The fix to neither lies in technology. And it doesn't lie in AI alignment.
We cannot align AI because WE are not aligned. For 50% of congress (you can pick your party as the other side, regardless which one you are), the "AI creates misinformation" narrative sounds like "Oh great, I get re-elected easier").
This is a governance and regulation problem - not a technology problem.
Big tech would love you to think that "they can solve AI" if we follow the China model of just forcing everything to go through big tech and they'll regulate it pliantly in exchange for market protection and the more pressure there is on their existing growth models, the more excited they are about pushing this angle.
Capitalism requires constant growth, which unfortunately is very challenging given diminishing returns in R&D. You can only optimize the internal combusion engine for so long before the costs of incremental increases start killing your profit, and the same is true to any other technology.
And so now we have big Knife Company who are telling governments that they will only sell blunt knifes and nobody will ever get hurt, and that's the only way nobody gets hurt because if there's dozens of knife stores, who is gonna regulate those effectively.
So no, I don't think your concerns are actually related to AI. They are related to society, and you're buying into the narrative that we can fix it with technology if only we give the power over that technology to permanent large gate-keepers.
The risks you flag are related to:
- Distribution of content at scale.
- Erosion of trust (anyone can buy a safety mark).
- Lack of regulation and enforcement of said risks.
- The dilemma of where the limits of free speech and tolerance lie.
Many of those have existed since Fox News.