A.I. Muddies Israel-Hamas War in Unexpected Way
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
But who'd have had the audacity to make such claims back then? Now it's a lot more justifiable to immediately doubt any piece of evidence, or even multiple pieces. And so when ever more people see some emotionally charged damning evidence, their reaction is no longer to race to the desired opinion. Even if AI image generation didn't exist, there'd be plenty of people doubting this right now, for good reason. And I think this is a very good thing.
This is perhaps the one and only nice benefit of a low fertility rate. With an ever aging population more and more people are going to have the wisdom of having lived through these events. With any luck it might even help keep us out of WW3.
---
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curveball_(informant)
[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Niger_uranium_forgeries
[3] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allegations_of_Iraqi_mobile_we...
[4] - https://www.nytimes.com/2003/02/06/opinion/irrefutable-and-u...
If you presented everything to a smart 8 year old, they would said it sounded dubious.
The information was bad, but it certainly wasn't clear to an 8 year old and probably wasn't even clear to Bush & Co. Given the incredible effort that the US military spent trying to hunt down WMDs after the war, it's clear the belief was genuine. That doesn't make their decisions good, but it makes them somewhat understandable.
I was 30 when the Iraq war started. I had mixed feelings then and to be honest, I still have mixed feelings. I cry not one single tear for Saddam Hussein, though the population of Iraq deserved a better outcome.
Around here, comedians were just repeating the evidence to get people to laugh. It was so clear cut that it didn't need explanation.
But then it stopped being funny when the US actually acted on it.
The only reason that we suspected he had chemical war systems is that the US sold him those chemical war systems in the 1980s to use against Iran. I'm not sure how ready or what level of disrepair they were in 20 years later.
Removing Saddam absolutely was wrong strategically, and lead to about a million people dying.
You literally whiteness-ed how the white house manufactured public consent to go to war.
I recall the aluminum tubes that supposedly where for uranium enrichment but were not even close to be what you would need for such a centrifuge. but people believed it.
Also bonkers was Bush and Chaney said before going in. The US cannot wait for final proof "in the form of a mushroom cloud" before taking action against Saddam Hussein, the US president, George Bush, warned overnight.
But it doesn’t capture the nuance of the feeling.
There was this great unification in America that I haven’t seen since. Everyone shared a common feeling: we were attacked, and we needed to make sure it never happened again.
I was in gradeschool at the time, and I remember my 8th grade teacher turning off the TV because he didn’t feel kids should be watching the towers fall.
Months and years after that, no one questioned that we had to put a stop to terrorism. These were the bad guys, and we were the good guys. Go get ‘em.
I don’t think it’s even possible to replicate the stranglehold that mainstream media had on us. The internet was around, but social media was not. Nowadays you can get contrarian opinions at the speed of light. Back then, you’d be ostracized for voicing that our troops weren’t doing the right thing.
Funny how the same thing is happening now. But it’s way less effective in 2023 than 2003.
i was wondering about the firsthand experience of realizing it's all fake in the many years after 9/11.
especially from educated professionals and financially well doing professionals.
i only know working class accounts
Its not only not well-documented, its inaccurate self-justification that has been constructed after people realized how they had been deluded in their bloodthirst (or, at least, for people like Matt Yglesias who had rocketed from a college blogger to a major media figure largely through his pro-Iraq War blogging, as means of protecting their reputation once public opinion turned.)
It wasn't a major media stranglehold; while, yes, things like Judith Miller’s war pimping occurred, so did extensive major media debunkings of the lies and exposes of the methods being used to manufacture them. People will tell you they watched the UNSC meeting live and remember how chilled they were when Powell presented the fake evidence, but they don't seem to recall as prominently their feeling when many of those claims were debunked by UN inspectors in that same meeting.
A major media failing would have been easier to deal with, to accept: we were lied to, the truth wasn't avaialable, and naturally the public made the sensible stand based on what was available to them. Horrifying in its result, but not at all damaging to one’s fellow humans, but for a small cadre of evil warmongering propagabdists.
But when the whole narrative was debunked and that debunking was widely reported in major media, etc., abd yet the mass of the public still cheerleads for death and destruction that is being sold with the debunked narrative, living through that as someone who didn’t buy into was horrifying on a level that is hard to describe (as has been witnessing the retroactive denial narrative after the bloodthirst subsided a bit0, since not facing what actually happened, makes it a lot more likely to happen again.)
