OpenAI collapses media reality with Sora AI video generator | If trusting video from anonymous sources on social media was a bad idea before, it’s an even worse idea now::Hello, cultural singularity—soon, every video you see online could be completely fake.
I looked at these videos with very mixed emotions. On the one hand, I marveled at how far we’ve gotten. In a few years we went from generating sort of okay images in a very confined domain and essentially uncontrollable, to generating high resolution video that on first glance looks real.
But then the sadness struck me. I think we’re entering the post-truth era, where the truth is harder and harder to find because all the fake stuff looks so real. We can generate text, images, sound, and now also video of whatever we want in the blink of an eye. Combine this with the tendency of people to accept any “information” that fits their view, and the filter bubbles that already exist, and we can see that humanity will start living in separate bubbles. Every bubble will have their own truth, and even if someone proves that a video or image is fake, that information will probably not even reach them because the truth doesn’t generate enough clicks.
I want to stay optimistic, we’ve overcome so much stuff as a species, maybe we’ll right the ship at some point. But with all the shit that is already going on in the world, the last thing we need is the ability to fake videos like this in no time at all. At some point the separate filter bubbles will tear our stable western world as we knew it apart, and we’ll see shit like WW II again. The situation is already heating up.
It’s funny that in the human history there will be a gap of around 100 years where photos and video were considered to be solid proof and evidence that could determine the outcome of somebody’s future
we’re back at square one I guess
Naah, that was never a thing. EG: In 1917, two young girls created some photographs of fairies, the Cottingley Fairies. Arthur Conan Doyle, the inventor of Sherlock Holmes, endorsed them as real. When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth. That quote is terrible advice.
The last 1 or 2 decades were really the golden age of credible evidence. Everyone has a video camera and can upload these videos almost immediately (proving that the videos were not edited later). Yet, at the same time, misinformation has become this huge topic.
We’re not back to square 1, either. You can still immediately upload a video (or a hash, or get it certified in some way). Say, you do this with dashcam footage after a collision, ASAP. That makes it almost unassailable as evidence, because you can’t have had time to forge it; certainly not in a way that is congruent with independent evidence and testimony.
If several people, upload videos of the same event at about the same time, then they either are all in it together and carefully prepared the videos beforehand, or not.
I’m actually glad that AI is making people realize that what they see is likely not real. For the history of media, the default has been for the written word or images or video to be taken as 100% truth, when in reality, it has always been very easy to deceive and manipulate. Now that we will suspect everything, maybe there will finally be critical thinking.
Another stepping stone to a much worse world. We won’t know what is real anymore.
I think it’s very cool technology, but in the hands of governments and psyops, it’s going to brainwash entire countries.
Want another 9/11? Sure no problem. Blow up a building, tell people you have some random video of what happened, captured by civilians…place evidence in locations where it will be found.
I think some governments already had tech like this but not all.
It will be interesting to follow this. Probably lots of fake videos on YouTube as a consequence where events are not real but used to stir up aggression.
Photoshop has existed for a long time. Three Letter Agencies have been faking stuff forever. Not new.
Will this make it easier/faster? For sure. The one upside I can see is it brings the conversation to everyone, even those folks who don’t want to acknowledge government is as bad an actor as anyone else.
We won’t know what is real anymore.
Of all the things, this really scares me. Many people scroll through their socials so quickly they will definitely not be able to tell apart generated clips from real ones. And the generated ones will only get better. One generation later, nobody will believe anything they see on a screen. And no, I don’t think regulation can do much here as it will only end up in heavily censoring everything, leading to more distrust in media.
This kind of AI stuff bums me out. You get people legitimately sharing AI images (and potentially videos in the future) and saying “look what I made!”. It’s totally inauthentic.
My boss loves this shit, on the other hand. Looking forward to the day she can automate our jobs away, I assume.
Why are they working so hard on making humanity worse?
Because we’re all born selfish assholes*, and some people never learn to not be so.
*We’re all born as selfish idiots, how can we be otherwise? We’re helpless at birth, thrust from perfect comfort and safety into discomfort, utterly ignorant and wholly dependent, with no knowledge there are others, who are just as dependent and helpless when they’re born. Learning about others, and how to get along is part of maturing.
