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Comment by m1el | Hacker News Reader

I am not scared for AI overflowing the news sites with bullshit. We already have a fire hydrant worth of bullshit content produced for consumption. Lies and fakes have coexisted with humans forever. People did rumours, then we had books, press, radio, television, and now the Internet. "But it's easier to produce lies/deepfakes today" -- true. However, the absolute cost of producing a lie per consumer already was negligible, and now it's even smaller. People will recalibrate their level of trust in technology and move on.

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The cost of producing a lie was not changing very fast, but the cost of pushing it out to lots of people has already plummeted.

And now with LLMs even the cost of producing lies has plummeted, too.

No matter how bad you think the past was, this problem just got worse.

The "*fakes" are those what really scary. Usually day by day, normal population won't interact much farther than miles / kilometers from their work / home / travel path, the rest of info we got from digital media. Now that if we cannot trust the digital media, our ability to gather information for making decision will get worse.

Let's say that nowadays I know that US has gun/ mass shooting problem from the digital news. But how when someday the media reporting that multiple countries, such as some EU countries and Canada also have mass shooting due to the change of gun laws, sooner or later we'll won't know the truth anymore.

This is very dangerous because it can be used to manipulate people to accept what's bad as normal, and can argue then provide proof that's generated by AI.

Hopefully we won't need to experience that issue.

You don't think that everyone having to "recalibrate their level of trust" in something as pervasive and fundamental to modern society as "technology" is impactful? Even just photos, videos, audio recordings, and phone calls becoming utterly untrustworthy would be pretty significant. The cost of a widely disseminated fake being low per recipient is altogether different from the cost to produce a fake specifically targeted for a single use approaching zero.

You can see this with information sources in our lifetime. Cable news networks and infotainment channels like the Discovery/History Channel turned to garbage so people stopped trusting them. The same will happen to the internet / social media sites.

I really think we are already there. Just look at how media is divided and how other side is treated by the other...

And then some fraction of middle hate it all...

Sure, but scale was limited. Comparing post-LLM production of rumours, fake news, and propaganda with previous methods is like comparing pre-industrial hand manufacturing with modern mass production.

You can now turn electricity directly into propaganda furthering your cause, which is unprecedented.

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