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Comment by crazygringo | Hacker News Reader

No. We've had photo and audio manipulation for many decades now. For a long time now, we've had to separate out what's credible from what's bullshit.

Fortunately, it's pretty simple in real life. We have certain publications and sources we trust, whether they're the NYT or a respected industry blog. We know they take accurate reporting seriously, fire journalists who are caught fabricating things, etc.

If we see a clip on YouTube from the BBC, we can trust it's almost certainly legit. If it's some crazy claim from a rando and you care whether it's real, it's easy to look it up to see if anyone credible has confirmed it.

So no, no worry at all about the past being erased.

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I don't agree. With ML tools it is possible to make sweeping changes to images and text that are often impossible to detect. combined with the centralisation of most online activities, large players could alter the past.

Imagine facebook decides to subtly change every public post and comment to show some particular person or cause in a better light.

If one "large player" like the NYT decides to "alter the past", you can compare with the WaPo or any other newspaper. You can compare with the Internet Archive. You can compare with microfiche. These aren't "impossible to detect", they're trivial to detect if you bother to compare.

We have tons of credible archived sources owned by different institutions. And these sources are successful in large part due to their credibility and trustworthiness.

It's just not economically rational for any of them to start "altering the past", and if they did, they'd be caught basically immediately and their reputation would be ruined.

This isn't an ML/tooling question, it's a question of humans and reputation and economic incentives.

The suggested large player was Facebook and Facebook posts. Which trustworthy independent sources of authenticity do we have for that? I do not think those you mention reach inside their walled garden?

First, why would Facebook do that? What economic incentive would there ever be, that would outweigh the loss of trust and reputation hit that would ensue?

Second, people take screenshots of Facebook posts all the time. They're everywhere. If you suddenly have a ton of people with timestamped screenshots from their phones that show Facebook has changed content, that's exactly the kind of story journalists will pounce on and verify.

The idea that Facebook could or would engage in widespread manipulation of past content and not get caught is just not realistic.

You seem eager to exclude the possibility.

Maybe it is improbable, but there now is the technical possibility which was not there before.

It is valuable to explore that possibility and maybe even work to prevent such a use.

I would be interested in a ledger of cryptographically signed records of important public information such as newspapers, government communication and intellectual discourse.

Your argument that large social media will behave rationally is not backed up by reality. Consider Musk and Twitter.

> If one "large player" like the NYT decides to "alter the past", you can compare with the WaPo or any other newspaper. You can compare with the Internet Archive. You can compare with microfiche. These aren't "impossible to detect", they're trivial to detect if you bother to compare.

Detection doesn't really matter, because people are too lazy to validate the facts, and reporters are not interested in reporting them. AI is simply another tool to manipulate people, like Wikipedia, Reddit.com, Twitter, or any other BS psuedo-authority. Think someone will actually crack open a book to prove the AI wrong? Not a chance.

> and reporters are not interested in reporting them

You really think that if the NYT started altering its past stories, other publications would just... ignore it?

It would be a front-page scandal that the WaPo would be delighted to report on. As well as a hundred other news publications.

Thankfully.

That is maybe true for a small percentage of stories. You are also reducing this argument to the most construed straw man instead of engaging with the idea in earnest.

If you can't alter world news headlines, you can still alter the tone of the article. If you can't alter front page news, you still can alter the remaining 95% of news.

Influencing public opinion is more subtle than the one important headline per day.

You are also ignoring the fact that news sites regularly edit published articles already, from fixed typos to corrections to large re-editings.

You seem to be misunderstanding.

This isn't about a small percentage of stories, it's not about tone, it's the fact that if the NYT ever did this even once with the intention to truly "alter the past" it would be a major scandal.

And obviously things like corrections or taking down libelous content aren't included.

So no, I'm not constructing any kind of straw man here. I'm saying that the threat of subtly nefariously "altering the past" isn't realistic because it would be caught and exposed and there's no financial motivation to do it in the first place.

