Every Day Is April Fool’s Day Now

With half a moment&#x27;s reflection you&#x27;ll realize that photos and video having been showing untrue things since the beginning (before anyone alive was born, in fact) and people have somehow been coping.<p>In fact, people have always been able to lie, deceive, trick, hide, bullshit, distract and beguile though all of human existence. The technology hasn&#x27;t changing anything. (Vice seems like the source of the dumbest stuff that gets on to the front page HN.)

I have a much shorter and optimistic version, which is that these models break a theory of mind that underpins a lot of bad stuff.<p>Basic idea is, since we have shown that we can simulate all consistent artifacts of language in an LLM, it&#x27;s a proof that language can and (therefore does) exist on a substrate. That substrate for us is the real, and what kids who encounter AI now will understand intuitively is that the artifacts of language and the real are necessarily separate things. It&#x27;s the end of subjectivity and everything stacked on top of it, thank literal God. I think people can be forgiven for having been decieved by some clever linguistic hacks that unmoored them from reality, and now we can look at the uncanny artifacts of the logic of ideas over language using sound models for what they are.<p>Welcome to the desert of the real!

The internet had its Eternal September. Now we&#x27;ve entered Eternal April.

A glimpse of what&#x27;s to come... <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;apple-ai.vercel.app" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;apple-ai.vercel.app</a>

Suddenly, the iconoclasm of the 8th-century Byzantines doesn&#x27;t seem so far-fetched after all...

The accelerationist in me wonders if this is a positive development in the medium term. If everyone&#x27;s convinced that the entire internet is sketchy, then much like state-controlled media in a dictatorship, or tabloids, no one will actually believe it.<p>The scale and sophistication of disinformation is getting to the point where actual verification will be extremely difficult or down to personal connections&#x2F;experience, outside of direct statements. Maybe the casual majority who&#x27;s favorite show is NCIS will just throw up their hands and start living more locally&#x2F;draw from verified sources when they do go on the internet. One can hope, but in the meantime we&#x27;re in for some chaos.<p>There will also be plenty who can&#x27;t&#x2F;won&#x27;t adapt, and stay stuck in various internet fever dreams for the rest of their lives as they desperately seek that next dopamine hit, and various AI algorithms tailor what they see to keep them hooked.

Images and videos are going to need to be signed in order to prove their provenance.

Potential upside: People might develop critical thinking skills and state-level disinformation campaigns may be drowned out by kids making fakes for the lulz.

Before, only people with resources and skills could afford to create fake content. Now everybody can. How is this not an advancement, taking into account you can&#x27;t take away the ability to create fakes from people with resources?