A lot of us at the time knew the run up to the war was bullshit because it was logically incoherent, which is an easy metric for that kind of thing. So on one side we never generally had a moment of "it's all fake"- we knew it was fake.
At best we had moments of "all these assholes who made me question if I was dumb /immature /irrational /misinformed were clearly incorrect". If you're around enough folks who think you're an insane idiot, eventually you question yourself. But since we on the anti-war left were wholly correct on so many counts it's been helpful to have some occasional reckonings- the folks running the US have not gotten "more correct" and the voices who shout down those of us who question it haven't gotten quieter so that has been useful to remember when I feel dumb for my political dissent.
On the other side, still, what you're looking for did not happen.
In my experience, none of the people who were pro-war in 2003 never really figured out how fake and wrong all of that was.
Most I have asked think one of two things. One group is convinced that "knowing what they knew at the time" they were correct. It's easy to fudge a bunch of facts to make that feel like an okay position, even if it's just wrong.
The best I can manage with the other subgroup of folks is a metaphor. We used to have to set our clocks forward and so people were conscious of time changes. At some point, most of us rely on phones, and as such the time changes happen but are only noticeable when we see that the clock on the stove needs to be adjusted.
At some point around 2012 a group of folks woke up thinking that they'd always known that the Iraq war stuff was all fake. That just became the "received opinion" and their thoughts from 2003 were all so murky, no need to look into anything, But, of course, US foreign interactions were probably well motivated and just so why would all that stuff from a decade ago matter, and besides that war criminal Bush was out of office (but was he really a war criminal? these folks might disagree with such strong wording).
Anyhow, that's my view as a 45-year-old on-the-fringe-of-the-Professional-Managerial-Class worker in tech and education: no pro-war adults in the PMC who I know had an experience of learning that they were wrong.
There was a terrorist attack that changed the New York City skyline. There was consequently a certain national mood. Then the institutions that are supposed to be ours, the government and the media, told the public a lie. But questioning authority? That's not patriotism and solidarity.
You might have believed them, because you were outraged and wanted someone to fight about it, and dissenting voices were not appreciated. The act of doubting the narrative was put off until after it was already too late. Not by men with guns but by social pressure and human nature.
The important thing to understand about this is that when people rally around the flag -- don't pretend it matters which one -- Moloch is aroused.
i'm part Ukranian. Raised in Germany. My family's social circle is huge. Almost none of the Ukrainians left Ukraine.
And almost none of those live in the east. Some fled to the country side but are already back in what the German media portrait as war zones.
my elders gave up. They say that if the higher classes don't care, nothing can be done.
and their German friends believe the news instead of calls between brothers and sisters who've been talking almost weekly for the last 30 years.
the same with the Russian side. And only few hardliners support the war. their logic is shared by a majority of the Ukrainians.
and i can't make up my freaking mind.
did they sell out their country? many Ukrainians say people votes for Selensky because they knew he would bring the war. Amd when I checked the data, Selensky got only 30 something % of Ukrainians on his side, which is standard given how many people don't vote at all.
then you check the news and studies and humanitarian reports dating back into the nineties and you think you realize what the hell is going on but the media turn everything 100 degrees and the voices that advocated for the truth suddenly switch sides. WHAT.
and it seems even worse with Israel-Palestine.
i don't know how to deal with how well-doing people like hackers and engineers and scientists deal with how the media and politicians treat the truth.
and it hurts
The media is people. Bias is the default. Sometimes the bias of one organization aligns with the truth, on some issue. That doesn't mean it will on every issue, or will tomorrow if it did yesterday.
Objective reporting is rare. And the reason for that is that it's hard to distinguish. The reason you're watching it on a screen is that you aren't there and you don't know what the truth is, so you're trusting someone else to faithfully convey what's happening. How do you know if they don't?
Sometimes it's more obvious than others. The truth is always logically consistent with reality. It's possible because it happened. Whereas lies have no such constraint. So you can detect lies -- sometimes -- because they contradict themselves. It's the same reason authors publish a novel and then get letters from readers telling them all the mistakes they made -- fiction is inconsistent with reality because otherwise it wouldn't be fiction. And so the more inconsistencies you detect with someone's reporting, the less you trust them.
