Buddhist office turns to Thai cyber police over AI-generated Facebook content
thethaiger.com
thethaiger.com
I realize AI allows this to scale, but it seems the legal framework should already have a mechanism to deal with this?
Someone looking to organize a trade union in her workplace? Anonymously load AI videos of that person jerking off in public or some other thing that would shatter their reputation, or worse have them confessing to crimes.
Its honestly worrying.
Cryptographically signing the news might be necessary, but it sure won't be sufficient, as your local government can pretty directly tell people who the trustworthy news sources are/which signatures they should trust. You need more than just the technology to solve problems like this.
The former is more effective. The latter won't get very far if you deny it and stick to your story.
Most modern psyops avoid the legal system since there are actual consequences for lying. Before social media, public trials were the only way to get enough national attention to defame someone, which required putting some skin in the game. Now you can just tell your "truth" on social media and the accusation is as good as a conviction. Faith-based systems are easily exploited.
It sounds like any standard "fun with memes" content.
I remember talking to a surrealist artist, once, about how he came up with ideas. He said that he basically used a "popsicle stick" method, where he wrote nouns, verbs, and modifiers on popsicle sticks, and then tossed them into cigar boxes.
He'd shake them up, then would draw random sticks, and create an illustration, based on that.
An example he gave, was "Nuns Riding Blue Bicycles."
Additionally, many people’s ideas of Buddhism is understood through their knowledge of mindfulness which was brought to the West through Theravada to a large part.
I practice Theravada and while it certainly is different than the US-style California Buddhism and the popular Mahayana traditions in the West (often with anything challenging or 'ethnic' or 'traditional' whitewashed for Westerners), the monks there are acting like I imagine monks near anywhere would. Its really offensive to portray monks as thrill-sensory seekers.
In the West, if some church was suing because someone was photoshopping their congregation into sinful acts everyone here probably agree, "Yep, slander and libel is actionable. Speech sometimes has consequences." But if Buddhists do it, somehow its an issue. I think there's a bit of ugly Orientalism at play here. Westerners can sue and use the police, but "mysterious" and "stoic" Asian monks must, of course, be above that.
It it was clearly humorous it would not be defamatory. It could only be defamatory if it made a real person actually look like they were doing something bad.
If it was all a fake, or an actor, or with completely generated faces, then no.
Western countries do not have blasphemy laws, a lot of Asian countries do e.g. Theravadan Buddhist Sri Lanka: https://end-blasphemy-laws.org/2020/07/sri-lankan-writer-fac...
There is a genuine legal and cultural difference here.
To be fair this is a quite recent development, on timescales measured from years to about a century; Ireland only got rid of its blasphemy laws 3 years ago. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blasphemy_law
In the hundred years before blasphemy laws were abolished in the UK there were seven prosecutions, some unsuccessful, and some were private prosecutions.
That's arguable and the West's oppression can be subtle but real.
Look at the people who suffered trying to expose the Catholic church's history of protecting pedophiles. Look at the people who suffered exposing things like Scientology or other cults. Look at people who have lost their jobs for speaking out against certain religions or religious groups or religious practices. Losing a job in the USA can be a death sentence if one can't afford health insurance. At least Thailand has socialized medicine.
The state doesnt protect you from this, they tell you that under civil charges or firing if you cant afford an expensive lawyer to fight these wealthy organizations, then too bad.
These laws and practices are defacto anti-blasphemy laws and just as oppressive, if not more so, than what is allowed in Thailand.
I'm not endorsing this images, I see why people find them offensive (and Thailand already has very strict laws about injuring people's dignity, particularly the royal family). I just don't think western countries especially protect the dignity of their own religious institutions.
I can say only for myself, and with me it is not Orientalism. What I knew about buddhism from our culture was awe-inspiring. They are not stupid christians o muslims, they are enlightened monks spendinv their lives sitting on top of a mountain, practicing their minds, blah-blah-blah...
But at some point you hear a story that shatters the illusion. Buddhists are nothing special. For me it was a story of tourists that were imprisoned on Sri-Lanka for their frivolous treatment of a statue of Buddha.
