Artificial Intelligence in general can draw, in seconds, any image you care to describe. It can generate photo-realistic facesthat could be used as “victims” and “mugshots”, or cast any fake drama with fake actors.
Free online tools can do all of the above passably already. Obviously, governments and mega-corporations would have access to more expensive advanced tools that would probably be near-impossible to detect.
Hollywood movies deploy CGI to bring dead actors back to life, add modern faces to old news footage, burn cities to the ground or make 60-year-olds look 20 again.
Simply put – You can’t trust images or videos. Ever. It’s a lesson we all need to learn.
So, we know that fast-developing tools make highly convincing fake news or staged events not only possible but easy. For our final point I want to focus more on the repeated lesson of history people refuse to learn:
They. Already. Fake. Everything.
OK, not literally everything, but a lot. A huge amount. Much more than most people grasp.
It’s a minor example, but in this clip from CNN, two female reporters are pretending to be miles apart doing a satellite interview, when a bus going by in the background proves that they are in fact in the same parking lot, and aren’t separated by more than fifty feet.
A reminder of just how much of the media we consume every day is some type of unreality, one way or another.
You could say “reality”, as we understand it, is barely ever seen in the media. Magazine covers are photoshopped. Interviews are stage-managed. “Scandals” can be largely PR stunts. “Reality television” is full of paid actors in simulated conflict with one another. Every scenario a contrivance, every emotion a performance.
The internet is rife with weather reporters leaning into hurricane winds that aren’t there, or paddling canoes in “floods” six inches deep.
Watch this video, allegedly recorded in Egypt circa the Arab Spring:
In his book Bought Journalists, the late Udo Ulfkotte recounts being in Iraq during the war and watching journalists poor petrol on burnt out tanks and cars, miles from the frontline, so they could set them on fire and pretend to be reporting from a warzone.
Within days of Russia launching its “special military operation” in Ukraine, both mainstream media and social media were flooded with fake and misattributed videos selling made-up stories.
The media landscape is saturated with pretend, and has been for decades.
The technology discussed above doesn’t mean they will start faking things, it means the faking they’ve been doing for years will be easier to do and harder to detect.
The technology exists. The motivation exists. The required levels of dishonesty and corruption more than exist. The lazy entitlement that ‘justifies’ a culture of pretend also exists.
No comments:
Post a Comment