Comment by smt88 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by smt88 | Hacker News Reader

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> We are already approaching a point in time of unverifiable reality and truth

This is also what terrifies me. You'll never be able to trust any digital medium again.

- a chat with your uncle could've been convincingly trained using his hacked emails

- someone calling you on the phone with a familiar voice could be using AI voice imitation

- any photo or video could be deepfaked, leading to the possibility of everyone's most hated political figure (on both sides) being 100% guilty of ____ (whatever their opponent wants)

LinkedIn is already teeming with convincing AI-generated faces that would defy facial recognition because they're novel. The only way I can tell they're fake is that the backgrounds are blurry and the CV doesn't make sense (for example, going to community college in Colorado and then working for Goldman Sachs).

Dating apps aren't too bad because the scammers use recognizable patterns, but they could easily get worse.

This technology will kill all digital information exchange.

> This technology will kill all digital information exchange.

....actually, you know what? I think that might be the best possible case scenario for humanity as a whole.

Breaking news, ChatGPT sends humanity back to the stone age. News broken by the town crier. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Town_crier

So you don't want to be able to call your relatives with certainty? You don't want to read what's going on that isn't right in front of your face?

Even local news would become unreliable.

What makes you so sure it is reliable now? Or in the past for that matter? The same dynamics of trust existed before as exist now, it's just that we have a lot more sources than we used to.

> What makes you so sure it is reliable now?

The technology to fake it isn't in widespread use.

> Or in the past for that matter?

The technology to fake it didn't exist.

> The same dynamics of trust existed before as exist now

No they didn't.

There's a reason the words "post-truth era" have been thrown around a lot in the past decade or so you know.

It isn't like we suddenly developed the ability to lie, have blind spots, biases, and inhabit echo chambers, we only developed the technology that made it obvious that we were doing that all the time. News in the past wasn't actually more trustworthy, it just felt that way because we had far fewer sources of it.

All that changes with AI here is volume.

It is exceedingly disturbing. I have no answers. The potential solutions will probably be even more disturbing. I can imagine there will be proposals for everyone having some cryptographic ID to use the internet so all data creation can be tracked to an individual. The end of privacy and freedom.

In my country you already need it if you want to use government services or banking online.

Technology seems to exist on a bell curve in regards to freedom. Much of technology progression has been helpful in making individuals more free for a period of time. I feel that now as we go forward that it is increasingly being used for our control.

> cryptographic ID

Verifiable digital IDs can only confirm that you're the holder of a key. The best case scenario is that it proves you are the same person as before, but there's no way to prove that you are who you say you are.

Yes, not saying it is a real solution. Just that solutions will be proposed that will only be mostly onerous.

> This technology will kill all digital information exchange.

This is a bit hyperbolic. We have strong encryption like PGP for media like email (although I suppose getting people to use it is the issue), and there will be plenty of incentive to develop other tech to counter the problems you mentioned.

PGP tells you you're talking to an entity which could set up PGP, it doesn't help you determine if the account ben_w is merely one of many government sock puppet accounts trying to push a specific meme into the minds of the general population.

Knowing who to trust… was already hard-to-impossible with just normal social media; cheap LLMs will definitely make this harder, as more groups will be able to afford what was once limited to government budgets.

I was referring to PGP as a solution for being potentially MITM’d by an AI when trying to communicate with an entity you already trust.

So we need to go back to talking to people irl. And basically assume that anything you read online is not written by real people unless proven otherwise.

> So we need to go back to talking to people irl

This is a fundamental breakdown of society. It is literally societal collapse. It's not going to happen. We'd give up the telephone and even the telegraph.

> assume that anything you read online is not written by real people unless proven otherwise

You can't prove otherwise. It's literally impossible without watching a human write it and publish it, and even then you'd have to compare it to what you saw them type.

The web of trust that was intended to be built by PGP is what would solve the "are you a real person" problem. We're connected to everyone else on earth by 3 or 4 degrees; it's unlikely that every path along that graph to another human is going to be adversarial such that a non-human can get added to the web of trust.

PGP's web of trust never worked because it was always too small to cover enough humans and take advantage of the low degree of overall connectivity.

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