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Comment by self_awareness

8 hours ago

Did you just justify generating racist videos as a good thing?

Is a video documenting racist behavior a racist or an anti-racist video? Is faking a video documenting racist behavior (that never happened) a racist or an anti-racist video? Is the act of faking a video documenting racist behavior (that never happened) or anti-racist behavior?

  • Video showing racist behavior is racist and anti-racist at the same time. A racist will be happy watching it, and anti-racist will forward it to forward their anti-racist message.

    Faking a racist video that never happend is, first of all, faking. Second, it's the same: racist and anti-racist at the same time. Third, it's falsifying the prevalence of occurrence.

    If you'll add to the video a disclaimer: "this video has been AI-generated, but it shows events that happen all across the US daily" then there's no problem. Nobody is being lied to about anything. The video shows the message, it's not faking anything. But when you impersonate a real occurence, but it's a fake video, then you're lying, and it's simple as that.

    Can a lie be told in good faith? I'm afraid that not even philosophy can answer that question. But it's really telling that leftist are sure about the answer!

    • That's not necessarily just a leftist thing. Plenty of politicians are perfectly fine with saying things they know are lies for what they believe are good reasons. We see it daily with the current US administration.

I don't think so. I was trying to respond to a comment in a way that was diplomatic and constructive. I can see that came out unclear.

Think they did the exact opposite

> Also, faked evidence can be done for a variety of reasons, including by someone who intends for the faking to be discovered

  • Well yes, that's what he wrote, but that's like saying: stealing can be done for variety of reasons, including by someone who intends the theft to be discovered? Killing can be done for variety of reasons, including by someone who intends the killing to be discovered?

    I read it as "producing racist videos can sometimes be used in good faith"?

    • They're saying one example of a reason someone could fake a video is so it would get found out and discredit the position it showed. I read it as them saying that producing the fake video of a cop being racist could have been done to discredit the idea of cops being racist.

    • There is significant differences between how the information world and the physical world operate.

      Creating all kinds of meta-levels of falsity is a real thing, with multiple lines of objective (if nefarious) motivation, in the information arena.

      But even physical crimes can have meta information purposes. Putin for instance is fond of instigating crimes in a way that his fingerprints will inevitably be found, because that is an effective form of intimidation and power projection.

    • I think they’re just saying we should interpret this video in a way that’s consistent with known historical facts. On one hand, it’s not depicting events that are strictly untrue, so we shouldn’t discredit it. On the other hand, since the video itself is literally fake, when we discredit it we shouldn’t accidentally also discredit the events it’s depicting.

      5 replies →

How about this question: Can generating an anti-racist video be justified as a good thing?

I think many here would say "yes!" to this question, so can saying "no" be justified by an anti-racist?

Generally I prefer questions that do not lead to thoughts being terminated. Seek to keep a discussion not stop it.

On the subject of this thread, these questions are quite old and are related to propaganda: is it okay to use propaganda if we are the Good Guys, if, by doing so, it weakens our people to be more susceptible to propaganda from the Bad Guys. Every single one of our nations and governments think yes, it's good to use propaganda.

Because that's explicitly what happened during the rise of Nazi Germany; the USA had an official national programme of propaganda awareness and manipulation resistance which had to be shut down because the country needed to use propaganda on their own citizens and the enemy during WW2.

So back to the first question, its not the content (whether it's racist or not) it's the effect: would producing fake content reach a desired policy goal?

Philosophically it's truth vs lie, can we lie to do good? Theologically in the majority of religions, this has been answered: lying can never do good.

  • Game theory tells us that we should lie if someone else is lying, for some time. Then we should try trusting again. But we should generally tell the truth at the beginning; we sometimes lose to those who lie all the time, but we can gain more than the eternal liar if we encounter someone who behaves just like us. Assuming our strategy is in the majority, this works.

    But this is game theory, a dead and amoral mechanism that is mostly used by the animal kingdom. I'm sure humanity is better than that?

    Propaganda is war, and each time we use war measures, we're getting closer to it.