I’m agnostic about the short term effects of OpenAI’s decision, but I wonder if and hope that the eventual equilibrium will look more like things did before the

I’m agnostic about the short term effects of OpenAI’s decision, but I wonder if and hope that the eventual equilibrium will look more like things did before the internet. In, say, the 1960’s, if someone stood on a street corner with a sign saying “The End Is Nigh,” most people would react with a shrug. They’d know that if the world were ending they’d probably hear about it from a trusted source like a newspaper or broadcaster. I’m not worried about being tricked by fakes because I know that the NYT will be doing infinitely more than I ever could to verify hugely important facts, and won’t overreact to random bits of media. If you’re not someone I know personally, and you’re not a trusted source of public information, you may as well be holding a sign on a street corner, no matter how realistic the image or text on your sign. I think there may be vast unintended consequences that have to do with scale, but intuitively it doesn’t feel like the “who to trust” problem is more than a matter of cultural behaviors around trust adjusting to the internet age.