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Comment by layer8 | Hacker News Reader

Just stop taking any video you see at face value? People managed without videos before video cameras were available, and the written word was never reliable to start with. Maybe the future won’t be that different?

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Except that time "before video cameras" didn't coincide with a time in which everyone had a magic device in our pocket that allowed anyone to send a firehose of propaganda our way.

If yellow newspapers were able to push us to war despite us knowing that "the written word was never reliable to start with", what will be the impact of the combination of this technology and the internet used against a population that has been conditioned over generations to trust video.

If “fake news” is anything to go by, the population will quickly be de-conditioned from trusting video.

Absolutely not. You can just go to Twitter or Reddit, like https://www.reddit.com/r/pics/, to see an image with a (e.g. political) caption that purports something to be true and thousands of people will take it onboard as truth. Nobody asks for a source, or they are admonished when they do for apparently disagreeing with the political claim.

You can go on Youtube to see charlatans peddle all sorts of convenient truths with no evidence.

You don't even need AI. The bug is in the human wetware.

So this is basically a regression to a 19th-century level in terms of being able to trust and understand reporting on the world beyond our own front door. People managed before photographic and video evidence was a thing; you could use eyewitness reports from trusted friends and news on the official telegraphs, to the extent that those were trustworthy. But it's certainly still a big step backward from the 20th century, that brief window of time where it was much easier to record physical evidence of an event than to fake it.

Photographic evidence has been subject to manipulation before computers were even a thing, more so after Photoshop became widely available. There has always been forensics for that, which will continue to evolve.

I think the issue with trust is rooted elsewhere - in social relations, politics, and not in AI generated content.

It has, but it used to take a lot more skill to manipulate a photo than to take a photo, and convincing video manipulation was even harder. I'm also skeptical that forensics will be able to keep up, because of the basic principle of antagonistic training -- any technique forensics can use can be applied back into improving the pipeline that generates the image, defeating the forensic tool. That certainly wasn't the case in the 20th century.

What remaining institutions still command any trust?

... Most of them?

Do you read the news at all? If you can't trust any of them, then why even bother?

Such as?

I'm confused. Do you not trust any mainstream media? Where do you get your news? World and local? Eyewitness accounts only?

good advice for internet citizens (too bad the uptake will be too slow). but doesn't address how courts and law should function.

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