| ▲ | oefrha 11 hours ago |
| > We can expect videos of unpopular minorities, doing horrible things Expect? You can post a random image of an unpopular minority, add some caption saying they did horrible things, that is not reflected in the image at all, and tons of people will pile on. Don’t even need a fake video. |
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| ▲ | 1718627440 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| What people tend to forget or dispel is that everything in society is based on trust. You can of course try to test every new fact for soundness with all the facts you already know, but fundamentally you need to trust something and in the end it just becomes a function of how much you trust the messenger. Undoing trustworthiness is a big issue and will lead to a lot of unrest in society. The reason you are not murdered today is not, because murder is hardly punished or hard to do, it is because most people aren't murders. If they were, we wouldn't be able to suppress it with force, we would simply live in hell. |
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| ▲ | yakshaving_jgt 10 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| For some reason this hurts worse. I was listening to James O’Brien on LBC, and [IIRC] he said he was serving jury duty with a woman who was convinced that Volodymyr Zelenskyy had spent hundreds of million of dollars on a super-yacht. He asked if she had any evidence for that claim, and she produced a picture of a boat. He said “That’s just a picture of a boat.” |
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| ▲ | groestl 10 hours ago | parent [-] | | Ironically, there is no evidence that woman ever said that. | | |
| ▲ | anonymous908213 9 hours ago | parent [-] | | There is, in fact, evidence that hundreds if not thousands of random people have said that: https://xcancel.com/KimDotcom/status/1729171832430027144 Perhaps you could even find that specific woman leaving an outraged comment over photos of boats if you looked hard enough! | | |
| ▲ | groestl 8 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Yes, but in that story, parent only has the word of that Journalist. I personally don't even have that, I only have a post about it. My deeper point is that it's arguably very difficult to establish a global, socially acceptable lower threshold of trust. Parent's level is, apparently, the word of a famous Journalist in a radio broadcast. For some, the form of a message alone makes the message worthy of trust, and AI will mess with this so much. | | |
| ▲ | anonymous908213 8 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Whether you trust the word of the journalist has little relation to the story. The "socially acceptable lower threshold of trust" is not static for all stories; it changes depending on the stakes of the story. Non-consequential: A photo of a cat with a funny caption. I am likely to trust the caption by default, because the energy of doubting it is not worth the stakes. If the caption is a lie, it does nothing to change my worldview or any actions I will ever take. Nobody's life will be worse off for not having spent an hour debunking an amusing story fabricated over a cat photo. Trivially consequential: Somebody relates a story about an anonymous, random person peddling misinformation based on photos with false captions on the internet. Whether I believe that specific random person did has no bearing on anything. The factor from the story that might influence your worldview is the knowledge that there are people in the world who are so easily swayed by false captions on photos, and that itself is a trivially verifiable fact, including other people consuming the exact photo and misinformation from the story. More consequential: Somebody makes an accusation against a world leader. This has the potential to sway opinions of many people, feeding into political decisions and international relations. The stakes are higher. It is therefore prudent not to trust without evidence of the specific accusation at hand. Providence of evidence does also matter; not everything can be concretely proven beyond a shadow of a doubt. We should not trust people blindly, but people who have a history of telling the truth are more credible than people who have a history of lying, which can influence what evidence is sufficient to reach a socially acceptable threshold of trust. | | |
| ▲ | groestl 8 hours ago | parent [-] | | The point about the stakes is a good one. But there is an individiual factor to it. And maybe it's exactly because of the stakes you mention: if you perceive your personal stakes to be low, or might even gain something out of redistributing the message, no matter if fabricated or not, your threshold might be low as well. | | |
| ▲ | oarsinsync 6 hours ago | parent [-] | | > > Trivially consequential: Somebody relates a story about an anonymous, random person peddling misinformation based on photos with false captions on the internet. Whether I believe that specific random person did has no bearing on anything. > The point about the stakes is a good one. But there is an individiual factor to it. Indeed. The so called "trivially consequential" depends on whether you're the person being "mis-informationed" about or not. You could be a black man with a white grandchild, and someone could then take a video your wife posted of you playing with your grandchild, and redistribute it calling you a pedophile, causing impact to your life and employment. Those consequences don't seem trivial to the people impacted. True story: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/aug/20/family-in-fear... | | |
| ▲ | anonymous908213 6 hours ago | parent [-] | | This is a complete and total misrepresentation of what I said. The key point here is that the "accused" in the trivial story is anonymous. They are fungible. Their identity is irrelevant to the story; it is merely an anecdote about the fact that a person like this exists, and people who exhibit the exact same behaviour as them verifiably do exist, so there is nothing to be misinformed about. A tangible accusation against a specific individual is completely different, and obviously is consequential. |
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| ▲ | jasonvorhe 8 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Who cares about a single or two Yachts. Ukraine likely made 100 billion USD disappear and there were many people expecting just that. Just like some of the "donated equipment" started showing up on all sorts of black markets once it was shipped to Ukraine. It's just the obviously controlled media in Europe that stopped mentioning Ukraine's corruption issues right after February 2022. Obviously I can only be a Putin-loving propaganda bot for saying such things. | | |
