Ted Gioia asks the question.
It is now possible to alter reality and every kind of historical record—and perhaps irrevocably. The technology for creating fake audio, video, and text has improved enormously in just the last few months. We will soon reach—or may have already reached—a tipping point where it’s impossible to tell the difference between truth and deception.
- Can I tell the difference between a fake AI video and a real video? A few months ago, I would have said yes. But now I’m not so sure.
- Can I tell the difference between fake AI music and human music? I still think I can discern a difference in complex genres, but this is a lot harder than it was just a few months ago.
- Can I tell the difference between a fake AI book and a real book by a human author? I’m fairly confident I can do this for a book on a subject I know well, but if I’m operating outside my core expertise, I might fail.
At the current rate of technological advance, all reliable ways of validating truth will soon be gone. My best guess is that we have another 12 months to enjoy some degree of confidence in our shared sense of reality.
But what happens when it’s gone?
. . .
Consider those loonies who believe that the Apollo moon landing never happened. Now imagine a world in which everybody is like that about everything—because nothing can be proven.
We have always lived in a world of disputes, but never on this new level of total skepticism. Consider a football game: I think the ref made a bad call, and you disagree—but at least we both believe that a game is actually happening.
Not anymore.
We once disagreed on how we interpreted events. Now we can’t even agree on the existence of events.
There's more at the link. Go read the whole thing. It's worth it.
That's a very good question. It has very serious implications for every aspect of our lives, from the micro to the macro. Consider:
- If a government announces the existence of a new and purportedly dangerous virus, and orders everyone to be vaccinated against it, how many of us will believe them? After COVID-19, you can bet your bottom dollar I won't, even if they broadcast video of sufferers from the disease collapsing and dying on camera - because my immediate suspicion will be that they've faked the video.
- If two nation-states at war (think Russia and Ukraine) make claims about battlefield successes, or trumpet the success of an air strike, whom do we believe? We aren't there to see for ourselves. The only evidence we have will be video clips on Twitter or Tiktok. How do we know they're genuine? How do we know whether an atrocity, or an incident described as a casus belli, actually took place at all?
- If convictions in court rely on technological tools such as security camera footage, what will the jury do if the defendant's lawyers claim that the cops faked the footage? The odds of that happening get better and better as the criminal justice system is challenged to take offenders off the streets. We already know of cases where a criminal might not have committed a particular crime, but is railroaded by the "system" anyway, because the prosecutors and the cops "know" that he's committed many other crimes for which they can't obtain evidence to convict him. Their answer - put him in jail for something, rather than let him off. That may be karma catching up with him, but it's not justice.
- What about civil claims - say, a divorce case relying on video of a spouse committing adultery? How many porn videos are already out there, purporting to show famous actresses having sex with someone, only for it to emerge that it's a "deep-fake", artificially contrived video showing the actress' head superimposed on someone else's body?
Peter
A book named “Fall” by Neal Stephenson has a sub-plot with a direct description of the problems of overwhelming fake information.
ReplyDeleteThe solution was a personal digital assistant/ human business that would curate your news feed. Afluent characters could afford expensive AI filters or even human verified news. The poor were subject to blizzards of conflicting misinformation.
A portion of the story was dear to my heart as a native Nebraskan when he described the border between Iowa and Nebraska as traveling into the wild lands of the unfiltered, where Nebraskas just drank in the whole internet and believed everything that appeared and lived in a culture of primitive religious belief in all things supernatural.
At one point in the book, a main character engineers an artificial news report of a nuclear weapon attack on a Utah town and manages to convince a majority of the world population that the town was destroyed and local residents claiming to still live there are actually the misinformation agents.
Notwithstand that he regularly reminded listeners that this was not an actual occurrence, a very large number of people did believe that Martians had attacked earth.
DeleteOrson Wells, 1938 radio broadcast of the War Of The Worlds.
Maybe it's a good thing if we acknowledge that we shouldn't trust anyone you can't look at face-to-face and verify ourselves.
ReplyDeleteBelieving media, industry, governments, and politicians seems to be a root cause of most of our major problems.
I recently wrote on something similar as well.
ReplyDeletehttps://natewinchester.substack.com/p/drowning-in-snake-oil
But as this video points out this isn't entirely new. It brings up the Sarah Palin example I always like to use.
The moon landing was real. A good telescope will draw a bead on the junk we left up there... And for those other folks, the Earth has been proven to be round...
ReplyDeleteI get your point though, Peter. When reality can be "created" or "redefined," trust is forever lost. Unfortunately, we're already at a point where people have been programmed not to believe what their own eyes are seeing...
No telescope will enable you to see the moon landing sites debris from earth. However, that doesn't mean the landings didn't happen.
DeleteBuy and keep books written decades ago. This includes encyclopedias.
ReplyDeleteThe problem mentioned here has existed for all of this current century and bact to at least the 1960s.
Today is only a more convincing acceleration of that age old problem.
Yep, I managed to find a 1986 Encyclopedia Britannica at my local used goods store for cheap. It's at least theoretically possible to edit everything that's online, sneaking into my house and swapping out a page of a book is at a different level.
DeleteElectronic media, of any type, is no longer credible. Factor in the fact that eyewitness testimony is notoriously faulty and we are in a crisis of truth. We can no longer believe anything we don't see personally and even much of that is now suspect. A low trust society cannot survive for long. And by all appearances our society is on its last legs.
ReplyDeleteLow trust societies can definitely survive a long time, hell, that describes most of the world, it's just not a society anyone here wants to live in.
Delete" those loonies who believe that the Apollo moon landing never happened."
