4 ms·

Twenty years ago, I don't think any of us were excited about a future internet where we couldn't trust whether what we were seeing or reading was genuine. I hop

• Cider9986 4mo ago
  What could make it stop?
  • flashman 4mo ago
    well we could [HN terms of service violation]
    • amelius 4mo ago
      Good thing the locations of many datacenters are secret.
• nostrebored 4mo ago
  I am pretty excited. The factuality of important events has been distorted for most of history. Moving to a low information trust society is something that I think will be positive.
  • mungoman2 4mo ago
    Curious about this take, how do you mean? I understand the point of distorted facts, but what I’m not sure how things are improved by basically having no trust in any facts?
    • enduser 4mo ago
      I’m not the original poster, but I think they are saying if we are more skeptical about what we read, we are less likely to absorb propaganda as fact.
      • deleted 4mo ago
        [deleted]
      • port11 4mo ago
        This is kinda cute because it glosses over the lack of critical thinking skills, lack of research skills, and willingness to believe magic bullets, which would make most of us believe nothing of substance and yet fall for anyone with a silver tongue. Heck, we’re already dangerously close to that without LLMs.
    • ky-hy 4mo ago
      One of my professors at Uni a year ago was arguing that due to genAI we would have a shift of trust into established institutions/people, so government (I'm not American so I don't know if this is possible after many recent scandals for example), Universities, people with authority/knowledge, close family members that are trust worthy, knowledgeable and/or work in before mentioned institutions. So basically we would revert to pre-web times where we had to trust some entities whenever we liked it or not. I personally worry that what that would mean is we are left with little to no institutions to trust, besides Universities and family members, I don't think I would be able to trust governments and corporations, but I guess before internet people also weren't blindly trusting those.
      • lopis 4mo ago
        I doubt the new trust bearers will be anything like governments and universities because trust in them has been severely eroded. Sadly, they will be select Youtubers and Internet influencers.
      • nostrebored 4mo ago
        I've lived in a low information trust society and this was not the outcome at all. People trusted their local cliques much more, and there were local minima (e.g. a mainstreamish political party with leaders that are actively and dangerously anti semitic), but in general people were way more willing to engage with ideas. One implication was people were more social and talked about ideas more. Thought had not been outsourced to arbiters in the way that it was in the U.S. People with authority, knowledge, and close family members were definitely inputs into what people thought, but by-and-large people still came to their own conclusions. You got to see the gradient of thought that people actually had about issues. People would say their insane ideas out loud. You could disagree with people and have them actually engage with your perception of reality. It was strictly better in my opinion.
  • davkan 4mo ago
    I don’t see it leading anywhere but a flat earth. When no one can be trusted whoever can tell you want to hear will be who people listen to and snake oil salesmen will reign supreme. Even if he was CIA, Cronkite’s world was closer to the truth than Alex Jones’.
    • OvidNaso 4mo ago
      Gr 3d 7
  • rickdeckard 4mo ago
    Ignore the naysayers, they are just jealous. You got it totally tight, not everyone get's it like we do. We are facing alot of backlash for our beliefs these days. Listen, I'm hosting this Telegram channel for people like us, where we can exchange free information without media bias, share the real facts and plan coordinated activities against these poisoning mainstream scumbags. I also have a 20% coupon code for Wamp® Wolf-Testosteron for you, Wamp® really helped me stay awake and alert in these dire times. It's true: Wamp, it really whips the Llama's ass!
    • nostrebored 4mo ago
      But this is exactly my point -- in a low information trust society things like this our noise. They work in high information trust societies because who would sell medical products that don't work? A doctor is leading Wamp®, surely a doctor would never lie to us for money?
      • rickdeckard 4mo ago
        In low information trust society everything is noise except what passes a smoke-test or who you believe, which plays on this general tendency of humans to prefer comfort over challenge, confirmation over rejection. A high information trust society has regulation in place which tracks such acts of manipulation so that this trust is not abused (e.g. regulation against misleading/false advertising). A low information society promotes the notion that everyone is lying anyway and everyone is on his own to figure out what's true. So regulation gets dismantled, and the premise becomes "it's not lying if I can make enough people believe it".
        • nostrebored 4mo ago
          I don’t think you have ever actually lived in one. “which plays on this general tendency of humans to prefer comfort over challenge, confirmation over rejection.” This is completely and observably wrong. It reads like it would make sense, but the most ideologically open cultures I’ve seen are LIT.
  • pjc50 4mo ago
    Low trust societies are poorer because everyone has to spend much more effort on verifying everything. People give up business opportunities because they can't trust their partners. It becomes more nepotistic because people trust family over strangers. Low information trust societies get destroyed by pandemics of both physical viruses (due to anti-vax and medical distrust; we can see this happening again with Ebola) and destructive memetic lies (see 20th century fascism).
