AI is Driving Us Back To the 1700s

AI is driving us back to the 1700s. What do I mean?

In the 1700s, the newspapers that existed had hand-drawn images when they had imagery. There was no photography or video, and so a person living multiple states away could go their entire life without ever seeing the actual face of someone like Benjamin Franklin or George Washington. If someone wanted to make something up out of whole cloth and sell it as news, it would be easy to do.

For a brief period in human history, we had photographs and video. They were originally difficult to modify. Then tools like Photoshop and video editing tools became prevalent and now we have AI. As of this writing, we usually can still pick out an AI-generated video but they’re getting better and better. This is all part of the popular discussion, but we don’t seem to be truly considering the implications.

Someone I once knew had a saying: I believe nothing I hear and only half of what I see. We badly need to reconsider the value of digital media as truth verification. We’re going to have to stop thinking of the news as news—authoritative, trustworthy, above reproach. There are incentives to lie, or at least, bend the truth. The more sensational the story, the more clicks and ad revenue it generates.

We all know this on some level, and there’s a risk of descending into nihilism if you take this idea too far. I don’t advocate for us to give up on ever finding out the truth. What we absolutely must do is stop outsourcing our critical thinking. Should anything we see online be enough to ruin someone’s reputation? Should a mere video be enough to start a riot? Our standards of proof as a society need to improve. As individuals, we can do much by questioning everything we hear from the internet, refusing to repeat or share most of it, and being gracious to opinions other than our own.