AI generated content, which now includes incredibly convincing videos of people, will grow exponentially over the next weeks, months, and years.
At some point, the majority of the content you see will be fake, and any usefulness or connection to humans will be lost.
Even information that you might have previously been able to confirm from a trusted source can (and will) be manipulated in some way, making verification impossible.
This lack of verification, along with the speed at which fake content can now be generated, will make it impossible to defend against.
Even the world of art and communication has been tainted, serving no connection to real people through this digital hellscape.
To that end, when will the internet be so untrustworthy, “soulless”, and useless to you that it crosses the tipping point?
EDIT: Ok, holy fuck. There’s actually a term for what I’m describing: “The Dead Internet Theory”
Plot twist: How do I know you aren’t a bot? /s
As information multiplies, and people have less time to apply critical thinking or skepticism to what they see, we’ll have an extremely hard time sorting through it all.
Even if we had a crowdsourced system that generates a whitelist of trusted sites, bots could easily overwhelm such a system, skewing the results. If Wikipedia, for example, had bots tampering with the data at a million times the rate that it does now, would anyone still want to use it?
One option might be an invite-only system, and even that would create new problems with fragmentation and exploitation.
Trust is almost becoming a thing of the past because of unprecedented digital threats.
Work does suck the life out of me, but I’d hope I can still pass a Turing test! 😜
There’s always going to be people that value facts and knowledge and they will always find each other for their own sanity.
With a focus on animal stuff, there is a lot of AI that I come across to try to win cuteness karma. I do see some convincing looking things that make me do a double take, because animals can do some weird things after all, but some stuff is never going to be physically possible. Some color combos just don’t exist. It may take a more trained eye to spot things, but there’s still going to be people calling stuff out and there will be forums where things will get pulled down if they’re not real.
In that regard, I worry about some real things being lost, at least to view to some of the general public, where real things that can’t be verified get downvoted/taken down/etc. But those with real interest will still work to conclusively verify or disprove things of questionable value.
People just want truth to get out. Whether you’re interested in education or conspiracy, from whichever direction most of us approach things, we just want to know the truth to the best of our abilities. That does bring inherent troubles and creates avenues to poison the well, but as hard as the bad actors will work, the good actors will be working to clean it just as hard.
ETA:
I also encourage people to question me. I’m happy to be able to confirm things, because I want you to also learn what I have learned, because I found it cool enough to study and share with you already. Questioning what I present to you also leads me to learn about more things, exploring subject matter I wouldn’t have thought to pursue on my own, or to finally learn about something I’ve been meaning to get to. Someone questioning my knowledge is both an opportunity for me to teach and to learn. And if I was wrong, hopefully afterwards I will know what is correct, and that has strengthened me as a whole if I accept I was wrong and have learned from the experience and not acted immaturely about it.