You can go back and read stories from the 1950s which have these issues and more. There has never been a time where all individuals involved in a democracy have understood all the facts. Popular politics has always been driven by newspapers and special interest groups.
In my country, implementation of a certain policy has very clear correlation with a marked increase in suicide rates - the slow rollout of this specific policy across areas of the country provides an easy way to show this. Certain newspapers refuse to report on this - it doesn't match their ideology - after all, when pointed out, people holding this ideology will often point out that suicide is one's own decision and it's not the Government's problem.
That's an assertion, but others say otherwise. According to this video below, Americans have argued values in the past, but agreed on the facts.
E.g. global warming. People agreed it was happening, but differed in what and whether to do about it. Today, we dispute its very factuality.
And the experts you cite that say it is real are in on it.
It's the Establishment trying to suppress the truth. That's what they say today. With more technology, the underdog with AI can beat the Establishment in a few weeks. And there will not be any way to distinguish what's true anymore than you can distinguish a chess line played by AlphaGo vs any other really good chess line.
Seems like you'd mention it unless it is a politically charged issue, perhaps related to gender relations or immigration or something.
One of these is a simplification of a bunch of benefits into something called "Universal Credit". It's a good idea, with some nice points. It's being implemented terribly, and is causing significant harm.
When someone makes a claim there is a minimum wait of six weeks before they get any money. In the England a landlord can apply to the courts to resposses a rented home if the tenant misses 8 weeks of rent. So the rollout of UC is causing some people to be evicted from their homes.
The old benefits were paid fortnightly. UC is paid monthly. People have to budget very carefully to last all month. Poor people tend to be bad at budgeting, and being poor makes it harder to budget.
There is a very strict, punitive, sanctions regime in place. You'll see people being given sanctions because they attended a medical appointment or had to look after a child. People are expected to spend 35 hours a week searching for work, and they have to provide evidence that they've done so. That could be ok, but it means a claimant will send very many applications to unsuitable jobs, rather than spend a couple of hours polishing an application for a more suitable job. There's a lot more about sanctions and suspension: the rules are very strict; there are very many rules; the DWP and JC+ don't know what their own rules are and sometimes give incorrect advice. So sometimes a claimant will ask DWP or JC+ what to do, and will follow that instruction, and end up being sanctioned because it was the wrong thing to do.
Benefits are paid by the Secretary of State for the Department of Work and Pensions. That person is busy being a government minister, so they employ "decision makers" who look at the various acts of parliament, statutory instruments, and case law and apply those to the details of the claim. The quality of decision making is particularly poor at the moment.
Two judges (who are involved in appeals) have said this. Here's a useful article: https://linustechtips.com/main/topic/872276-ai-assisted-fake...
Note here they're not just talking about UC, but also about PIP and ESA. (PIP and ESA are disability benefits. ESA is an out of work benefit.)
To get PIP or ESA the claimant will need an independent medical. This is provided by a nurse, a physiotherapist, or an occupational therapist. These people are employed by private companies. Those companies have said that over 30% of the assessments they do are not acceptable. https://twitter.com/CommonsWorkPen/status/942773136390590465
Imagine that - imagine if fully one third of everything you did was not acceptable.
Finally, because the claim is about suicide: https://www.disabilitynewsservice.com/shocking-nhs-stats-sho...
We have to be a bit careful with these figures. (We'd expect the population claiming benefits for a disability to include more people who've had suicidal thoughts).
FWIW, I've been that primary source for some major news stories, and the final story usually bears just a passing resemblance to reality as I experienced it. Assuming good faith on the part of the reporter, I have to assume that reality as I experienced it bears only a passing resemblance to reality as other primary sources experience it, which is congruent with other known facts like the difficulty of communication, the existence of cognitive biases, and the field of psychology. Objectivity is a myth; it's oftentimes a useful myth, but it's worth remembering that the reporter has his own biases and preconceptions as well, and as the person choosing what to report upon, these will necessarily make it into the final piece. The audience has their own biases as well, so they won't be reading exactly the same piece that the reporter wrote.
Unlikely. One of us has spent a large chunk of their professional career working in and around newsrooms.
With millions of events happening each and every day the simple act of choice is incredibly meaningful.
Your own belief in the objectivity of modern newsrooms proves my point.
Clearly both Al-Jazeera and Fox News do fact checking... yet one would be left with a very different view of the world depending on who did the reporting.
If anything it is the one place where getting the objectivity wrong has no consequences. In a typical company if you are getting the truth about something wrong (e.g. what people want, what people are willing to pay, where the market will move to) the lack of profit margins will refute the correctness.
In a newsroom however objective truth is a hygiene issue like a cook washing his hands. They should. But if they don't it has very few consequences.