But that's just a heuristic. Someone tells the truth 95% of the time, that doesn't tell you which 5% is a lie. Someone lies 95% of the time, that doesn't tell you which 5% is the truth.
We want to pretend we can know for sure, but that's not how it is. Then nihilists want to claim that you can't know anything so you might as well give up, but that's not how it is either. Being 95% sure isn't the same as being 40% sure.
Dominique de Villepin, famously.
What stuck with me was the description that intelligence can support any story as long as you only pay attention to the bits you want. Decades of watching the same dog and pony show lets you see just a little behind the curtain.
You sure about that? Every time I go on social media, I see people falling over each other on holy crusades based on prescribed ideology and the flimsiest of evidence, thanks in no small part to selective reporting and double standards of the nationalistic/partisan media outlets they subscribe to. In addition, whatever you believe in, there's always a good number of people ready to feed you often bullshit evidence to confirm your world view; the echo chamber effect is stronger than ever. Do you really think people conditioned to this environment can really resist orchestrated state propaganda broadcasted on all national media (for instance, how often do you see "(anonymous) government/military official says blah blah" on all of them)?
Except for, I think, the specifics of the high level insider, each of those claims was widely made in the major media and/or in the same UNSC meeting in which Powell presented the fake evidence before the war (in the latter case, by UN weapon inspectors), in both cases with fairly extensive receipts; the mobile labs were, for instance, debunked with details including the UK origin, the date of sale, and, IIRC, copies of official UK government documents concerning them in a major article in the Guardian before the war.
There was also detailed reporting on how the UK government knew the US evidence in general false and that the evidence was deliberately being manufactured and a policy narrative.
There were also articles in the major US press, with extensive details, about the lack of support within the US intelligence community for the officiak narrative and the details of how and organizationally by whom within the government the “intelligence” as propaganda operation was being run.
In the wave of bloodthirst and Islamophobia post-9/11, which had barely subsided at all by 2003, no one (effectively, for all the political difference it made) in the US (and not enough people in the UK) cared about the facts, but the official narrative was debunked widely, in near real-time, in the major media.
When people can't trust some of the news, it erodes their trust in all of it, and then they can't know for sure what's actually going on.
But why bother with such subtle techniques when you can just cut communications entirely on the eve of your assualt, and then act with impunity.
Thankfully he got laughed out of the courtroom for that. Yet.
https://www.npr.org/2023/05/08/1174132413/people-are-trying-...
If you have a clip of someone saying something in a news story from 2003, on the website of a news organization, with a publication date in 2003, to claim it's a deepfake would require you to claim the news organization forged the publication date. Every news organization that contemporaneously published the same video.
But if we don't have reliable means to identify deepfakes (the high quality ones, not just the bad ones), well, sometimes the video in question wasn't widely published in a year before deepfakes were a thing. So what now? If you can't tell the difference in a large number of cases then your choices are admitting the forgeries into evidence or excluding the legitimate videos.
AI may allow for creating infinite stuff to validate your biases available, but people are already sorting themselves out just fine without it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cogito,_ergo_sum#Discourse_on_...
I'm also not an expert but that's what I understood from the original comment. Hope this helps
Solipsism, to quote Wikipedia: is the philosophical idea that only one's mind is sure to exist. As an epistemological position, solipsism holds that knowledge of anything outside one's own mind is unsure; the external world and other minds cannot be known and might not exist outside the mind.
GenAI reduces what once was photo/video/audio proof to uncertainty both through quality (AI can create better fakes) and quantity (it is much easier to use AI to create fakes, therefore much more people will do so).
I can make an AI Fake that Donald Trump has two heads.
It could look convincing.
It would not take much effort to disprove that.
It's not clear to me why this is any bigger than rumors and propaganda and gossip. If you're susceptible to that, you're susceptible to deep fakes, but you were already trapped in a bed of lies.
I still maintain that it has never been easier to seek the truth than today.
You've fallen into a trap where you 'know' you'll recognize the truth when it occurs because 'reasons'. It's the wrong way to look at the problem. Instead say "How much energy/time am I going to spend debunking bullshit", because once it's more time/energy then you have, it's game over.
We’re just going to open the field of convincing looking bullshit to a whole bunch of newer and even more nefarious interests.
Basically agreeing with you though.
And if you rely on the “everyone knows people can only have one head” heuristic to validate the one-head hypothesis, that isn’t evidence seeking, it’s confirmation bias.