It’s like we’re going back to the pre-internet era but it’s obviously a little different. Before the internet, there were just a few major media providers on TV plus lots of local newspapers. I would say that, for the most part in the USA, the public trusted TV news sources even though their material interests weren’t aligned (regular people vs big media corporations). It felt like there wasn’t a reason not to trust them, since they always told an acceptable version of the truth and there wasn’t an easy way to find a different narrative (no internet or crazy cable news). Local newspapers were usually very trusted, since they were often locally owned and part of the community.
The internet broke all of those business models. Local newspapers died because why do you need a paper when there are news websites? Major media companies were big enough to weather the storm and could buy up struggling competitors. They consolidated and one in particular started aggressively spinning the news to fit a narrative for ratings and political gain of the ownership class. Other companies followed suit.
This, paired with the thousands of available narratives online, weakened the credibility of the major media companies. Anyone could find the other side of the story or fact check whatever was on TV.
Now what is happening? The internet is being polluted with garbage and lies. It hasn’t been good for some time now. Obviously anyone could type up bullshit, but for a minute photos were considered reliable proof (usually). Then photoshopping something became easier and easier, which made videos the new standard of reliable proof (in most cases).
But if anything can be fake now and difficult to identify as fake, then how can you fact check anything? Only those with the means will be able to produce undeniably real news with great difficulty, which I think will return power to major news companies or something equivalent.
I’m probably wrong about what the future holds, so what do you think is going to happen?
I don’t think you’re wrong, I have been thinking the same thing.
Everyone has been worried about “AI misinformation” - but if misinformation becomes so commoditized online that someone convinced the moon landing is fake finds two dozen different AI generated sources agreeing with them but disagreeing with each other (i.e. a video of Orson Wells filming it but also a video of Stanley Kubrick filming it) we may well end up in a world where people just stop paying attention to the bullshit online that has been destroying people’s minds for years now.
Couple this with the advances in AI correctly identifying misinformation and live fact checking it with citations to reputable and/or certified sources, combined with things like Elon Musk’s ‘uncensored’ Grok turning around and calling his conservative Twitter fans racist and small minded morons while pointing out why they are wrong, or Gab’s literal Adolf Hitler AI telling a user they were disgusting for asking if Jews were vermin - and we may just end up on a narrow path out of the mess we’ve found ourselves in well before AI was suddenly a thing.
I had been really worried about the AI misinformation angle, but given some recent developments in the past few months I’m actually hopeful about the future of a better informed public for the first time in years.
Agreed, people are up in arms that misinformation will become easier. But I think the naive idea that the internet is inherently a reliable source of truth when it is mixed with subtler forms of misinformation, is much more insidious. Journalism used to be a highly respected field before we all forgot why it was so important.
People just want to get confirmed in what they already believe, with the amount of fake news people are already getting dumber because they’re not suffering criticism.
If I believe moon landing was fake before I would have hundreds of source telling me I’m wrong and only a few scammy documentaries that would agree with my belief. But now there is fake to confirm any belief I have. Aliens are real, check this video proving it. Zuckerberg is a lizard? There are dozens of photo and video on twitter. And so on.
I’m really not optimistic about that at all.
Now what is happening? The internet is being polluted with garbage and lies. It hasn’t been good for some time now.
Social media as content aggregation is generally garbage, but it’s a far stretch to apply that to the Internet or even the Web as a whole. Don’t forget Wikipedia is still a thing and almost every creator of primary source data publishes online.
But if anything can be fake now and difficult to identify as fake, then how can you fact check anything? Only those with the means will be able to produce undeniably real news with great difficulty, which I think will return power to major news companies or something equivalent.
That’s kind of always been true. And I agree, we need to find a way to maintain information sourcing organizations (e.g. news) that we can trust as the arbiters of this information. If Washington Post can actually put credible reporters on the ground to confirm something, and I know I can trust WaPo, I can fairly say with some confidence that it’s good information.
I think we all (or some of us at least) just need to be willing to pay for this service.