Buddhism is an opium for masses, like all other religions. This revelation comes as a disappointing surprise, and it brings buddhism down from a pedestal of the only truly sensible religion. But it doesn't make it in any way worse than Christianity or Islam. Just worse than I thought.
Not to mention in Theravada, and in other forms I imagine, these are very offensive images because it turns monks into sensory seekers, which is the opposite of equanimity. This is like, say, someone posting images on a church with Jesus being friendly with Satan and engaging in various sins.
Of course organized religion is a political power-base as much as anything of note in socieety, so there's always going to be a protective element to it. Theravada is the defacto state religion (the king must always be Buddhist per their constitution and the country is 93% Buddhist), thus Theravada enjoys a great level of protection. There are strong laws against religious defamation there that we don't often have in the West.
Lastly, you can use the "attached" excuse for anything. "Oh Buddhists dont like it when I punch them in the face? Guess they're too attached to feeling pain free!" Its a jerks argument that only empowers anti-merit.
People are just people, everywhere.
1. It's possibly defamatory. There is a public image of behavior of that order, and someone is falsifying images that contradict that. I don't know about Thai law, but my layperson understanding is that the US, for example, has some laws and precedents that might apply.
2. It's disrespectful/rude. Apparently this is something important to the monks, and people don't realize that, however cool/amusing-looking the art might seem, it bothers the people featured. So maybe focus on other ways, rather than picking on someone (especially not picking on a group that seems so inoffensive).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Is%E2%80%93ought_problem
If I Buddhists offensive "You ought not" is not a compelling argument. For example I find fascists highly offensive and would continue picking on them even at the risk of peril.
Now, you can attempt to deal with the issue socially, "It's not cool to insult Buddhists" media splurge, for example. But the success of this can very greatly depending on the motivation of the attacking group.
In this example, I initially thought that the 2 fake images of monks I saw were cool and humorous. But then I learned that the portrayal actually bothered those people, which took much of the fun out of it. So probably I either wouldn't make images like those of monks, or if I did for some private amusement, I wouldn't distribute them.
Other people, once they're aware that it's upsetting, might also decide not to do it.
We collectively already have various values about rudeness and being considerate.
These values will come into play more with AI-generated fake images/videos/audio/etc. and with the Internet to distribute them globally.
What I think is going to complicate this is both:
1. Being widely connected by Internet, across many cultural groups, means that behaving with goodwill is harder, because there's a lot more things to know about, than just the conventions of our city.
2. Recent "Internet culture" has had a lot of sociopathic behavior in general (e.g., many Twitter behaviors), plus the relative minority of influencers often get status through sociopathic behavior. So we aren't surrounded by conspicuous examples of good behavior that would help intuition for what's good and bad. Relative to how we see ourselves, or how we aspire to be.
(Though we do have fashionable mimicking and posturing, which right now is used as weapons in toxic behavior, and often without much apparent thinking. So, for example, we might see ourselves as helping those in need of help, which I think is very admirable. But the Twitter behavior we see as examples is mostly about scorched-earth attacking any peep from anyone that sounds like an idea we've been told is one of the officially bad talking points. Without individually thinking about it beyond that -- neither about what is good or bad, nor about how we respond to it, mostly just mimicking fashion we observe. This not only makes for a toxic environment that's vulnerable to manipulation/co-opting, but can make it harder to respond according to our believed values when presented with a new situation. Like the many implications of what will happen when every schoolchild can make and distribute deepfakes of anyone.)
So growing up in the pre-internet days, I also saw this behavior in individuals 'in real life'. The typical issue with being a sociopath IRL is for the average person you run out of audience quick. People learn to shun you and stay away, or you meet some bigger badder socio that beats the pulp out of you. I mean, a lot of us have examples of events with lots of teenagers going out of control without a moderating factor there of sometime (generally the cops showing up).
But the internet has always had unmoderated places for these sociopaths to play. In the older net, these places were typically separated on servers in different places. In recent years it's been the massive consolidation of social media giants that has pulled groups from across the planet together with different levels of moderation and expectation.
I'm not a Thai lawyer, but it sounds like it's criminal there:
https://library.siam-legal.com/thai-law/criminal-code-defama...
