From Pine View Farm

Grokking the Disinformation Superhighway 0

At the Psychology Today website, Richard Restak warns that, “(t)hanks to the technology of the Internet and AI, misinformation is vastly increasing.” He points out that, not only can AI distort the present, it can distort the past:

Nor is the difficulty in distinguishing the real from the fake limited to the present. AI can provide a phony version of the past by altering photos or introducing characters who never existed into a specific historical context. George Orwell presciently anticipated this in 1984, a Comrade Ogilvy “who had recently died in battle under heroic circumstances.” But although no such person as Comrade Ogilvy ever existed, “a few lines of print and a couple of faked photographs would soon bring him into existence.”

Read the whole thing and remind yourself that, even if you see it on a computer screen (perhaps especially if you see it on a computer screen from “social” media), it ain’t necessarily so.

Afterthought:

I wonder how long it will be before the Trump maladministration starts to deploy AI in our national par–oh, never mind.

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