> To combat the rising wave of imperceptible fake content and its social consequences, Hickerson said regulation and corporate accountability are key. As of last week, there are more than 50 bills across 30 states aimed to clamp down on deepfake risks. And since the beginning of 2024, Congress has introduced a flurry of bills to address deepfakes.
Does anyone know what these bills are trying to do to address deepfakes? Something tells me the bad actors are not going to abide by regulations and probably aren't even many times in the US.
Yes, there's something about this that struck me as ageist.
There's kind of this odd implicit assumption, for instance, that liking an image means accepting it as genuine. It's entirely possible that people are liking something without regard to its artificiality. I'm sure a lot of them don't recognize it as AI, but some of them also don't care.
It also buries the later discussion where it's pointed out that older individuals are less susceptible to artificial verbal information.
I wouldn't be surprised if there are age trends in any of this — it cites stuff as such — but the way it's written is inappropriate in subtle ways.
There's plenty of fake on TikTok getting through to younger individuals. But older individuals are liking funny AI-generated pictures on Facebook? That we have to worry about in particular. Or at least that's the vibe.
It doesn't really look any different from the terrible Photoshops that old people would like and share. AI has most lowered the bar of entry.
But the flip side is that as costs come down and diffusion models see greater use, we may actually have classifier models tagging likely fake AI images and Photoshops both.
Writers these days love to write stories about how terrible AI is, but often neglect to realize that it's a double edged sword and the infrastructural production deploys of the other edge of mass low barrier adoption takes more time but is certainly on its way.
Rather than a world where AI ushered in misinformation, we may actually get to an end result where we have greater skepticism and improved platform tooling to combat it because of both the underlying technology and the push to offset the wave of low effort spam.
Anyone who thinks this will lead to productive skepticism hasn't been paying attention. As the amount of information we have to digest has exploded, more and more people are overwhelemed and unable to process it; they then tend to fall back into believeing everything that comports with their worldview, or forming the belief that they're unable to know the truth, which really end up being two sides of the same coin. Our ability to have conversations is breaking down as our shared reality has become more and more narrow.
That's before you even bring in misinformation and disinformatoom, let alone AI.
We're going to get more skeptical alright, it's just not going to be in a good way.
We're in a transitory period. I'm actually kinda optimistic in the long term, as this disinformation may inoculate people against other types of online propaganda that's more subtle. I remember when I was a kid we were told not to believe things we saw on the internet. We need to go back.
