It’s surprising how quickly this has become so realistic. It can be unsettling and even dangerous, since at a glance it’s hard to tell what’s real. The cuffs don’t look quite right, but I can see how someone could easily be fooled.
Suddenly there's a new generation of memes in the form of realistic video clips. We are accelerating to the point at which our whole media environments can be generated at will at trivial cost. It feels like the body politic is walking along an epistemic cliff.
Anyone skilled with AI, even just regular CGI, has been able to do this convincingly for years. What's changing is that it's becoming better, easier and more widely available. This is a good thing. It's significantly increasing every individual's potential for creative expression, and it's simultaneously making the general public aware that you can't just trust random media without knowing the source. Not before, and not now.
You can try regulating, banning and censoring models, adding silly invisible watermarks, require Gen AI content to be labelled as such, and live with a complete false sense of security. You'd be making it way easier to deceive people.
Someone once told me that a person who doesn't believe anything will fall for everything. So if we don't know what to believe, do we all join our own conspiracy communities? Like on a grand scale?
A few years ago I gave a keynote speech at Amazon’s annual design conference called Post Truth Design. This was a year before ChatGPT launched and generative AI blew up. And I was talking about exactly this kind of situation where hyperrealistic, but fake, media and content will supersede and conflict with reality. Most importantly, loads of research tells us that when presented with objective truth versus comfortable or even more entertaining fictions, lies will always win. Because of this, there is a deep humanistic responsibility on us to both find ways to deal with this new future, and actively work against these psychological tendencies to believe comfortable or entertaining lies.
Unsurprisingly, things didn’t get simpler in the intervening years since then, but I feel very strongly believe we can and will find a balance. Even if it takes a lot of bodies to pay for it.
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[ 4.5 ms ] story [ 33.3 ms ] threadYou can try regulating, banning and censoring models, adding silly invisible watermarks, require Gen AI content to be labelled as such, and live with a complete false sense of security. You'd be making it way easier to deceive people.
Like a lot of "journalists". It is called propaganda and is not new.