ReplyDelete"Loonies" is particularly apt for those people.
I’ve been playing around with AI and have found it has no problems keeping answers from you.
ReplyDeleteMy current project is to figure out who killed Arthur Ah Loo at the June 14th ‘No Kings’ march in Salt Lake City. I can ask ‘Who killed Arthur Ah Loo’? And it replies ‘Peacekeepers’ and cannot provide the identity of the Peacekeepers as that information has not been provided by Police/DA or the media. I dug around and found the Identity of the ‘peacekeeper’ and asked: ‘Did Matt Alder kill Arthur Ah Loo’? It answered ‘Yes’. I called it out for concealing Alder’s identity from me and it kept in a circular argument where it didn’t provide that information because the police/DA or mainstream sources haven’t provided that information and it couldn’t provide facts unless they were from very specific sources.
Case two: I asked if Jennifer Siebel Newsom(Yes, the Governor’s wife) ever killed anyone. ‘No’. I asked if she had killed her sister. Again, ‘No’. But, Jennifer had been present when her sister was killed in an accident involving a golf cart. I then asked who was driving the golf cart. AI answered that Jennifer was driving the golf cart, but didn’t kill her sister because it was an accident and children cannot be held accountable for their actions.
Believe nothing, question everything.
ReplyDeleteCan I just point out that we've had this effect for at least the last 15 years with people who watch and believe PBS and everything they hear on NPR. I think we may lean into the concept of Fair Witnesses as described in a Stranger in a Strange Land. On the gripping hand, this sort of got covered by EE Smith back when they were looking for a means of verifying Agents of the Good Side TM and Arisa had to come to them.
ReplyDeleteIn terms of criminality, it won't be a system of trust but of:
ReplyDelete1: Constant location tracking where you are and who you are around.
2: Health tracking to see if you were asleep during the crime, if your heartrate spiked during the crime or remains high fleeing from the crime.
3: Constant surveillance of spending, traveling and activity without our consent (they already have this.)
Very conspiratorial but they'll convince the public to probably get some chip in our necks to track all of this. Then people will find a way to remove it or hack it and then... mad max!!
The problem everyone needs to talk about and virtually nobody does is keeping the discussion going on how much power continually better AI is going to require. The existential problem is that AI sucks so much power, they're going to black out the rest of humanity. Remember hearing that Microsoft has gotten the Three Mile Island nuclear power station back online for their AI power needs - and will get exclusive access to all the power it can generate? There have been similar stories around the world.
ReplyDeleteEric Schmidt - the former CEO of Google - has bought Relativity space, a launch company apparently doing the preliminary design for data centers in orbit, to get access to the solar power.
Schmidt said, ""People are planning 10 gigawatt data centers. Gives you a sense of how big this crisis is. Many people think that the energy demand for our industry will go from 3 percent to 99 percent of total generation. One of the estimates that I think is most likely is that data centers will require an additional 29 gigawatts of power by 2027, and 67 more gigawatts by 2030. These things are industrial at a scale that I have never seen in my life."
If it can't happen, it won't happen. The scale they envision is needing up to 99 percent of the entire power generation of the world. Say that to yourself again. It. Can't. Happen.
A lot of con artists are going to sell the idea and skim the wealth for themselves. It's best to consider anything being sold as AI is a con job.
"Consider those loonies who believe that the Apollo moon landing never happened"
ReplyDeleteAI will be used to hide the real footage so dumb boomers can gaslight us on this again. Thank GOD I lived before AI and know I saw the real moon landing footage.
The original footage proves it was fake with wind on the moon and a fake ship hund by a string by an obviously false and small moon. Boomers swear they watched it in color despite it being black abd white. They watched some Hollywood movie and thought it was the real footage.
Agree with HMS Defiant. And question everything 'new' today... Sigh...
ReplyDeleteI follow the development and do some beta work for tips - Grok has an interesting trajectory. I don't think you have twelve months.
ReplyDeleteIt is the death knell for our national government.
ReplyDeleteNo really, not hyperbole. If the government said grass was green, at this point, I'd go get my eyes checked.
The KungFlu situation crystalized everything. They lied to us about it. Not just little white lies. They lied about its origins. They lied about its cause and effects. They lied about its severity and risks. They lied about the long term effects. They lied about the clot-shots effectiveness. They lied about the impacts of the clot-shot after problems became OBVIOUS. To this day, they are STILL lying about everything to do with that whole affair. And they're doing so, despite the fact that the truth is circulating out there, and a large portion of the country knows the truth.
The kid is literally standing there w/ their face and fingers covered in frosting, insisting they have no idea what happened to the cake.
That's where we are. The philanderer caught with his dick still in the other woman, has protested 'its not what it looks like!'
There is no going back. Once you know someone will lie to you, straight to your face w/o even blushing once, you never, EVER trust a word from that person's mouth again.
That is our federal government. Incapable of being trusted by 55% of the nation, yet still going on like a zombie that doesn't know its dead yet.
Peter this will doubtless interest you with your author's hat on:
ReplyDeletehttps://mark---lawrence.blogspot.com/2025/08/so-is-ai-writing-any-good-part-2.html
An antidote for fake audio/video is providing the long form unedited version. AI currently can only do short clips.
ReplyDeleteYou could splice in AI-generated stuff, but then it's just as detectable as human-generated spliced material.
I admit this is postponement rather than a permanent solution, assuming the improvement in capability continues to improve.
In the end, it's like pretty much everything else where you're asked to take something on trust that you haven't personally witnessed. Who do you trust as witnesses? Can you draw a chain of trusted witnesses back to the event? How good are they at not being fooled by others?