    • nostrebored 4mo ago
      I've lived in low information trust societies, and they were much intellectually healthier than high trust societies, at least in the white collar communities I was in. Moving there, I was shocked at how "conspiratorial" everybody seemed about everything. Living there, I was shocked out how often they were right. But it didn't impact people's likelihood to do things. I think they are actually orthogonal in a way that is unintuitive.
• AbraKdabra 4mo ago
  Aberration? That seems like an extreme overreaction.
  • flashman 4mo ago
    I don't know what else you'd call the widespread and enthusiastic adoption of a technology that is designed to exploit people's trust in the veracity of images by mimicking reality as seamlessly as possible. I think it's both aberrant and abhorrent for the tech industry to be actively developing something that's permanently polluting our information environment. Here's a local story published after I made my comment, about tour operators using AI images to misrepresent destinations in the area: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-06-01/ai-videos-spark-concern-among-tourism-operators-in-wa-north/106731806 https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-06-01/ai-videos-spark-conce... Increasing the availability of fake image generators directly enables more harms like these.
    • zamadatix 4mo ago
      I think the massive scale up in making bogus images is actually a net good in the end. For decades, even before computers, images were edited on the idea people trust an image. Anything from removing/adding figures to a photo, changing something in the image to modify the meaning, or cropping something out to hide part of it. People had a default trust of images because 99% of the images they saw weren't worth modifying, so they didn't think about it. Now images have gone back to being like a book. People are beginning to assume anyone can write anything, make up quotes, etc. We still get to keep the ones we just like or the ones we know were really that way (e.g. your wedding vows/wedding photos) but we've dropped this silly notion image=fact just because it's an image. It's not all good that faking an image has gotten consistently easier over the last 100 years, but it's also not bad that it's fallen apart enough people are seeing through it.
• onion2k 4mo ago
  You don't remember the discussion around Narrative Science (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narrative_Science https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narrative_Science) then. They were a university spin-out that could write plausible-sounding baseball news articles (and later finance) from the stats. Their software enabled local news websites to publish articles about every game, which was seen as a boon to sports fans and a key driver for web traffic. There was a lot of criticism about how it wasn't 'real' though. Slate published this about it in 2012: https://slate.com/technology/2012/03/narrative-science-robot-journalists-customized-news-and-the-danger-to-civil-discourse.html https://slate.com/technology/2012/03/narrative-science-robot... For as long as we've had computers people have tried to make them sound human. It's not a new thing that people are concerned about knowing if they're talking to (or reading) a robot imitating a person.
  • flashman 4mo ago
    I didn't say there wasn't bot-generated content in the past. I said we weren't excited about a future where it was de rigeur.
  • miki123211 4mo ago
    Literally the first thing I wrote after OpenAI's chat completions API came out was a Python script that took in a JSON description of a football (soccer) game from an API and used gpt-3.5-turbo to generate an article about it. I was surprised how well it worked, even then.
    • HappMacDonald 4mo ago
      Every time I hear "even then" about a large language model I swear I can hear a fidget spinner fossilizing in the distance
  • pjc50 4mo ago
    > could write plausible-sounding baseball news articles (and later finance) from the stats Back in the day, baseball commentators sometimes did this for live games they couldn't see based on very limited information they were being passed. One such commentator was .. Ronald Reagan.
• geysersam 4mo ago
  There's always existed misinformation in text and in images. It's been possible to manipulate photographs for as long as photography has been around. It's becoming easier for sure, but it's not really a qualitative change. Trusting anything you saw on the internet twenty years ago would have been as ridiculous as it is today.
  • lopis 4mo ago
    > It's becoming easier for sure This is seriously underplaying it. It's become trivial to generate and inundate the internet with fake content (either for laughs, for internet points, or for more nefarious purposes). Manipulating photos required a lot of skill to make something plausible. We're reaching a point (if we're not there yet) where most content produced on the internet is fake.
• Ey7NFZ3P0nzAe 4mo ago
  The picnic scene: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FDIvzDGBLWU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FDIvzDGBLWU
• paulluuk 4mo ago
  Twenty years ago my teachers were telling me not to use Wikipedia because you can't trust anything on the internet. You should never date someone you met through an app or website because they are 100% murderers. "The internet is for porn". Things have a way of improving over time, and people always overestimate societal risks of new tech in the beginning.
  • orleyhuxwell 4mo ago
    Young girls suicides, Brexit&Trump (post-truth politics, general democratic decline), demographic catastrophe, obesity crisis are often partially attributed to social media. Not saying that tech is inherently evil, these could have been prevented, but to me it seems we have underestimated the social risks and failed to regulate accordingly.
    • zamadatix 4mo ago
      For any new change we underestimate certain risk and overestimate others. This leads to a lot of focus and discussion on the things that don't matter much while the things that do matter become apparent. It's natural, guessing everything about the future correctly is never going to happen, but I don't really think that info tells you things are getting better or getting worse overall - it just tells you what things we focused on instead of should have focused on.
