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Comment by alexvoda | Hacker News Reader

GP is probably talking about Descartes's famous line "I think therefore I am" an the relation of this line to Solipsism.

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).

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AI Fakes are only good if you're too lazy to look for literally any counter evidence.

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.

Imagine two lines. One is the availability of "real information". The other is availability of high quality bullshit/fake information. You're used to dealing with a past where there was a low availability of real information, but also low availability of high quality fake information. What many are pointing out is that it appears very soon a convergence will occur where most information becomes high quality bullshit. More and more of your time is going to be spent disproving it's not real and you fall into the trap of 'Bullshit Asymmetry'.

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’ve been there for a long time. “Don’t believe anything you read” is something I heard from my parents generation and I’m gen X.

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.

But how about the soon to be world where there are just as many “photos” of Donald Trump with one, two, three, …, n heads? Won’t it be equally possible that photos with one head are the misinformation?

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.

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