Comment by kamaal
6 days ago
At some point trust will break down to a point, you will actually only believe things from a real human with a badge(talking to them in person).
For that matter, My email has been /dev/null for a while now, and unless I have spoken to a person over phone and expect their email, I don't even check my inbox. Facebook/Instagram account is largely used as a photo back up service, plus online directory. And Twitter is for news.
I mostly don't trust anything that comes online, unless I already have verified the other party is somebody Im familiar with and even then only through the established means of communication we both have agreed to.
I do believe reddit, quora, leet code et al, will largely be reduced /dev/null spaces very soon.
The issue is that you can say they but as an agglomeration of individuals - society can’t say that.
There was a direct benefit from digitization and being able to trust digital video and information that allowed nations to deliver services.
Trust was a public good. Factual information cheaply produced and disseminated was a public good.
Those are now more expensive because the genAI content easily surpasses any cheap bullshit filter.
It also ends up undermining faith in true content, which may be outlandish.
I saw an image of a penny hitch on Reddit and I have no idea if it’s real or not without having to check anymore.
>>It also ends up undermining faith in true content, which may be outlandish.
In all honesty, art in some form or the other has always been simulated to some extent. Heck, the whole idea of a story, even if in a book is something you know hasn't happened in real life, but you are willing to suspend belief for a while to be entertained. This is the essence of all entertainment. It is not real, but it makes you feel good.
Like action movies have had cgi, cartoon shows, magic shows and even actors putting on make up itself can be considered deviation from truth.
I guess your idea is that news can be manufactured and one could rig public opinion to all sorts of bad things. But again, once you are here, a good amount of public already knows this to be false enough to be wary of it. Come to think of it, a lot of news is already heavily edited to a point it doesn't represent the original story. This is just a continuation of the same.
Theres 2 (ish) things at play here. The first being an inherent problem with our information economy - the fact that News is competing against Entertainment. Reducing this further is Accurate content, cost effective against Inaccurate content for revenue and profit.
The second issue at play here is the level of effort required to spoof content and its flip side - the level of effort required to verify accuracy of content.
I am talking about the second issue: Effectively our ability to suss out what is real is now insufficient. Is the person you are talking to in the comments a bot? Is that short message from a human? interesting historic fact true? Did people really do that? That can’t be real, can it?
I am concerned that it used to take X amount of time and effort to check if something was valid, or Y amount of time to create a convincing facsimile.
The issue is that since Y is much lower, when something outlandish shows up, it takes more time and effort to check if it’s true. For example, I could look at an image and at a glance tell if it was fake. Now I can’t. This means that theres a whole swathe of content that I cannot trust anymore, unless I am willing to make a decent chunk of effort to verify it.
This means I am also less invested in public groups or communities, because they are likely to be filled with bots. My posture is to be more guarded and suspicious.
Extended to the entire ecosystem, and this becomes the dystopian worst case scenario, and that voice asking for help in some corner of the net, is likely a mimic and not an adventurer who needs help.
I am not too concerned about rigging popular opinion, because that process has already been discovered (I’ll plug Network Propaganda again).