I'm gonna push back on this "Death of shared reality" thing because in the world I live in (and in the world you live in, too) reality still means quite a lot. You and I still have to follow through on our promises, still have to deliver the goods, or there are consequences. And no amount of AI trickery lets us get off the hook for that.
The problem is confined to our politics, and even more specifically to the Republican Party. Yes, in that bubble-world, reality and truth means nothing. That's usually the case with people who have signed on to a cult. But please don't tell me that these lunatics have the ability to decide whether reality matters for the rest of us.
With respect, it's not a question of "whether reality matters"; it is rather the (pivotal) question of whether we are allowed the means to determine what is real and what is not, and -- as a vital subset -- whether the determination process is made daunting enough to encourage mass abandonment and (thereby) compel unquestioning acceptance of whatever lies our capitalist masters scientifically determine are essential to feed us to sustain their ecogenocidal omnipotence. (Moreover -- decades before the advent of AI -- the institutionalized deception of which I am speaking was becoming evident in the governance of the former United States, facilitated by its mainstream-media magnates' willing, Central-Intelligence-Agency-directed conversion of their properties --which began in the earliest 1950s -- to the world's first privately owned, for-maximum-profit version of Josef Goebbels' Reichsministerium für Volksaufklärung und Propaganda, the infamous Reich Ministry for Public Enlightenment and Propaganda.)
What artificial intelligence has done -- and I have no doubt this is the fulfillment of its clandestine purpose -- is give the ruling class the ability to rule in accordance with the slogan "ignorance is strength," which always seemed to me to be the darkest prophecy in the stygian darkness of George Orwell's ever-more-obviously prophetic "1984." What this means -- what is its truly bottomless horror -- is the Christonazi cabal that has conquered the former United States can now pursue its intended New Holocaust without fear of disclosure. In other words, the mere existence of AI enables Trump and his successors to forcefully dismiss as "just an AI fake" any documentation of their atrocities. The corrective function of visual journalism is thereby nullified forever.
As I said on Heather Cox Richardson’s 26 October (print) thread, technology is the "how" of the apocalyptic patriarchal dynamic I've been observing for years -- first noted in "Glimpses of a Pale Dancer," the foolishly optimistic, implicitly revolutionary, forward-looking work of photography and extensively footnoted text that was destroyed by arson on 1 September 1983, just as it seemed on the brink of major publication -- after which I never dared write of it again until I became a blogger.
Under patriarchy, any notion that history arcs toward justice (here used as synonymous with humanitarian socioeconomic and political liberty) is by far the most paralytically malignant Big Lie ever uttered. There is indeed an arc of patriarchal history, but any honest reading of its truths proves that -- aided and abetted by ever-more-efficient technologies of oppression -- it curves toward fulfilling the ultimate patriarchal purpose of ever-more-tyrannical omnipotence for our Masters and ever-more-inescapable slavery for all the rest of us. Hence my oft-repeated observation that -- both in purpose and consequence -- patriarchy is the cosmic version of smallpox-contaminated blankets.
(With heartfelt thanks to Ms. Molloy for what is probably the most important essay published on Substack thus far.)
Accountability will be selectively applied by those who hold power and influence, obviously. This is about more than politicians; it's about the law, period (whether the law in itself is just or not). The ways this will impact the criminal justice and judicial systems is going to be a rough ride. Let's hope that we can develop AI that is as good at reliably detecting AI-created media as it is at creating it in the first place. Even with those tools, the fundamental question is about trust in what many would consider objective reality, and this technology is rapidly eroding what is left of it. (Because what if the AI detection tools themselves can be manipulated into reporting false-positives?) It's really about humans acting in good faith under highly consequential circumstances, and there seems to be very little of that anymore.
" the fundamental question is about trust in what many would consider objective reality"
Modern life requires an enormous amount of trust in other people. I trust that the water that comes out of the tap is safe, and I have to, because I don't draw it out of a well myself (and ask the people of Flint how that trust can go wrong.)
And that trust pervades everything we do. Just think about the last time you went to the grocery store, they ran the stuff through the scanner and told you what to pay, and you paid it. You didn't whip out a calculator and check their math, nobody does. Modern life simply couldn't function without massive amounts of trust constantly extended to total strangers.
