Hopefully, we will soon enter the stage where nobody believes anything they see anymore. Then, you no longer have to be afraid of being misinterpreted, because nobody is listening anymore anyway. Great time to be alive!
Luckily there’s a “solution” to that: Just don’t use the internet for dialogue anymore.
As someone that grew up with late-90’s internet culture and has seen all the pros and cons
and changes over the decades, I find myself using the internet less and less for dialogue with people. And I’m spending more time in nature and saying hi to strangers in reality.
I’m still worries about the impact this will have on a lot of people’s ability to reason however. “Just” Tik Tok and apps like it has already had devastating results on certain demographics.
That bit "... there's a "solution"" - does it keep working in societies where there are mega corps pushing billions into developing engaging, compelling and interesting AI companions?
That's why I put it in quotation marks because it is a solution that will remain available, simply because the planet is really big and there'll always be places on the fringes. But it doesn't really solve the problem for society at large, it only solves it for an individual. But sometimes individuals showing other ways of living helps the rest of society see that there's choices where they previously thought there were none.
I don't know why anyone thinks this will happen. You can obviously write anything you want (we have an entire realm of works in this area that everyone knows about, fiction) and yet huge amounts of people believe passed around stories either from bad or faked media sources or entirely unsourced.
I'm not saying either you or the parent commenter is right or wrong, but fiction in books and movies are clearly fiction and we consume it as such. You are right that some people have been making up fake stories and others (the more naive) have been quick to believe in those false stories. The difference now is that it's not just text invented and written by a human, which takes time and dedication. Now it's done in a second. On top of that it's easy to enhance the text with realistic photos, audio and video. It becomes much more convincing. And this material is created in a few seconds or minutes.
It's hard to know what to believe if you get a phone call with the voice of your child or colleague, and your "child"/"colleague" replies within milliseconds in a convincing way.
I agree it's fundamentally different in application which I think will have a large impact (just like targeted advertising with optimisation vs billboards), but my point is that given people know you can just write anything and yet misinformation is abound - I don't see how knowing that you can fake any picture or video or sound leading to a situation where everyone just stops believing them.
I think unfortunately it will massively lower the trust of actual real videos and images, because someone can dismiss them with little thought.
Be glib, but that is one way for society to bring privacy back-and with it shared respect. I think of it as the “oh everyone has an anus” moment. We all know everyone has one and it doesn’t need to be dragged out in polite company.
I'm not sure if people work like that — many of us have, as far as I can tell for millennia and despite sometimes quite severe punishments for doing so, been massive gossips.
What you see will be custom tailored to what you believe, and your loyalty will be won. Do what the AI says and your life will be better. It already knows you better than you know yourself. Maybe you're one of those holdouts who put off a smartphone until life became untenable wihout it. Life will be even more untenable without your AI personal assistant/friend/broker/coach/therapist/teacher/girlfriend to navigate your life for you.
