Humans aren’t mentally ready for an AI-saturated ‘post-truth world’

#458

Post by legendofbrando »

Cullinet wrote: post #361
legendofbrando wrote: post #326

Counter point: sure they are. Humans are highly adaptable and like other changes to information availability in the past they will adapt. This is what societal norms and cultural memes are for. “Don’t believe everything you hear” “Don’t believe what you see on TV” “if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.” These are all ways that the human species uses memes and cultural norms to teach ourselves how not to f…

>Humans are highly adaptable and like other changes to information availability in the past they will adapt. This is what societal norms and cultural memes are for. “Don’t believe everything you hear” “Don’t believe what you see on TV” “if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.” These are all ways that the human species uses memes and cultural norms to teach ourselves how not to fall victim to false informati…

In 1800 there were around 1 billion people and today there are around 8 billion. Humans do seem to scale rather easily.

https://ourworldindata.org/world-population-growth

Re: Humans aren’t mentally ready for an AI-saturated ‘post-truth world’

#459

Post by reaperman »

anonym29 wrote: post #358
jsheard wrote: post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's also Forever Voices, which offers those who have formed unhealthy parasocial relationships with real-life streamers/influencers the opportunity to talk to an AI version of them for $1 per minute. FV started out making novelty chatbots of people like Trump and Steve Jobs, but they seem to have made a hard pivot to exploiting desperately lonely people after realising how much more lucrative it could be. https:/…

This is incredibly sickening. This is women teaming up with a technology company to extract money from vulnerable, mentally unwell people suffering from some combination of soul-crushing loneliness and delusional thinking. Even if some customers are aware that they're engaged in delusional thinking, this is still nauseatingly exploitative of a comparatively lower socioeconomic class, one that may be suffering from me…

Yes it’s worse than what came before. But I see it as a continuation of both addictive games with pay to win IAP who prey on similar whales, and streaming in general with “pay to be noticed”.

It’s not necessarily game-changing, from the perspective of $$ extraction, but definitely a very significant advancement.

Re: Humans aren’t mentally ready for an AI-saturated ‘post-truth world’

#460

Post by cqzfalle »

The Internet afaik is a breakthrough in technology that is potentially powerful enough to break new grounds

Instead, people use it as a ignorance amplifier.

Now AI can be used to benefit humanity, but I can only trust humanity to use it to pollute the internet with ego and selfish manipulation.

Is human nature seriously that wretched?

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