One item for today, about which I think is a key principle.
NY Times, Zeynep Tufekci, 12 Aug 2024: The Problem Is Not A.I. It’s the Disbelief Created by Trump.
This triggers off the recent news items about Trump’s skepticism about the crowds at Kamala Harris’ events. Ironically, he’s accusing her big crowds of being faked, by AI. (Note again: projection.) Tufekci:
How do we know an image is real in this day and age? An average person can no longer be certain of the authenticity of images — or increasingly even videos — through individual sleuthing. The A.I. is that good, and getting better. (That’s why the classic media literacy advice — do your own research — doesn’t work anymore).
This makes it difficult to know what to believe, except through a key mechanism: Trusting sources, and trusting that they have either taken the image or video themselves, or carefully vetted it as authentic.
That’s how we do know that the crowd waiting for Harris is real, because there are pictures from photo agencies like Getty, as well as images and reports from multiple other news organizations that were on the tarmac, that match the circulating social media photos that caught Trump’s ire. We know that credible news organizations and photo agencies have very strict rules about images and videos. But that, in turn, requires trusting the photo agency — or the media source — furnishing the image or video.
In this age of social media, “do your own research” doesn’t work. There are too many fake sources out there.
No one of us can understand the world through direct contact and confirmation. That might have been true in the primitive, tribal world, in which every member of the tribe knew each other, and knew how to track and kill, cook, take care of a child, and so on. But in our modern complex world, we implicitly trust so many other people for our understanding of how the world works. We depend on a common understanding. And this works fine, as long as we’re all based in reality. That our understanding and ‘beliefs’ are accountable to reality.
The answer to this is:
This makes it difficult to know what to believe, except through a key mechanism: Trusting sources, and trusting that they have either taken the image or video themselves, or carefully vetted it as authentic.
That’s how we do know that the crowd waiting for Harris is real, because there are pictures from photo agencies like Getty, as well as images and reports from multiple other news organizations that were on the tarmac, that match the circulating social media photos that caught Trump’s ire. We know that credible news organizations and photo agencies have very strict rules about images and videos. But that, in turn, requires trusting the photo agency — or the media source — furnishing the image or video.
It’s ultimately about trust. Some news sources are better than others. It’s an individual’s personal responsibility to learn and understand this. This is something that should be taught, in schools.
It’s no accident that Trump has made it a habit to portray credible news organizations as untrustworthy liars, and many of his supporters seem to have internalized that message they were open to in the first place.
Once trust is lost and all credibility is questioned, the lie doesn’t have to be high quality. It doesn’t have to be supported by highly realistic fake A.I. It doesn’t have to be so easily disprovable. To work, the lie just needs a willing purveyor and an eager audience. The A.I., then, is but a fig leaf.
I’ve said this before: I think the credulity of a large part of the American public is because of their inculcation by religion. Religion teaches you to “believe” based on authority, or stories, without or despite evidence, i.e. understanding of the actual, physical, real world. I would demote the word “belief” as inconsequential, and replace it with “understanding”. A persona can ‘believe’ anything at all, and the religious are taught to do so at an early age. Science is not about “belief,” it’s about “understanding” conclusions based on evidence with observations of the real, objective, physical world.
The people who do not understand this are the ones subject to conspiracy thinking, and conservative “beliefs” that do not actually correspond to the real world.
