This really sounds like you wouldn't love it to be an open source workable competitor at all.

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.

This would be great, if it were only remotely feasible that an individual could ever have the tools and training to counterbalance entire industries of giant disinformation-focused billionaire corporations and governments with thousands of highly trained disinformation professionals using modern tooling, well-funded research departments, and increasingly deep data to spread disinformation.

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.

> 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?

>IMO it's not the task of governments to be prepared to address misinformation.

The media wasnt perfect but they were better before the fairness doctrine was repealed.

> This requires an educated civil society

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).

Imagine if the French - or the Founding Fathers - had waited for their populace to reach some artificially high and fundamentally undefined level of education before instituting democracy on the idea that democracy presupposes education. They would still be waiting today.

This would rightly be understood as a shallow hold-out.

Except you forget that when democracy was first unveiled only white, land-owning males could vote because they supposed that they were educated and self-interested enough to make good decisions. The founding fathers were well-known to not trust the public for making decisions and thats WHY we (in the USA) have laws written up and argued over by the House and Senate and not popular vote...

Yeah, and democracy didn't just spontaneously appear - its the result of education and debates by educated people.

Yes, I know that argument. So I'm curious: Would you support the initial restriction to only white, land-owning males as reasonable? Do you think, for example, that US women's suffrage required women to be educated first?

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?

I think this really misses my point, and also is just factually wrong as the other poster responded.

>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.

> The question was "what can be done to combat misinformation" and my response was "education"

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.

Preexisting gov't? Where do you live? Most people here live under a gov't - why are you being this obtuse. Bizarre that you think you are in a position to state what my intent was when my last response to you was that you missed my point. So much for making an effort to understand.

This really does not sound like you're familiar with the necessity of regulation at all.

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?

This reply here is a great example of casually portraing something as factual which isn't much more than an opinion. It's not that opinionated replies are bad, it's bad when commenters use this to avoid actually reasoning or referencing anything substantial.

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.

OpenAI has been giving this as their reason for years and nothing has happened even though powerful models were released open source.

Turns out that misinformation is already incredibly cheap to create and the bottleneck lies elsewhere.

> ... at least until governments around the world are prepared to address a tsunami of misinformation

The American system, as designed, is diametrically opposed to waiting for governments around the world to protect you from misinformation.