6 ms·

We've actually been approaching being ready for a few years now. Now more than ever people have begun to add a layer of skepticism and treat information as sepa

We've actually been approaching being ready for a few years now. Now more than ever people have begun to add a layer of skepticism and treat information as separate from reality itself. Remember 10-15 years ago? If it was on the news, thats because it happened. If an important politician said it that's because it's important. If the 'expert' said it then it must be true! If you need a refresher go visit old political threads on reddit from 10+ years ago. You'll recognize your old sheltered political views, and yes it was somehow even more naive and coddled than reddit of today. Deepfakes will be a net good. It will make more ideas have to stand on their own merits (because there will be limited authority to validate the medium thats conveying it, mitigates reliance on fallacies) if you can make <famous politician> say <total opposite of their entire platform>. It will put a damper on how seriously people take everything on the internet outside of official sources (thank god). It will effectively weaponize social media's ills against itself, the more its abused the greater that effect. People are finally starting to ask the questions they should be asking on a large scale, "where is chatGPT taking us, do we want more of this?", those kinds of meta-questions were never being asked even a few years ago. Almost no one asked that about smartphones when they came out. Better late than never.

vlunkr 4y ago
> Now more than ever people have begun to add a layer of skepticism and treat information as separate from reality itself. This is pretty strong blanket statement. A disturbing amount of people have bought into conspiracies like Qanon in the last few years.
- corbulo 4y ago
  Those are a symptom of burgeoning skepticism. Just because people are acquiring newfound skepticism doesn't mean they'll believe all of the optimal and reasonable things. It goes back to normal where much like for all of previous human history, people believed ridiculous rumors all the time. It was only the last 100-150 years or so that people have really gotten locked in to the single minded ideology wars while totally locking down their sources of information.
- xboxnolifes 4y ago
  Believing in conspiracies is itself skepticism. The idea behind nearly all of them is that what people in power tell you is not true and there is a separate explanation.
  - antifa 4y ago
    Contrarianism is actually not the same thing as skepticism.
    - xboxnolifes 4y ago
      Beliefs in a conspiracy can be the majority position, and not at all a contrarian position.
politelemon 4y ago
The internet, and the information networks it could support, was supposed to be the very thing you describe, but all it did was create bubbles. All this will do is reinforce those bubbles as the echo chambers cherry pick what is convenient to their causes.
- corbulo 4y ago
  If every bubble has a video of the same authority figure(s) (within the group or outside of the group) saying directly contrary things it has to have an effect. The internet really was that though until the last 8-10 years. Once it reached a critical mass and started being actively gamed by world govs as a major objective it changed dramatically to what it is now. Now the masses are becoming just as paranoid and skeptical as a baseline as the cypherpunks were.
danaris 4y ago
> It will make more ideas have to stand on their own merits This is a reasonable position to take, but I'm afraid it's somewhat at odds with the current reality on the ground. The problem being stated here isn't that "absent the ability to provide image/video/audio evidence and trust it as untampered, we will be left adrift in a sea of confusion", it's that we aren't ready to compensate for the problems that lack of trust creates yet. For the vast majority of people in our society, nothing has changed since 15 years ago. They still trust that everything they see on the news (at least, the news source of their choice) is real. (This despite the fact that it's been terrifyingly easy for decades to create a narrative with no actual alteration of the source footage—just clever editing. See, eg, "The Illusion of Truth", from the 4th season of Babylon 5, aired in 1997, for a great illustration of this effect. Not to mention a great example of how science fiction draws attention to real social issues of the time, but can't easily predict what technologies we'll have available—or they just would've made deepfakes of John and Delenn there instead.) All in all, I hope you're right—and I think that ultimately, we will develop a more robust ability, as a society, to make up our minds based on principles and values rather than on who says what...but I'm afraid that we will have some very rough times in the near-to-medium term before we can get there. Because we're not ready yet.
- corbulo 4y ago
  I agree wholeheartedly with your general points. We are about to face an intense chaos, if we're not already in the midst of it. I'm less pessimistic on how many people believe media at face value. There's been large reduction in people who do, and the beginning of that shift is willingness to doubt their 'trusted' sources. When someone says 'this happened' and you say 'actually that turned out to be fake news/not the whole truth' there's a much greater shift in reaction to that than a decade+ ago. The kneejerk is increasingly less condemning.

vlunkr 4y ago

> Now more than ever people have begun to add a layer of skepticism and treat information as separate from reality itself. This is pretty strong blanket statement. A disturbing amount of people have bought into conspiracies like Qanon in the last few years.

corbulo 4y ago
Those are a symptom of burgeoning skepticism. Just because people are acquiring newfound skepticism doesn't mean they'll believe all of the optimal and reasonable things. It goes back to normal where much like for all of previous human history, people believed ridiculous rumors all the time. It was only the last 100-150 years or so that people have really gotten locked in to the single minded ideology wars while totally locking down their sources of information.
xboxnolifes 4y ago
Believing in conspiracies is itself skepticism. The idea behind nearly all of them is that what people in power tell you is not true and there is a separate explanation.
- antifa 4y ago
  Contrarianism is actually not the same thing as skepticism.
  - xboxnolifes 4y ago
    Beliefs in a conspiracy can be the majority position, and not at all a contrarian position.

politelemon 4y ago

The internet, and the information networks it could support, was supposed to be the very thing you describe, but all it did was create bubbles. All this will do is reinforce those bubbles as the echo chambers cherry pick what is convenient to their causes.

corbulo 4y ago
If every bubble has a video of the same authority figure(s) (within the group or outside of the group) saying directly contrary things it has to have an effect. The internet really was that though until the last 8-10 years. Once it reached a critical mass and started being actively gamed by world govs as a major objective it changed dramatically to what it is now. Now the masses are becoming just as paranoid and skeptical as a baseline as the cypherpunks were.

danaris 4y ago

> It will make more ideas have to stand on their own merits This is a reasonable position to take, but I'm afraid it's somewhat at odds with the current reality on the ground. The problem being stated here isn't that "absent the ability to provide image/video/audio evidence and trust it as untampered, we will be left adrift in a sea of confusion", it's that we aren't ready to compensate for the problems that lack of trust creates yet. For the vast majority of people in our society, nothing has changed since 15 years ago. They still trust that everything they see on the news (at least, the news source of their choice) is real. (This despite the fact that it's been terrifyingly easy for decades to create a narrative with no actual alteration of the source footage—just clever editing. See, eg, "The Illusion of Truth", from the 4th season of Babylon 5, aired in 1997, for a great illustration of this effect. Not to mention a great example of how science fiction draws attention to real social issues of the time, but can't easily predict what technologies we'll have available—or they just would've made deepfakes of John and Delenn there instead.) All in all, I hope you're right—and I think that ultimately, we will develop a more robust ability, as a society, to make up our minds based on principles and values rather than on who says what...but I'm afraid that we will have some very rough times in the near-to-medium term before we can get there. Because we're not ready yet.

corbulo 4y ago
I agree wholeheartedly with your general points. We are about to face an intense chaos, if we're not already in the midst of it. I'm less pessimistic on how many people believe media at face value. There's been large reduction in people who do, and the beginning of that shift is willingness to doubt their 'trusted' sources. When someone says 'this happened' and you say 'actually that turned out to be fake news/not the whole truth' there's a much greater shift in reaction to that than a decade+ ago. The kneejerk is increasingly less condemning.