I think this way of thinking is distracted. No type of media has ever been a source of truth in itself. Videos have been edited convincingly for a long time, and people can lie about their context or cut them in a way that flips their meaning.
Text is the easiest media to lie on, you can freely just make stuff up as you go, yet we don't say "we cannot trust written text anymore".
Well yeah duh, you can trust no type of media just because it is formatted in a certain way. We arrive at the truth by using multiple sources and judging the sources' track records of the past. AI is not going to change how sourcing works. It might be easier to fool people who have no media literacy, but those people have always been a problem for society.
You are right but the thing with this is the speed and ease with which you can generate something completely fake.
> Well yeah duh, you can trust no type of media just because it is formatted in a certain way
Maybe you wouldn't, but the layperson probably would.
> We arrive at the truth by using multiple sources and judging the sources' track records of the past
Again, this is something that the ideal person would, not the average layperson. Almost nobody would go through all that to decide if they want to believe something or not. Presenting them a video of this sometjing would've been a surefire way to force them to believe it though, at least before Sora.
> people have always been a problem for society
Unrelated, but I think this attitude is by far the bigger "problem for society". It encourages us to look down on some people even when we do not know their circumstances or reasons, all for an extremely trivial matter. It encourages gatekeeping and hostility, and I think that kind of attitude is at least as detrimental to society as people with no media literacy.
But even then, as nowadays, people didn't trust the medium absolutely. The possibility of forgery was real, as it has been with the video, even before generative AI.
'pics or it didn't happen' has been a thing (possibly) until very recently for good reason.
I really find this constant back and forth exhausting. It's always the same conversation: '(gen)AI makes it easy to create lots of fake news and disinformation etc.' --> 'but we've always been able to do that. have you not guys not heard of photoshop?' --> 'yes, but not on this scale this quickly. can you not see the difference?'
Anyway, my original point was simply to say that a lot of people have (rightly or wrongly) indeed taken photographic evidence seriously, even in the age of photographic manipulation (which as you point out, pretty much coincides with the age of photography itself).
Why have you been trusting videos? The only difference is that the cost will decrease.
Haven't you seen Holywood movies? CGI has been convincing enough for a decade. Just add some compression and shaky mobile cam and it would be impossible to tell the difference on anything.
Every piece of information should have "how do you know?" question attached.
We've been living in a post-truth society for a while now. Thanks to "the algorithm" interacting with basic human behavior, you can find something somewhere that will tell you anything is true. You'll even find a community of people who'll be more than happy to feed your personal echo chamber -- downvoting & blocking any objections and upvoting and encouraging anything that feeds the beast.
And this doesn't just apply to "dumb people" or "the others", it applies to the very people reading this forum right now. You and me and everybody here lives in their safe, sound truth bubble. Don't like what people tell you? Just find somebody or something that will assure you that whatever it is you think, you are thinking the truth. No, everybody is the asshole who is wrong. Fuck those pond scum spreaders of "misinformation".
It could be a blog, it could be some AI generated video, it could even be "esteemed" newspapers like the New York Times or NPR. Everybody thinks their truth is the correct one and thanks to the selective power of the internet, we can all believe whatever truth we want. And honestly, at this point, I am suspecting there might not be any kind of ground truth. It's bullshit all the way down.
we need ground truths for these things to actually function. how else can things work together?
I showed these demos to my partner yesterday and she was upset about how real AI has become, how little we will be able to trust what we see in the future. Authoritative sources will be more valuable, but they themselves may struggle to publish only the facts and none of the fiction.
Here's one possible military / political use:
The commander of Russia's Black Sea Fleet, Viktor Sokolov, is widely believed to have been killed by a missile strike on 22 September 2023. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viktor_Sokolov_(naval_officer)
Russian authorities refute his death and have released proof of life footage, which may be doctored or taken before his death. Authoritative source Wikipedia is not much help in establishing truth here, because without proof of death they must default to toeing the official line.
I predict that in the coming months Sokolov (who just yesterday was removed from his post) will re-emerge in the video realm, and go on to have a glorious career. Resurrecting dead heroes is a perfect use of this tech, for states where feeding people lies is preferable to arming them with the truth.
Sokolov may even go on to be the next Russian President.