> People gossiped all sorts of stuff, spread malicious runors and you had to guess what's a lie and what's not.
And there were things like witch trials where people were burnt at the stake!
The resolution was a shared faith in central authority. Witness testimony and physical evidence don't scale to populations of millions, you have to trust in the person getting that evidence. And that trust is what's rapidly eroding these days. In politics, in police, in the courts.
I can't see how functioning democracy can survive without truth as shared grounds of discussion.
Prior to the Internet the range of opinions which you could gain access to was far more limited. If the media were all in agreement on something it was really hard to find a counter-argument.
We're so far down the rabbit hole already of bots and astroturfing online, I doubt that AI deepfake videos are going to be the nail in the coffin for democracy.
The majority of the bot, deepfake and AI lies are going to be created by the people who have the most capital.
Just like they owned the traditional media and created the lies there.
> I don't think the US was a monarchy for its first hundred years.
Did the US not have truth as shared grounds of discussion for its first hundred years?
What matters is how many people will suffer during this adjustment period.
How many Rwandan genocides will happen because of this technology? How many lynchings or witch burnings?
We will collectively understand that pixels on a screen are like cartoons or Photoshop on steroid.
About 40 years later the Rwandan genocide took place and many scholars attribute a preceding radio-based propaganda campaign as playing a key role in increasing ethnic violence in the aware.
Since then the link between radio and genocide seems to have decreased over time but it's likely that this isn't so much because humans have a better understanding of the medium but more so because propaganda has moved to more effective mediums like the internet.
Given that we didn't actually solve the problems with radio before moving onto the next medium it isn't likely that we'll figure out the problems with these new mediums before millions die.
And apropos radio, the War of the Worlds radio drama in 1938 is know to have made quite some afraid that it's real. And plenty of people collected money in communist Hungary for the sake of the enslaved Isaura (protagonist of a Brazilian soap opera). But most people adjusted and understand that radio dramas are a thing, movies are a thing, and will adjust to the fact that pixels on a screen are just that.
Is that a fair assessment of your comment? Is there a way to test your assertion?
It will take some time but it's in fact quite easy to explain it to older relatives if you make a few custom examples.
The bigger point is that realism is a red herring. You can spread propaganda with hand drawn caricatures just as well or even better. It's a panic over nothing. The real lever of control is what news to report on and how to frame it, what quotes to use, which experts to ask and which ones not to. The bottleneck never was at HD realism.
They do not which is why a reality TV star who is 'good at business' is the current US President.
Reality TV is the old media and people are still falling for it and the consequences of them falling for it will be felt for decades. It will be the same with newer technologies but worse.
The novel threat that something like Sora poses isn't just from realism, it's also from the fast turn around and customized messaging. It will enable the exact things you caution about but at an unprecedented scale.
This idea that it all new media is going to be just another case of 'meet the new boss same as the old boss' is ahistorical and shortsighted.
Which are inapplicable today.
> We will adjust
Will we? Maybe years later... per event. It's finally now dawning on the majority of Britons that Brexit was a mistake they were lied about.
It is a concern... it took a few centuries for the printing press to spur the Catholic/Protestant wars and then finally resolve them.
No, they are not.