Asklemmy

In reality genAI isn't all that novel when it comes to disinformation. People have been tricked into believing stuff for centuries with far less convincing tech. Editing and framing have been useful for manipulating viewers for as long as the medium has existed.

Step back a bit from the title question, and when you see a video, ask yourself "to what degree should I treat this as useful information?"

Being real or AI-gen is part of the critical examination, but just because something isn't generated doesn't mean it's a good representation of reality. Say, for example, you scroll across a video of an ethnic minority being belligerent on the subway. If it's AI, you know it's not real. But even if it's definitely real, what does it mean to you?

Well, it means that for 30 seconds at some undefined point in time, at some undisclosed location, some anonymous person with supposedly notable physical or linguistic or whatever characteristics appeared to have been belligerent. If you're a scientist trying to define reality, this is a statistically-nonexistent sample. If you're the average Twitter user, though, it threatens to plug into a mental network of symbols and signifiers that approximate reality. And this is a problem whether the video is real or staged or edited or generated: it functionally isn't real-- isn't a useful representation of reality-- so the degree to which it's internalized is a problem.

What about denigrating politicians? Again, I think genAI may slightly flavor this problem, but isn't an operative variable. Sometimes evidence of corruption is enough to take down a politician, sometimes evidence of outright crimes against children and humanity won't do it. Sometimes obvious lies or manipulations are enough to take one down. Sometimes a CIA-produced sex-tape with an actor lookalike just makes people think you're cool instead of making them turn on you.