You are misunderstanding. Altering the tone, comments, bias etc. is altering the past, this is what I meant originally. You came up with the straw man of the new york times. Sure, some high visibility publications are less able to be altered, but that doesn't mean none can in no way.

Your solution, in the case of trusted sources altering content to fit a particular worldview, is to look at other "trusted" sources. I think that therein lies the problem. I believe the real danger isn't people being convinced of something untrue. I think the real danger is the apathy that builds up as people can no longer reliably distinguish the truth, and they give up on sifting through it altogether, instead accepting "their truth". The vast majority of people simply don't care enough to verify sources.

This is already happening without generative AI, and this new stuff is only going to speed things up exponentially.

> We've had photo and audio manipulation for many decades now.

We haven't been able to generate 1,000 different forged variants of the same speech in a day before.

> We have certain publications and sources we trust, whether they're the NYT or a respected industry blog.

We can't even be sure that most of these aren't changing old stories, unless we notice and check archive.org, and they haven't had them deleted from the archive. The NYT has blockchain verification, but the reason nobody else does is because no one else wants to. They want to be free to change old stories.

> but the reason nobody else does is because no one else wants to. They want to be free to change old stories.

You're wildly assuming a motive with zero evidence.

No, the reason companies aren't building blockchain verification of their stories is simply because it's expensive and complicated to do, for literally zero commercial benefit.

Archive.org already will prove any difference to you, and it's much easier to use/verify than any blockchain technology.

Yep, every time technology shifts, reputation systems shift in response.

This goes all the way back to yellow news with newspapers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_journalism

Most people these days interact with news through comments, if comments looks legit, a lot of people assume the source is legit. Imagine a world in which a fake video has the bbc logo on it and ai generated comments act if they are discussing the video but they subtly manipulate, like 60% of the comments advocate a certain view point and 40% are random memes, advocate against it etc... The average person would easily be fooled.

You basically described Reddit. Don't even need an AI, all you need is moderator powers and a bunch of impressionable young people.

If I have a random picture, video, text - it's not easy at all to verify its authenticity. Hopefully a media organization has it, but even then are there any services I can use to validate? Definitely not family/personal media, any media that wasn't reported on by a large organization with the ability to manage large archives of data.

I'm saying this is going to become increasingly important fast, and we may miss the window where now almost everything not properly indexed by a large media organization is invalidated as there is no way to verify it.

I have a picture of Frank Sinatra at Disney World riding the tea cups. Who is the Frank Sinatra media authority that can tell me if this ever happened or not? A very small example to extrapolate from. It's going to get worse when everyone can create audio/video/pictures/text of anything they can dream.

The past may very well become a fictional dream, mythology, most of it impossible to verify.

> We've had photo and audio manipulation for many decades now. For a long time now, we've had to separate out what's credible from what's bullshit.

The difference is that the floodgates are being opened.

At a time when “people” seem easily manipulated and focused on their fully believing their personal feeds of curated outrage. They often don’t apply the screens/filters they should be because of the apparent social proofs, trust, and biases they have with the content. Contemporary journalists hardly do any fact/source checks as it is. So they’ll begin reporting on some of this, giving it further credibility and it’s just a downward spiral. So, more of the same, yay!

It doesn't matter though. Most of the internet is already probably mostly SEO blogspam, just like spam e-mail already outweighs legitimate e-mail for a lot of (most?) people. But nobody cares because it gets filtered out in the ways people actually navigate.

We have lots of tools to fight spam, and there's no reason to believe they won't continue to evolve and work well.

Seems like it might now become much easier to post a clip on YouTube that looks like an authentic BBC clip, logo and all. If generative AI gets that good, how will you be able to tell whether a particular piece of media comes from a trusted source?

Might not be possible on platforms - only if it's posted on a trusted domain.

Easy, is it on the official BBC YouTube channel or not?

That's the entire point of having trusted sources. Regular people can post whatever fake things they want on their own accounts; they can't post to the BBC's YouTube channel or to the NYT's website.

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