| ▲ | rwmj 8 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Corruption in Ukraine is constantly in the news. https://www.economist.com/search?q=ukraine+corruption&nav_so... | |
| ▲ | matthewmacleod 8 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Everybody is aware the Ukraine has major corruption issues. It is frequently covered in the media and is common knowledge. I have no doubt however that Europe (and hopefully the wider world) is less worried about that corruption than they are about Russian military aggression. And there will be some level of media focus on that – rightly so, where the focus should be on grinding the Russian kleptostate into dust as quickly and thoroughly as possible. You're not a propaganda bot; you're just making their lives easier. | | |
| ▲ | lawn 7 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Where does the corruption come from? It comes from an old culture that Ukraine is trying to remove themselves from, hence the large amount of corruption charges we see. The same culture is incidentally what makes Russia one of the most corrupt countries in the world. | |
| ▲ | jasonvorhe 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | If you're happy with your tax euros disappearing in Ukraine, good for you. I know for a fact via family ties that major newsrooms in Germany received instructions to tune out the corruption angle once the war started. I'm sure it's all nothing though and that Putin will find himself in Poland next year. Of course! | | |
| ▲ | mrwrong 4 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | this is true, my dad is Volodymyr Zelensky | |
| ▲ | vasco 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | What's your point though? There's corruption in Ukraine. Ok. There's corruption in your country too, do you refuse to pay taxes? Or do you still pay them because some good comes with the little bad? Same deal. | | |
| ▲ | jasonvorhe 6 hours ago | parent [-] | | If sending hundreds of billions of tax payer money to a known oligarch run cleptocracy is comparable to some German conservative party affiliate making a couple of millions using shady COVID mask deals is comparable to you, I rest my case. It's all corruption in the end so who cares, right? | | |
| ▲ | rwmj 6 hours ago | parent [-] | | Two things can be true at the same time - we don't want Russia to absorb Ukraine and then further threaten the eastern border of the EU, and we don't want Ukraine to be corrupt. | | |
| ▲ | johannes1234321 6 hours ago | parent [-] | | And in the Ukraine we see that the corruption is uncovered punished, even if it is in the direct circles of the president. There are problems in uncovering it, but the attempt to get rid of corruption is a big factor in the whole situation and one of the things Russia fears. For Russia a corrupt system was a lot simpler to influence and Ukraine showing how a partially Russian speaking country, where people moved back and forth, fighting corruption was a threat to the system. |
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| ▲ | mcphage 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | > to tune out the corruption angle once the war started Oh man, wait until you hear about what’s going on in the US, we’re experiencing corruption to a degree you can’t even imagine. |
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| ▲ | netsharc 9 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Hah, Kim Dotcom is still around? In the 90s he was bragging that he's this super hacker that made millions, his website posted pics of parties, cars, girls, and yachts, and it turned out those were bought/rented using swindled investor money (ironic that he's accusing Zelensky of the same crime). Then he became a sort of hero when the US/NZ governments Team 6-ed his house for the crime of aiding copyright infringement. Now he's a Putin/Trump apologist... | | |
| ▲ | tjpnz 5 hours ago | parent [-] | | Still around and at a huge cost to the New Zealand taxpayer - people used to have some sympathy but public opinion turned against him years ago. His extradition was declared ok, long overdue he was put on a plane and made somebody else's problem. |
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| ▲ | littlestymaar 11 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| In fact, this is already happening on a daily basis. IA ain't the problem here, so called social media are. |
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| ▲ | tormeh 10 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Well, some news organizations are more than willing to spread fake news as well, so it's hardly limited to social media. I think it's just in-group vs out-group mentality, and a need to hate. | |
| ▲ | markdown 9 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | It was not happening on a daily basis on Twitter before Elon Musk. The endless flow of racism and bigotry on that website is a choice. It's convenient to blame the amorphous thing "social media" instead of the actual people responsible. There are only a handful of them: Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, etc. And stopping it is simple. It's a choice. | | |
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| ▲ | delusional 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| In my opinion, this isn't a problem of AI. the people who get deceived by this are willing participants in the lie. When proven wrong, they will fall back to the echo chamber and rely on it to give them more false facts. They won't seek information outside of their own circle. They cannot be understood as merely passively misinformed. They are actively lying to themselves. |
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| ▲ | soneil 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | What you'll tend to notice with "willing participants" is that they're not looking for truth, they're looking for confirmation. No-one asks for proof when you tell them what they want to hear. |
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| ▲ | hulitu 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| > You can post a random image of an unpopular minority, add some caption saying they did horrible things, that is not reflected in the image at all, and tons of people will pile on. We call this journalism and this is a respectable profession. /s |