> If the offence of defamation be committed by means of publication of a document, drawing, painting, cinematography film, picture or letters made visible by any means, gramophone record or another recording instruments, recording picture or letters, or by broadcasting or spreading picture, or by propagation by any other means, the offender shall be punished with imprisonment not exceeding two years and fined not exceeding two hundred thousand Baht.
As I understand, the US is relatively very permissive in regards to defamatory speech, and has a very high bar for punishing this type of speech compared to other places.
>>> but my layperson understanding is that the US, for example, has some laws and precedents that might apply
>> as far as US jurisdiction applies
That reputation has been building for thousands of years, and upholding that reputation -- carrying the very sacred teachings of the Buddha in a particularly strict and graceful way -- is very much part of the religious teachings.
Images like these certainly threaten to damage that reputation among less educated laity.
I myself, a convert western Buddhist no less, was surprised and a little disturbed to see these images. I imagine the shock that these images might generate for born-Buddhists and cultural Buddhists would be far stronger, and far more harmful.
Don't forget that monastics depend on the laity for alms -- their literal food, medicine, the material for their dwellings, and the cloth for their robes. The sangha was designed by the Buddha to remain interdependent with the laity. The sangha could literally die out if the laity developed distrust in it.
I'm Buddhist and think the pics look cool.
Not like there hasn't been monks depicted in media like this for 30 years, didn't even Mortal Kombat have a killer monk?
It's just never going to work, though. Trolls will just do it from further away, out of their control.
In the US, the comparison might be to its Constitution or Founding Fathers. Political free speech is enshrined in the Constitution, and often championed by its Founding Fathers, but plenty of people who are deeply committed to those institutions still get earnestly riled up if you take critical or disrespectful speech and aim it at the Constitution or Founding Fathers themselves.
There's an intellectual dissonance to be found there, maybe, but it probably resolves in many people ultimately valuing a common, respected, strong social fabric over ideology and dogma.
Just because a lot of Westerners wouldn't die for their religion, doesn't make religion a hobby. That is where you draw the line isn't it? 'True Believers' do believe in a real hell, and are willing to die for it, whether in a Jihad or a lions den. Anything less is just 'signaling' and a hobby?
I was referring more to Buddhist ethics, which do not include getting bent out of shape and calling the cops because they get their feelings hurt over images.
Once you go down the path of being 'revered' and a 'social institute' to be defended, then I'd say you are slipping into being just like any of the other religions with calcified hierarchical structures, a 'dogmatic orthodoxy'. And loosing the essence of Buddhism.
While I must have communicated something poorly, there’s no denigration of individual spiritual seeking intended. I’m one of those people myself.
But there’s a whole different experience of “religion” that exists for people whose religion is integrated across generations of family history, centuries old cultural institutions, widespread adoption, etc
What might seem calcified and orthodox to you is the lived experience of millions of people, and their ancestors, and their community. Their relationship with that community and heritage is real and meaningful, and while your understanding of Buddhism may not be able to make sense of looking after these monks and the respect they’re seen as due, theirs does.
That doesn’t mean that your understanding is lesser, in what it provides for you, or maybe even its attention to the “essence” of Buddhism, but theirs is of a different kind and no less studied.
I wasn't actually trying to take offense. It is true that some 'true believers' really do draw the line at death and killing for religion. And there is a very large sliding scale between someone that just goes to church on Sunday then forgets about it, and someone how lives it so deeply they will become suicide bombers. Lot of gray area in between these worlds.
Just I've always held out that Buddhist are different, without a 'god' to become radicalized around. The teachings of Buddha are bit more 'scientific'. It's more about reason, or if reason is still too strong, about how to understand the world. Isn't the heart sutra really about phenomenology.
So, it is discouraging when a sect of Buddhist fall prey to the same foibles/downfall as say Catholicism, and become more about the 'image', than the 'understanding'.
But, maybe all of this is just human nature. Built into our brains, ala William James. People have a religious experience, form a church, but eventually all religions of all stripes tend to become about a group hierarchy, and control, bureaucratic.
Its a stupid and incredibly hypocritical take for this societies. (and I say this as someone who's parents come from such a culture) to become buddha, you must kill the buddha. this may sound offensive to the ignorant but revering buddha to this level is counterproductive to achieving the state of enlightenment.