    • bonzini 4mo ago
      Demographic decay was already going on in the 90s in some countries (Italy, South Korea, Japan), and the obesity crisis in the US too. For Brexit & Trump it could have been a contributing factor, but Italy had Berlusconi in the 90s just with TV and France almost elected Le Pen (father). That said, while I am generally skeptical of these effects, fake news are a real problem that social media has exacerbated.
    • itake 4mo ago
      you're also missing all of the positive healthcare outcomes the internet grants due to better access to information. If the internet saves 1,000 lives per day, and hurts 1, then the roi is there.
• plomme 4mo ago
  I think it may turn out postive; That the less we are able to take images and video at face value the better. Motivated actors have been able to doctor, fake, or spin media content since time immemorial. But peoples default mode was to trust what they saw. Now that fake imagery is ubiquitous, maybe we'll all get a bit more skeptical.
  • hidroto 4mo ago
    being skeptical and determining the truth takes a lot of work. I fear that we may just refuse to wade through all the lies and just accept a enforced willful ignorance.
    • plomme 4mo ago
      You're right. But I'd rather be uninformed than misinformed.
  • pjc50 4mo ago
    The death of consensus reality is also the death of democratic politics. Too many people regard that as a positive.
    • plomme 4mo ago
      Sure, but LLMS and image generators are not the death of "consensus reality". Healthy democracies will still have investigative journalism, public debate, trustworthy institutions, etc.
      • pjc50 4mo ago
        > will still have investigative journalism, public debate, trustworthy institutions, etc. All of which are under serious threat from social media, buyouts by billionaires, and simple smear campaigns. Not dependent on AI, but effects which will be magnified by AI.
      • naasking 4mo ago
        > Healthy democracies will still have investigative journalism, public debate, trustworthy institutions, etc. Boy do I wish that were the case. Investigative journalism is rare now and instead favours activist journalism, public debate is hard (but getting better), and institutional trust is at all time lows, for various reasons. People will muddle through regardless, we're not as fragile as most assume.
• renarl 4mo ago
  Are there any examples where it has happened in tech? Maybe internet Pop-ups are closest, that are now automatically blocked. But seems unlikely that we would not use image generation. Just not trust any image by default.
• idle_zealot 4mo ago
  It seems to me the era of being able to trust pictures was an aberration. Before the camera images created in any form might depict something that really happened, an exaggeration, or a total fabrication. The camera represented a technological leap that made capturing reality significantly more easy than faking it, though faking it was never actually all that hard. Now technology has progressed again and we're back where we started. Any image might be real, edited, or totally fabricated, and we can no longer fool ourselves about "photographic evidence." Trust is and always will be about credibility of the claimant. Additional evidence is itself only as trustworthy as its providence. An attempt to destroy the ability to create images that resemble photographs is doomed to fail and wrongheaded to begin with. The only reason such an idea would occur to someone is they were born in an aberrant era where the culture had ingrained in them the semi-grounded belief that certain types of images are representative of reality. That wasn't the case historically and won't be again.
• nl 4mo ago
  I LOVE being able to create images of things I could previously only imagine. I think the inability to see the freedom AI gives people is one of the saddest things I've seen. I remember when the internet was young people would complain about how it was becoming read-only. Now we have a tool to let people express themselves and people complain the fact there are fake pics on AirBNB means the collapse of society. Please!
  • ehnto 4mo ago
    I enjoy the technology too, but the tradeoffs are pretty grim. It takes stepping outside of my bubble to see it in full force, but AI misinformation is already rampant.
  • sedawkgrep 4mo ago
    You should reconsider the scope. Nobody is losing sleep over Airbnb pics. We’re in an era now where every image and video (and for that matter audio) is potentially fake; where knowing what’s real and true is no longer possible.
    • naasking 4mo ago
      > We’re in an era now where every image and video (and for that matter audio) is potentially fake; where knowing what’s real and true is no longer possible. This was always the case. Spin and propaganda are not new, the way it's conveyed has just become a bit easier. People are not as susceptible to misinformation as most assume, they recalibrate how much stock they put into the things they see based on the quality of the information environment. Basically everyone knows now that the internet has a low signal to noise ratio.
      • sedawkgrep 4mo ago
        No, this really hasn't always been the case. At least not in the sense it is today. 20 years ago your misinformation came from television, radio, and print. All of those things were expensive to produce and there was an implicit need for them to be at least vaguely believable and reliable, because their existence depended on it to continually generate revenue. - Today, a single person produce 100% AI-generated media for basically the cost of their time. - That media is as high quality as anything else out there. - Social media platforms provide the delivery system for free. - There's no real way to tell if there's even a real person behind the name/pseudonym used for posting it. It might be a person, it might be an algorithm, it might be a nation-state. You have no way to know. Coincidentally, this is at the top of HN right now: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48355751 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48355751 It's more about using LLMs to impersonate someone, but the point stands.
• sunaookami 4mo ago
  >we couldn't trust whether what we were seeing or reading was genuine You could never trust ANYTHING you read or see on the internet, this isn't new. There are thousands of old hoaxes that many people still believe.