In the olden days you certainly had less ways to fake footage (no image editing or digital forms of manipulation), but at the same time it was also much easier to trick people into believing falsehoods. I mean, look at the older stuff on the Museum of Hoaxes. It'd be shot down in minutes in 2017, since it's obvious the people involved did very little work to back up their claims. You could literally walk into a town where a famous guy's son when missing ten years ago and pretend you're him with no one any the wiser for months. Despite not looking anything like the missing guy and knowing very little about his life. [0]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tichborne_case
Or pretend to be a missing Russian princess/foreign visitor/royal with no one being any the wiser. Or lie in newspapers about how Astronomers found a society of advanced humanoids on the Moon. Either way, while there were few ways to falsify information to the same quality as can be done now, it was made up for by how easy it was to trick people in a world without the internet, a decent press/journalists or easily hidden cameras.
As history went on, obviously the amount of ways that you could falsify evidence increased, as did the convincingness of the trickery. However, at the same it also became much easier to debunk false claims too, so the quality of the fakers had to get better if they wanted to stand a chance of fooling anyone.
Hence the arms race. The better technology gets at letting people forge evidence, the better it also gets at letting people debunk fakes.
Not exactly propaganda, more misdirection, maskirovka our Russian comrades call it
Any technology created by humans will be a mirror of human shortcomings. Techo-utopians believe that technology will make humanity somehow better. It won't. We'll just use it to do the same terrible shit we've been doing since the dawn of time.
https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/6jqakv/communi...
For instance, at least in Russia you just get an actor that looks like the politician, film them doing some bad stuff and blackmail them. Pretty simple.
We have had doctored photos/videos for as long as the mediums existed.
If anything it will saturate and you wont be able to tell what is real or not. Most people will default to "fake" and have to rely on the trustfulness of the source. Just like now. We have photoshop and there isn't mass chaos.
Until faked video of the trusted source him- or herself appears.
https://qz.com/583311/north-koreas-dissident-tracking-comput...
Separately, generating false images or videos for libel purposes would become more difficult; if a camera that has never been owned by a person is used to produce a signed video that is pornographic in nature, the authenticity of that video is immediately suspect. It would take a much more sophisticated attack to produce a mathematically convincing fake video.
However, that's still interesting; isn't it possible that each light sensor has certain watermark-like characteristics arising from the manufacturing process?
I hope it might actually help people be more skeptical of what they're reading and seeing. And hopefully it will help news media be more skeptical of their sources as well. If that doesn't happen then this will be a disaster.
Somewhat ironically, I feel a citation is needed here.
Granted it was a lot more common before photoshop-style software was everywhere.
If it needed any more proof (than facebook, fox, ads, gov propaganda...) that this never happened, I think the Trump debacle should be final evidence this is fantasy.
http://tywkiwdbi.blogspot.com/2010/09/corpses-of-de-witt-bro...
The end result is more freedom and privacy because people won't trust "hard evidence" anymore. I think this might be a good thing.
Progress in technology ruins that illusion.
Want to play some heads up poker or chess with someone? How sure are you they aren't getting instructions from a program through some means?
Don't have anything to hide? How about an AI to dig up plausible sounding parallel construction stories to convince a jury?
And in a few decades we're talking about flirting, humor, writing stories, producing any sort of content.
There will be a time when a lot of these false positives will still be accepted, until people just stop trusting EVERYTHING.
With a few obvious exceptions -- like one particular shot of Ivanka's face that crosses the line from realism all the way past comedy into horror -- some of these replacements are almost good enough to start fooling people. Voice synthesis is approaching the 'solved problem' point as well (e.g., https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YfU_sWHT8mo ). Not there yet, but getting there.
But every criticism of traditional media here gets flagged. Which is ridiculous for a "hacker" news site when you think about and the hacker ethos.
Worked so well in a recent election...
> These sorts of things could be used to start wars.
Wars have been started on much flimsier pretexts, unless you are talking about getting the other side so irate that they fire first.
Either we instate an ID system or the web becomes a joke no one believes. The latter I guess wouldn’t be a bad thing.
There are many ways to disprove such video, and if the technology exists, we already know that it exists, so it will make any video, real or not, much less relevant.
The tale of new technology bringing war and mayhem might make sense, but in reality it doesn't. You just wish it would happen, because you might want to have some fiction that says "what if?", but it's just a wish. It's also why I dislike black mirror as a tv show. Distopian science fiction is boring most of the time.
Want court evidence of your wife cheating? Fake grainy hidden camera video. Want to discredit a politician? Here he is picking up a male escort and using racial slurs. These sorts of things could be used to start wars.
Sure, deeper analysis might prove that this video isn't real, but that won't stop the immediate public reaction and response. The knee-jerk reaction to what the public sees is the end-goal. I'll bet good money that this technology plays a major role in future elections.