I’ve thought about this before but it seems its becoming more real every day. I fear in the future it may be impossible to tell between truth and fiction. AI is getting more and more powerful and producing text, images and now videos that look real and I don’t see the improvements stopping anytime soon. Could the world fall into mass deception and misinformation because of AI?
Video Evidence is Dead
I seen a video this morning called Video Evidence is Dead talking about OpenAI’s new app called Sora. Reports are that it can take the likeness of anyone and make them say whatever you want. Including dead people. This is not new but the realism is getting extremely good.
Imagine for example someone taking a public figure like Martin Luther King Jr and putting their own words in his mouth in a video. Then that video spreading across the internet as some lost video that was found. At what point would it be impossible to really know? Now multiply by countless people making videos in AI. That sounds like a recipe for mass deception.
Or what if someone did not like you and made you say stuff in a video you never said then past that around? At what point can we no longer tell real from deep fake? or are we already there?
Text and Images
People have been able to fake text and images for a long time now. That’s not new. The problem is the scale. What one skilled person could do in Photoshop in a few hours now everyone can do in a few seconds with AI. Will the shear volume of fakes overwhelm us making it hard to find anything real?
Online Interactions
I already feel like a large number of online interactions are not human anymore. Its kind of sad because I enjoyed connecting with people in the past. Now it mostly seems fake. I heard the other day X Removed 1.7 Million Bots from their platform. But with AI I think it will keep getting worse. Reminds me of the Dead Internet Theory
This is already being used as a form of mass deception. One example is viewbotters. Some streamers and social media people use bots to make their content seem more popular then it is. This tricks advertisers causing them to lose money and it tricks people who tend to follow the crowd. These tricks will only get more advance as AI gets better.
Mass Deception is Coming?
Even if its not meant to be malicious. Flooding the world with fake information will make truth harder to find and confirm. I don’t know what the answer is but AI is not going to stop growing. Hopefully we can figure out a way to tell truth from deepfakes. Because if we can’t I fear there will be a lot of deceived people in the future.
