IMO it's not the task of governments to be prepared to address misinformation. It's an individual responsibility. This requires an educated civil society with the media literacy necessary to make a democracy work in the 21st century. It's an ongoing, aspirational project. ...and we can't wait until we think we're ready.
There is no amount of 'media literacy' training (which, in practice, would have to be created and administered by public schools under the watchful eye of some of the selfsame disinformation purveyors, in some states) that will ever be up to the task.
Sometimes I feel that the skill level demanded for media literacy is set artificially high in order to force the conclusion that individuals are categorically incapable of judging their personal information environment. But that does not seem plausible to me.
I feel pretty savvy, and I wasn't trained in school. Almost no journalist or public figure has received formalized training in the way you describe.
And why would that be necessary, what would they teach beyond common sense? Do you have examples of large-scale disinformation campaigns that aren't sufficiently contextualized through regular mainstream media?
The media wasnt perfect but they were better before the fairness doctrine was repealed.
Do you think educated civil societies just spontaneously form, or is it because they are enabled through the government providing things like education (the best way to combat misinformation).
This would rightly be understood as a shallow hold-out.
And, as you seem to assume, this skepticism led to more indirect forms of democratic institutions: Would you argue against direct democratic institutions in the U.S. on the same basis?
>But people should always be assumed to be capable of judging their informational environment independently of formal education. Not to do so would be deeply paternalistic and infantilizing.
That's not the point. The question was "what can be done to combat misinformation" and my response was "education" which in the democracies that I'm aware of, is generally provided by the gov't. You are talking about something else entirely, and a bit pejoratively as well, which is ironic because you are talking about education but apparently completely missed the point.
No, the topic was that whether the thesis that technologies like ChatGPT enable misinformation is a reason to keep the technology unfree.
And in response to that topic it was me, not you, who introduced education. You then just added a loaded question designed to hint at a preexisting government.
Yes an individual should be media literate, just as corporations SHOULD practice fair competition and people should not invest their life savings in Ponzi schemes or kill one another. Unfortunately, maintaining a stable society in the real world requires governance. 16% of the world's population don't have electricity. How can you expect them to educate themselves about misinformation while technology beyond their comprehension is being weaponized against them?
Just ask yourself: What could they mean by being familiar with "the necessity of regulation"? Like _any_ regulation? _Every_ regulation? The " necessity " of specific regulatory measures varies widely, depending on many different factors.
> Unfortunately, maintaining a stable society in the real world requires governance.
Yeah, I mean... how could someone not agree with the second part? ... but why would that be "unfortunate"?
Governance is such a broad human endeavor, even language is part of it, as are all the protocols, supply chains, standardizations etc. that make this conversation possible. Hardly unfortunate?
> Yes an individual should be media literate, just as corporations SHOULD practice fair competition and people should not invest their life savings in Ponzi schemes or kill one another.
I didn't say they, the people, should do something, I said we should do something. We should not, as in this debate, infantilize the population.
> 16% of the world's population don't have electricity. How can you expect them to educate themselves about misinformation while technology beyond their comprehension is being weaponized against them? That's the same argument for why indigenous people can't govern themselves without Western education. I'm not going to go there, and I certainly don't see the threat you are painting.
Misinformation is nothing new at all, and if you argue that social media is making a difference: Not only is that controversial, it assumes electricity - in a completely uncontroversial way. People will deal with misinformation today using the same tools they used to deal with misinformation yesterday: reason, critical thinking, etc.
There's no technical fix for this.
Turns out that misinformation is already incredibly cheap to create and the bottleneck lies elsewhere.
The American system, as designed, is diametrically opposed to waiting for governments around the world to protect you from misinformation.
Even if by Moore's law we get that great power in our own computers, enough to run a today's chatGPT clone, there will always be a commercial version that is 100x more awesome out there built by actors with immense compute power backed by rivers of corporate money.
This is worrisome because I think mega corporations like Microsoft and Google want AI to just be a fun little tool for drafting emails and writing jokes and recipes. Any more powerful language constructions are too risky to their existing business models or too risky in terms of PR. People will just screenshot something the AI says philosophically and it will get retweeted and people will lose their mind.
I really hope a open source workable competitor to chatGPT emerges soon.