> Disinformation researchers have found relatively few A.I. fakes, and even fewer that are convincing. Yet the mere possibility that A.I. content could be circulating is leading people to dismiss genuine images, video and audio as inauthentic.
People don't expect the nihilistic second order effect where the mere existence of AI taints all evidence.
I think it is interesting that in the case of media that is known to be fictional like video games, we now have to grapple with the novel question of how realistic is too realistic, all because we found out enough ways to make it realistic enough. What was once an implicit and invisible barrier mediated by the lack of advanced technology has become an ethical barrier that relies on persons refusing to use the technology for the harm it causes.
Sometimes I liken the outcome to spicy peppers. I can imagine that at some point the spiciest pepper yet will be engineered such that an average person ingesting one will encounter severe health problems. And yet we can't help but ask the question of "how spicy we can go," so until that limit is reached we keep going. The question of harm that such a pepper could inflict is drowned out by the question of what stones humankind have still left unturned. Somehow we can't stop turning them.
But unlike peppers, the results of these technologies will affect people that aren't interested in the question, and they will still be affected without any say in the matter.
The Amish limit their technology, in an attempt to prevent it from interfering with their culture.
Theoretically we can decide to do whatever we (collectively) want.
It’s hard to say whether deepfakes are to blame. Certainly it’s a factor. But the underlying reason seems to be that people are willing to believe that Israel is overreacting.
Before deepfakes, there was good old fashioned propaganda. Both are lies, and it’s hard to tell what to believe. What’s changed is that information travels far faster now, and more widely.
One thing’s for certain: traditional media seems hopelessly outclassed by social media when it comes to influencing peoples’ opinions. The news blitz leading up to the Iraq invasion ("weapons of mass destruction…" rhetoric) might be the last time that such tricks will work for getting wide-scale public support for governmental actions. If 9/11 had happened today, one can’t help but to imagine what a Taliban social media presence would look like, or whether there would be a large scale surge of support in their favor.
Apropos nothing, pg highlighted one of the more interesting takes on the whole situation: https://x.com/paulg/status/1712097145770156458?s=61&t=jQbmCk...
I don't think that's certain at all. It's really as simple as people not wanting to bomb densely populated areas. The longer that goes on, the more the tide will turn on Israel. I think there's also an element of education, most people in the west don't know the history of Israel. Once people start looking into what happened in 1948, they start to see the reality of an occupying force and colonization.
Mainstream media has lost control of the narrative.
"And now, experts say that malicious agents are taking advantage of A.I.’s availability to dismiss authentic content as fake — a concept known as the liar’s dividend."
“Proving what’s fake is going to be a pointless endeavor and we’re just going to boil the ocean trying to do it,” said Chester Wisniewski, an executive at the cybersecurity firm Sophos. “It’s never going to work, and we need to just double down on how we can start validating what’s real.”
Yes, there is such a thing as ethics, also in tech.
Perhaps the ethics are more complicated than that.
Only the professionals should have access to these tools, then?
At some point, you're making a generally useful tool and some people choose to use it to create lies.
We don't want to go back to the days of quill feathers and movable type just to make lying more expensive.
Democratizing propaganda is a good thing. Now you wont need deep pockets to fake stuff.
I can't say i find Mr Ferebee's action unethical, given what I know of the situation.
"Cryptographic trust" is never going to prove anything. Even if a camera can encrypt a photograph to try to prove a particular photograph was taken at a particular place and time, nothing is preventing someone from spoofing a GPS signal and snapping a photo of a doctored photograph with the camera.
Adulterated content has been around for basically as long as the printing press.
Enjoy your completely unfiltered social network. It’s not my problem if you can’t see any benefit whatsoever to any kind of trust filtering.
I already have trust filtering, just by following specific journalists whose reporting I trust. They do the work of verifying photographs, because it's part of their area of professional expertise, and I appreciate it.
Where has common sense already failed?
The intent of all trust systems is to make it more difficult (technically, financially) to falsify information. It’s a statistics game — the harder it is to break a trust system, the fewer people will do it. This is true for everything from house keys to PKI to currency to ID cards.
The general population doesn't care about whether an image was cryptographically signed. It's going to have zero effect.
People who don't care about the truth are going to continue to pass around edited images, while those who do get their news from trusted journalists and aren't paying attention to random images on social networks.