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Comment by zzzeek | Hacker News Reader

What's scaring me the most about AI is that FOX News is now uncritically showing AI videos that portray fictitious Black people fraudulently selling food stamps for drugs, and they are claiming these videos are real.

AGI is not going to kill humanity, humanity is going to kill humanity as usual, and AI's immediate role in assisting this is as a tool that renders truth, knowledge, and a shared reality as essentially over.

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I didn't find the specific article you're referencing, but I did find this[0] "SNAP beneficiaries threaten to ransack stores over government shutdown" with the usual conservative-created strawmen about poor people getting mad that the government's not taking care of their kids and quoting stereotypical ebonics.

You can see the effect is has on their base here[1]. It looks like they changed it sometime to say "AI videos of SNAP beneficiaries complaining about cuts go viral"[2] with a small note at the end saying they didn't mention it was AI. This is truly disgusting.

[0]: https://web.archive.org/web/20251031212530/https://www.foxne...

[1]: https://old.reddit.com/r/Conservative/comments/1ol9iu6/snap_...

[2]: https://www.foxnews.com/media/snap-beneficiaries-threaten-ra...

Here is one example: https://www.reddit.com/r/BlackPeopleTwitter/comments/1ojydgq...

Here's a bunch more, notice they all have the same "I've got 7 kids with 7 daddies" script- https://www.reddit.com/r/themayormccheese/comments/1ojtbwz/a...

I appreciate the links. Though I think OP got some wires crossed mentioning that Fox was reporting the SNAP->Drugs conversion - since that video with the Fox reporter came from Tiktok. Though they did end up incidentally reporting other fake AI videos as real, so... yea.

Regarding your second link - it's pretty surreal to see. Reminiscent of "this is extremely dangerous to our democracy".

I don't understand how a news agency is allowed to blatantly lie and mislead the public to that degree. That's an abuse of free speech, not a proper use of it. It goes way beyond providing a conservative (if you even call it that) perspective. It's straight up propaganda.

> I don't understand how a news agency is allowed to blatantly lie and mislead the public to that degree. That's an abuse of free speech, not a proper use of it. It goes way beyond providing a conservative (if you even call it that) perspective. It's straight up propaganda.

Did you see Robert J. O’Neill the guy who claims he shot Osama bin laden play various roles as a masked guest interviewee on Fox news? He wears a face mask and pretends to be ex-Antifa, in another interview pretends to be Mafia Mundo an a mexican cartel member, another he plays a Gaza warlard, and a bunch of other anonymous extremist people? Now they won't even have to use this guy acting as random fake people, they can just whip of an AI interviewee to say whatever narrative they want to lie about.

https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/fox-news-masked-antifa-w...

https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/events/robert-j-oneill-masked...

https://www.reddit.com/r/conspiracy/comments/1nzyyod/is_fox_...

it is, yes. however, it's considered an acceptable bullet to bite in the United States's set of values, considering the alternative is the government gets to decide what speech to allow, or decide what a "lie" is.

I would have agreed before, but seeing the fruition from decades of propaganda, I no longer think it's an acceptable bullet. Not when it leads to undermining democracy and the erosion of free speech.

The "editorial" pieces of FOX news were found to be "entertainment" by US judges. That's Tucker Carlson, Bill O'Reilly, and probably the current guys.

The judge claimed that the average viewer could differentiate that from fact, and wouldn't be swayed by it.

I disagree with that ruling. I'm not sure what the "news" portions of FOX were considered.

the way to combat this is to legislate against media conglomeration in the hands of a small set of billionaires. We have anti-trust laws that can be pulled out of deep storage to be used for this purpose. while we're at it, deflating the wealth of actual billionaires back to nine or fewer digits would be pretty helpful too.

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