Solipsism, to quote Wikipedia: is the philosophical idea that only one's mind is sure to exist. As an epistemological position, solipsism holds that knowledge of anything outside one's own mind is unsure; the external world and other minds cannot be known and might not exist outside the mind.
GenAI reduces what once was photo/video/audio proof to uncertainty both through quality (AI can create better fakes) and quantity (it is much easier to use AI to create fakes, therefore much more people will do so).
I can make an AI Fake that Donald Trump has two heads.
It could look convincing.
It would not take much effort to disprove that.
It's not clear to me why this is any bigger than rumors and propaganda and gossip. If you're susceptible to that, you're susceptible to deep fakes, but you were already trapped in a bed of lies.
I still maintain that it has never been easier to seek the truth than today.
You've fallen into a trap where you 'know' you'll recognize the truth when it occurs because 'reasons'. It's the wrong way to look at the problem. Instead say "How much energy/time am I going to spend debunking bullshit", because once it's more time/energy then you have, it's game over.
We’re just going to open the field of convincing looking bullshit to a whole bunch of newer and even more nefarious interests.
Basically agreeing with you though.
And if you rely on the “everyone knows people can only have one head” heuristic to validate the one-head hypothesis, that isn’t evidence seeking, it’s confirmation bias.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cogito,_ergo_sum#Discourse_on_...
I'm also not an expert but that's what I understood from the original comment. Hope this helps
> Disinformation researchers have found relatively few A.I. fakes, and even fewer that are convincing. Yet the mere possibility that A.I. content could be circulating is leading people to dismiss genuine images, video and audio as inauthentic.
People don't expect the nihilistic second order effect where the mere existence of AI taints all evidence.
I think it is interesting that in the case of media that is known to be fictional like video games, we now have to grapple with the novel question of how realistic is too realistic, all because we found out enough ways to make it realistic enough. What was once an implicit and invisible barrier mediated by the lack of advanced technology has become an ethical barrier that relies on persons refusing to use the technology for the harm it causes.
Sometimes I liken the outcome to spicy peppers. I can imagine that at some point the spiciest pepper yet will be engineered such that an average person ingesting one will encounter severe health problems. And yet we can't help but ask the question of "how spicy we can go," so until that limit is reached we keep going. The question of harm that such a pepper could inflict is drowned out by the question of what stones humankind have still left unturned. Somehow we can't stop turning them.
But unlike peppers, the results of these technologies will affect people that aren't interested in the question, and they will still be affected without any say in the matter.
The Amish limit their technology, in an attempt to prevent it from interfering with their culture.
Theoretically we can decide to do whatever we (collectively) want.