Maybe that bothers people, maybe they look for an outlet in conspiracy theories, "OK, but THIS TIME I'm not gonna trust nobody!" But I hold on to the fact that modern society mostly works, and it mostly works because we still do trust one another (with some obvious exceptions.)
I agree with you, and that’s not what I’m taking about. I’m talking mainly about the ability of powerful and influential people — and groups — to use AI (actively or passively) to further manipulate our understanding of what is or is not true, despite the presence of concrete, verifiable facts and data. This will have broad consequences for everyone, across multiple dimensions of everyday life, because these alternative facts will be used — as they are now with things like vaccines and gender-affirming care and “antifa” — to inform public policy that harms innocent people.
The problem I have with discussions like this is that there's so much emphasis on the powers that THEY have and so little on the powers that WE have to resist the lies. People are actually really hard to persuade of anything, I know, I've tried! What throws us off, I think, is all the people who appear to be persuaded by his lies, but they're all the same people who bought all his other lies, no matter how ridiculous. Is there anyone who says, "Well, I don't like Donald Trump, but he sure caught those Canadians red-handed!" I don't think so.
In this environment, Republican AI videos don't work as persuasion, they work as a tool for constructing an alternate reality for the cult members to live in. Meanwhile, we've got a powerful ally on our side - reality itself. And as they say, reality always bats last.
"The problem isn’t so much that people can’t tell the difference between real and fake videos. The problem is that people don’t want to tell the difference when the fake confirms what they already believe, or when calling something fake protects someone they support."
Yes, exactly. So when we come to Trump's lies, who is being fooled by them? I'm not, and neither are you. The only people "fooled" are people pretending to be fooled, because they desperately want to believe in their cult leader.
Trump's approval rating is in the low 40's, which suggests to me that most people do know he's full of shit. I'm gonna call "Trump is full of shit" a "shared reality" that's shared by more than a hundred million Americans.
The irony, of course, being that Trump's White House as literally used AI to bolster false claims and maga "influencers" have posted video of real events totally unconnected in time and space to other real events which they use to make a comment about the "lunatic left" or "violent antifa".
I'm gonna push back on this "Death of shared reality" thing because in the world I live in (and in the world you live in, too) reality still means quite a lot. You and I still have to follow through on our promises, still have to deliver the goods, or there are consequences. And no amount of AI trickery lets us get off the hook for that.
The problem is confined to our politics, and even more specifically to the Republican Party. Yes, in that bubble-world, reality and truth means nothing. That's usually the case with people who have signed on to a cult. But please don't tell me that these lunatics have the ability to decide whether reality matters for the rest of us.
With respect, it's not a question of "whether reality matters"; it is rather the (pivotal) question of whether we are allowed the means to determine what is real and what is not, and -- as a vital subset -- whether the determination process is made daunting enough to encourage mass abandonment and (thereby) compel unquestioning acceptance of whatever lies our capitalist masters scientifically determine are essential to feed us to sustain their ecogenocidal omnipotence. (Moreover -- decades before the advent of AI -- the institutionalized deception of which I am speaking was becoming evident in the governance of the former United States, facilitated by its mainstream-media magnates' willing, Central-Intelligence-Agency-directed conversion of their properties --which began in the earliest 1950s -- to the world's first privately owned, for-maximum-profit version of Josef Goebbels' Reichsministerium für Volksaufklärung und Propaganda, the infamous Reich Ministry for Public Enlightenment and Propaganda.)
What artificial intelligence has done -- and I have no doubt this is the fulfillment of its clandestine purpose -- is give the ruling class the ability to rule in accordance with the slogan "ignorance is strength," which always seemed to me to be the darkest prophecy in the stygian darkness of George Orwell's ever-more-obviously prophetic "1984." What this means -- what is its truly bottomless horror -- is the Christonazi cabal that has conquered the former United States can now pursue its intended New Holocaust without fear of disclosure. In other words, the mere existence of AI enables Trump and his successors to forcefully dismiss as "just an AI fake" any documentation of their atrocities. The corrective function of visual journalism is thereby nullified forever.
