Hacker News Reader

Comment by folksinger | Hacker News Reader

I'm not surprised that a forum full of people who work in the information technology industry cannot see the epistomological failure of mass media, but these problems are not new, and the idea that nothing communicated through a screen can be trusted will most definitely cause more good than harm outside of the very near future.

Democratic institutions not only functioned but were put into effect before the advent of recorded or transmitted audio and video. Mass media has already been distorting the truth for over a century.

"Trust nothing you read online" becoming commonplace is something to be celebrated!

View on HN

There's also another possibility: that media literacy will take off, and children will learn to verify sources. This was the original proposal early blogospherists: that ordinary citizens would learn to do journalism so as to keep microcommunities informed.

This is in fact happening, to everyone's benefit. Only in matters of vague mass policy (do we need giant walls? can markets sell health?) has it been largely corrupted by corporate propaganda. Which is probably not terribly worse than before. That scale has always been a big enough target to make it worth the effort to corrupt.

I agree with you in that mass media has been, willingly or otherwise, distorting the truth(s), but the easier and cheaper it is to "create fake information" the higher the verification bar for the public.

Right now, faking an interview via real-time 3d rendering plus capture of facial expressions would cost a ton of money. So anyone trying to do so would need (for e.g. to damage a competitor's reputation) both deep pockets and something valuable to gain from it (and would need to factorize the cost of getting caught, etc).

If this tech goes mainstream in the future, the cost would be so low that I can imagine some nasty things happening.

Hopefully there will be ways to detect this as this technique is further explored, so I'm not saying it's a "catastrophic development", but it certainly made me think more than just "oh wow, this is very neat!", which it also did by the way. It's incredible the kind of things researchers are able to achieve.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com