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Comment by jetrink | Hacker News Reader

A friend who lives in North Carolina sent me a video of the raging floodwaters in his state- at least that's what the superimposed text claimed it was. When I looked closer, it was clearly an Indian city filled with Indian people and Indian cars. He hadn't noticed anything except the flood water. It reminded me of that famous selective attention test video[1]. I won't ruin it for those who haven't seen it, but it's amazing what details we can miss when we aren't looking for them. I suspect this is made even worse when we're casually viewing videos in a disjointed way as on social media and we're not even giving one part of the video our full attention.

1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vJG698U2Mvo

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For the entire duration of the Russia/Ukraine war "combat footage" that is actually from the video game ARMA 3 has gone viral fairly regularly, and now exactly the same thing is happening with Israel/Iran.

And which YouTube happily promotes straight to the top, of course -- thanks to the efforts of its rocket-science algorithm team. (Not sure whether the ones I've been seeing were generated by that particular platform, but YT does seem to promote obviously fake and deceptively labelled "combat" footage with depressing regularity).

The willingness of people to believe that combatants are wearing cinematic body cams for no tactical reason can only be matched by their willingness to assume people meticulously record every minute of their lives just so they can post a once-in-a-lifetime event on TikTok.

Who even needs AI generated videos when you can just act out absurdity and pretend it's real?

As far as I know, most of the viral stuff has been active air defence CWIS and the like which can be hard to discern.

There's a morbid path from the grainy Iraq war and earlier shaky footage, through IS propaganda which at the time had basically the most intense combat footage ever released to the Ukraine war. Which took it to the morbid end conclusion of endless drone video deaths and edited clips 30+ mins long with day long engagements and defending.

And yes, to answer your belief that there is none - there is loads of "cinematic body cam footage out there now".

Thousands of combatants are wearing bodycams, and pretty regularly, there are videos released by Russians of a dead Ukrainian's last moments taken from their corpse and the same happens vice versa.

Dude I clicked on some random Youtube accounts that were streaming the world cup live, and it took me a while to realize that they were actually just streaming video games replica of the actual game (at least, I think they were simulating the actual game with a video game, but I'm not sure as I didn't compare closely)

I've seen that a bunch of times, there's CGI highlights of most football matches.

I still don't know if it's autogenerated from the original video or recreated manually but yeah it's pretty realistic for the first few seconds.

Someone once did the opposite - streamed a real pay-per-view UFC match on Twitch and pretended it was a game he was playing. It actually worked for a while before the Twitch mods realized what was going on.

https://www.theverge.com/2017/12/4/16732912/ufc-video-stream...

It's kind of sad that we don't even need AI to create misinformation, the bar for what people will fall for is really low.

I've shown my own videos I made in dcs world to idiots at the bar in airports and they believed I was the ghost of kiev lmao

People believe false things easily if it confirms their priors. Confirmation bias is strong.

Fake images play into that, but they don't need to be AI generated for that to be true, it's been true forever.

And let's not forget the paper that goes with the video, which has a stellar title: http://www.chabris.com/Simons1999.pdf

hmmm... Maybe it's because I knew it was testing me, but I noticed it right away and counted the right count.

I could see it being pretty shocking if I hadn't, but I honestly can't imagine how I'd miss that.

It probably doesn't work if you're primed to look for hidden details. I took the test along with my Psychology 101 class of about 30 people and no one noticed anything amiss.

Once you see it you can indeed not imagine how you couldn't. Some people see it the first time, but it's a small amount of people. This video just demonstrates how humans can only focus at one thing at a time, and when we're multitasking, we're actually doing little parts of different tasks one at a time but very quickly after each other, kind of like a single CPU core. And if we tightly focus our attention to one point, we are not aware of other things that might be relatively close to that point.

That is also how magicians work, drawing your attention to one particular thing, hiding the secret of the trick from you, sometimes even in plain sight, like in the video.

Or pickpockets, who might bump into you and picking your pocket at the same time, where your attention is focussed on the sudden impact, keeping your attention away from your walled being taken.

> hmmm... Maybe it's because I knew it was testing me, but I noticed it right away and counted the right count.

> I could see it being pretty shocking if I hadn't, but I honestly can't imagine how I'd miss that.

The point of the video wasn't to count correctly, but to see the gorilla

99% the person was playing along for the rest of us, so we get a chance to enjoy the video as intended.

cool, he noticed it right away

I believe them. Why would people lie on the internet?

> I noticed it right away

I was focused on counting. I counted very wrong, but caught the gorilla right away.

If you see a text accompanying some content you can de-prime yourself by saying "nuh-uh, that's exactly what it's fscking not."

I do not see how the examples you mentioned are related to the topic? What does selective attention have to do with the video looking AI generated in all the frames?

Their argument is that if someone is affected by confirmation bias, they likely won’t notice these kinds of details.

Essentially, send me a video of something I care about and I will only look for that thing. Most people are not detectives, and even most would-be detectives aren’t yet experts.

probably people will soon develop a habit of verifying every detail in videos of interest haha

Cause people are well known for verifying every detail in most other forms of media already right?

Verifying what?

Indeed watching Reels or Tiktok videos is an exercise in testing your bullshit meter and commenting accordingly to let the uninformed know hey this is most likely fake.

Facebook is mostly this now too. Long comment threads of boomers thanking AI images for their military service or congratulating it on a long marriage.

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