Asklemmy

The sooner our society abandons individualism and goes back to community oriented structures, the faster these problems will disappear.

Mass media, mass religion, mass communication, they all included manipulation. From telling lies, to telling only part of the truth, to salience and propaganda. AI is the latest scary tool.

The issue is that we expect the individual to have the tools to defend themselves from this. That's not how it works. We need human connection, small family communities, where members help each others on the various aspects of life, including following public discourse and politics. When everyone has their sense of belonging to a place of care, the value of money and of the mass manipulations it uses falls and fails to accomplish a thing.

Let's also stop believing that people vote mainly based on how easy it is to manipulate them. People vote based on their culture, their experiences, their overall mood on how things are going. The turnout in New York should show that. No fake news on Mamdani had an effect that comes even close to people's connection to a grassroots campaign, people's dissatisfaction with Trump and billionaires, people's cultural affiliation to a young immigrant that speaks of affordability, nurseries, and pride to be one's true self against discrimination.

Relevant XKCD.

Basically, we're going to go back to the days assessing likely truth by how much you trust the source. Unfakeable photographic evidence was the irreplaceable thing, and it was nice to have for a while, but it's definitely not the first time we've been without it. AI slop isn't fundamentally different from human made tall tales.

To a degree I've already made the shift, and tend to click more on websites I'm familiar with, while I used to just go by relevance.

That is already the case with written news. How can you trust any of it, when anyone can make up anything and present it as fact? In the same way you have to rely on the source and provenance of a news story, the same has become true of photos and videos. Photo altering has been going on for over 100 years

Same way we always have - trust. Reputation has always been a thing, there was a brief window where photographic or video evidemce was enough but it didn't last all that long and tbh it's always had its flaws.

At different points in the past, we thought novels, newspapers, radio, television, and the internet would be the end of truth. Truth is still around. We develop systems to sieve through the bullshit. In terms of slop, I don't think anyone can say for sure how we will deal with it. But if past experience is anything to go by, it will rely on reputation. You trust a certain news source because they have been reliable, so they have a reputation they don't want to lose. And that keeps them honest or you move on. We will find a way to deal with slop as well that will be based on reputation. In addition to laws and regulations that are yet to be written.

Whether it's news rooms or TikTubers or something completely new that will gain this reputation, eff knows. But we will get there.

Like it has always been done. This question is such a weird one to me. The problem isn't that AI is making shit up, people make shit up all the time. They lie, cheat, make mistakes, are dumb, etc. The problem is that we don't know if we can trust what we trusted before. But the solution is always simply trusting certain people to tell you the truth. scientists, journalists, teachers, publishers, etc. This has never not been the case. We can't trust AI not dreaming up answers. That's just how it is, and that's not a problem that needs solving. It's a fundamental part of current LLM technology.

Maybe in the future we can find something that makes LLM's more trustworthy, but as of yet, that's simply not the case. So I don't see a problem here. If you want to know the truth about something you're going to have to look at sources and do some digging until you find something you're trusting, then that's what's real to you.

And unless you want some deep philosophical discussion on the nature of Truth and how to arrive at Reality. Than this is how it works and how it has always worked.

So, what if people from different countries and regions exchanged contacts here and talked about what's really happening in their countries

Bots present themselves as real people with opinions. I know this is off topic, but have you ever tried Cool Ranch Doritos?

"That's a great question!"

The truth is, we don't need AI to have misinformation, and AI is not the biggest problem in the current post-truth society. There has been a war going on globally in undermining truth for a long time. The old saying, "The first casualty in war is truth" is invalid now, because truth is no longer relevant and lies are weaponised like never before in history. People don't want to be certain of something, their first reaction to news is to react at a deep and emotional level and the science of misinformation is highly refined and successful in making most people react in a certain way. It takes effort and training not to do that, and most of us can't.

Journalists have been warning us about this for decades but integrity costs money, and that funding has been under attack too. It's pretty depressing whichever way you look at it.

It's best to hew to long form content. It's harder for contentbots to rattle on for long without becoming incoherent. It helps that they don't know anything, including what they don't know, so they aren't going to fool someone that's already familiar with a subject. The problem emerges for novices, who often turn to chatbots to get an overview of a subject.

The real problem is social media, and how feeds are structured now.

The 'few trustworthy institutions' model has been utterly obliterated because a few tech companies figured out a sea of influencers is more profitable/exploitable. Not to minimize some of the great creators out there, but one's daily news shouldn't come from Joe Rogan + your Facebook uncle's reshares.

I think authentication will be huge.

Lots of commercial alternatives are starting to bet on the future (eg https://swear.com/), where something gets fingerprinted and the fingerprint gets signed and put on an authentication block chain (something block chains are actually useful for).

I imagine a future where this gets built into browsers (ie “this picture was verified by NY times, and it went through this editing chain, starting from a canon camera which recorded on this date”) and you can switch over to have unauthenticated assets highlighted.

• em dashes
• "delve"
• "Key takeaways" instead of "Conclusion"

talked about what’s really happening

If you ask me about my country the information and opinion you get will be very different from asking someone else. It doesn’t reveal a truth.