As I said on Heather Cox Richardson’s 26 October (print) thread, technology is the "how" of the apocalyptic patriarchal dynamic I've been observing for years -- first noted in "Glimpses of a Pale Dancer," the foolishly optimistic, implicitly revolutionary, forward-looking work of photography and extensively footnoted text that was destroyed by arson on 1 September 1983, just as it seemed on the brink of major publication -- after which I never dared write of it again until I became a blogger.
Under patriarchy, any notion that history arcs toward justice (here used as synonymous with humanitarian socioeconomic and political liberty) is by far the most paralytically malignant Big Lie ever uttered. There is indeed an arc of patriarchal history, but any honest reading of its truths proves that -- aided and abetted by ever-more-efficient technologies of oppression -- it curves toward fulfilling the ultimate patriarchal purpose of ever-more-tyrannical omnipotence for our Masters and ever-more-inescapable slavery for all the rest of us. Hence my oft-repeated observation that -- both in purpose and consequence -- patriarchy is the cosmic version of smallpox-contaminated blankets.
(With heartfelt thanks to Ms. Molloy for what is probably the most important essay published on Substack thus far.)
Accountability will be selectively applied by those who hold power and influence, obviously. This is about more than politicians; it's about the law, period (whether the law in itself is just or not). The ways this will impact the criminal justice and judicial systems is going to be a rough ride. Let's hope that we can develop AI that is as good at reliably detecting AI-created media as it is at creating it in the first place. Even with those tools, the fundamental question is about trust in what many would consider objective reality, and this technology is rapidly eroding what is left of it. (Because what if the AI detection tools themselves can be manipulated into reporting false-positives?) It's really about humans acting in good faith under highly consequential circumstances, and there seems to be very little of that anymore.
" the fundamental question is about trust in what many would consider objective reality"
Modern life requires an enormous amount of trust in other people. I trust that the water that comes out of the tap is safe, and I have to, because I don't draw it out of a well myself (and ask the people of Flint how that trust can go wrong.)
And that trust pervades everything we do. Just think about the last time you went to the grocery store, they ran the stuff through the scanner and told you what to pay, and you paid it. You didn't whip out a calculator and check their math, nobody does. Modern life simply couldn't function without massive amounts of trust constantly extended to total strangers.
Maybe that bothers people, maybe they look for an outlet in conspiracy theories, "OK, but THIS TIME I'm not gonna trust nobody!" But I hold on to the fact that modern society mostly works, and it mostly works because we still do trust one another (with some obvious exceptions.)
I agree with you, and that’s not what I’m taking about. I’m talking mainly about the ability of powerful and influential people — and groups — to use AI (actively or passively) to further manipulate our understanding of what is or is not true, despite the presence of concrete, verifiable facts and data. This will have broad consequences for everyone, across multiple dimensions of everyday life, because these alternative facts will be used — as they are now with things like vaccines and gender-affirming care and “antifa” — to inform public policy that harms innocent people.
The problem I have with discussions like this is that there's so much emphasis on the powers that THEY have and so little on the powers that WE have to resist the lies. People are actually really hard to persuade of anything, I know, I've tried! What throws us off, I think, is all the people who appear to be persuaded by his lies, but they're all the same people who bought all his other lies, no matter how ridiculous. Is there anyone who says, "Well, I don't like Donald Trump, but he sure caught those Canadians red-handed!" I don't think so.
In this environment, Republican AI videos don't work as persuasion, they work as a tool for constructing an alternate reality for the cult members to live in. Meanwhile, we've got a powerful ally on our side - reality itself. And as they say, reality always bats last.
TFW a Republican is running away from Ronald Reagan's words. I know Trump isn't your average Republican, but still.
"The problem isn’t so much that people can’t tell the difference between real and fake videos. The problem is that people don’t want to tell the difference when the fake confirms what they already believe, or when calling something fake protects someone they support."
Yes, exactly. So when we come to Trump's lies, who is being fooled by them? I'm not, and neither are you. The only people "fooled" are people pretending to be fooled, because they desperately want to believe in their cult leader.
Trump's approval rating is in the low 40's, which suggests to me that most people do know he's full of shit. I'm gonna call "Trump is full of shit" a "shared reality" that's shared by more than a hundred million Americans.
The irony, of course, being that Trump's White House as literally used AI to bolster false claims and maga "influencers" have posted video of real events totally unconnected in time and space to other real events which they use to make a comment about the "lunatic left" or "violent antifa".