Post-truth society is near

There is absolutely no chance whatsoever that robots that are so real they are indistinguishable from people will come about in our lifetimes. The amount of breathless speculation since OpenAI released a kind-of-decent text completion program is so far beyond ridiculous at this point.

So we&#x27;re living in a &quot;truth&quot; society now or in the near past? How silly. For most of human history people believed things to be true based on the words of soemone they trust (clergy, teacher, village chief,etc..). People are just doing that using the internet now.<p>There was a brief few decades where TV and radio changed society so that everyone thought what&#x27;s on TV was what everyone else outside their circle believed, this media centric truth seeking is what is going away.<p>A lot of people have crazy beliefs these days because the politicization of institutions that used to be far less polarized historically. This i ncludes academia,religion and the press. If someone lives, believes and acts in total contradiction of how you live, believe and act then the only way to accept their claims of fact is to be an expert in that field just as qualified as them and find out for yourself but most people can&#x27;t do that so they turn to someone closer to their world views and life styles.<p>This isn&#x27;t post-truth but the decentralization and segregation of trust at all aspects of society, because people are tribal and targeted ads make a lot of money.

Uh... Post-truth has been here awhile. They’ve had the capacity to fake&#x2F;alter live events for decades now.

There is so much baseless hysteria about this subject.<p>If society actually cared about this issue (spoiler, it doesn&#x27;t), we already have all the required cryptographic tools (PKI, trusted timestamping, remote attestation) to create&#x2F;record verifiably sourced content.<p>Nobody really cares though. But people sure do like to whine about it.

Post-truth society has already arrived in the mid-2010&#x27;s. Making fake content was never expensive or difficult to produce to begin with. Misinformation is already expensive to tackle and in many cases nearly undetectable without invasive data collection. Generative AI doesn&#x27;t change the equation and was never a requirement to successfully manipulate public opinon. Hell, most of these problems with misinformation are probably as old as the emergence of sedentary human societies.<p>Also, what&#x27;s up with throwing some random unsourced statement about robotics&#x2F;replicants in the middle of an article?

This essay equates &quot;human-generated&quot; with &quot;truth.&quot; That doesn&#x27;t match to my current experience online; more than half of what humans generate is already false.<p>What if it ultimately doesn&#x27;t matter if the source is human or machine-generated?

&gt; <i>We are never going to know what is real anymore.</i><p>Yeah, except for all those <i>aliens</i> who actually go outside and see for themselves, or ask people who have been there. You know, like most of humanity would do. :D<p>I get the article&#x27;s premise but it sounds like a non-issue midterm. A lot of people go through increased financial hardship currently, and their interest in news is waning so the whole thing kind of balances itself out: more manipulated online material, less engagement from people. I&#x27;d think the latter factor will prevail because the manipulated material is put online to achieve a goal (usually a financial one) and if that goal is not achieved then the manipulators will start losing interest -- eventually.<p>Though I am really curious to see how will the whole thing unfold in reality. Obviously I am not claiming I can predict the future.

&gt; Cylons&#x2F;Replicants are going to likely become real within our lifetime.<p>Great! So if me and some of my friends can afford to buy a few replicants together, we can agree offline on some gestures we will make using our replicants ahead of time and then we can witness important events with our replicants, and we will discretely gesture during the events. This will then allow us to determine if the feeds we are seeing from the eyes of our replicants are being fiddled with significantly.

I think the complete opposite is true. We are moving, for the first time ever, toward truth.<p>We never had truth in our society and suddenly with social media, people are forced into reading the truth and it makes them homicidal.<p>Worse yet, this truth has broken the world. No longer are the USA going to be the world police with a goal of stability. They are now at least incentivized to create instability.

&quot;Simulation and Simulacra&quot; was an instruction manual to some people.

Wow thank you “mind prison” for this revelatory call to action. We should indeed all “share with others” when it comes to this blog

97% of us always believe what we&#x27;re told by the authorities of the hour. Moving in conformity with the hive like a pebble embedded in a glacier. Evidence, recorded or otherwise, makes no difference.

That&#x27;s not what post-truth means. Post-truth would mean something like &quot;the world after the realization of the lack of coherence of the concept of truth&quot;.

Post truth society is already here. Disinformation has been on the rise the past couple of decades, and the results are clearly visible: conspiracy theories, election misinformation, and divisive politics where people&#x27;s worldviews vary across their perception of reality.<p>Photoshopping and lying your way to a narrative is now the norm in the age of social media.<p>No doubt that AI will accelerate this, but to act like AI is the beginning is just evidence that you aren&#x27;t paying attention.

cultural hegemony but with AI

Eh, what?<p>Anti-vaxxers believing there&#x27;s microchips in vaccines, 9&#x2F;11 truthers, flat earthers, NFT peddlers, gamestop investors, moon landing deniers, qanon, believers in a shadowy cabal running the USA because there&#x27;s an illuminati-looking eye on the 1 dollar bill...<p>These did pretty well without GPT4 and SD.<p>People need education, critical reading skills, reasoning skills. And they need at least the lower 2-3 rungs on Maslow&#x27;s pyramid satisfied. That protects against misinformation, not controlling or detecting where content originates.<p>Memes <i>will</i> spread if the conditions are right, no matter how much tech or legislation you throw at society.

I don&#x27;t understand the fear—we have always lived in a society where truth exists in terms of degrees of certainty, and virtually any statement about the world can only be true with less than perfect certainty. Vagueness and ambiguity, floating signifiers, and the difficult-to-articulate impact of connotation ensure that we live in a state of constant <i>un</i>certainty.<p>And, of course, there are always self-motivated incentives to directly mislead people about the world. If we really want to <i>minimize</i> the uncertainty that comes with relaying statements about the world around us to each other, we need to minimize the personal gain that can come from obscuring reality from each other. As I see it, this is inherently at-odds with the inherently narcissistic nature of market economics—there&#x27;s nothing inherently special about that but being the primary mechanism of power in this world.