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Comment by api | Hacker News Reader

People will have to learn that nothing can be believed no matter the medium unless there is a verifiable chain of custody to the information.

This is the way it always was back when our primary means of communication was verbal and hand written. Everyone knew anyone could lie. We then had this bizarre period of time when you had certain types of media, especially photographs and video, that were extremely hard to fake convincingly. That period is now over and we have returned to the norm: you can't believe it unless the provenance of the information is known and the chain of custody is trustworthy.

This needs to be drilled into people starting in elementary school.

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> This is the way it always was back when our primary means of communication was verbal and hand written. Everyone knew anyone could lie. We then had this bizarre period of time when you had certain types of media, especially photographs and video, that were extremely hard to fake convincingly. That period is now over and we have returned to the norm: you can't believe it unless the provenance of the information is known and the chain of custody is trustworthy.

Which will result in different groups of people living in different realities - if what evidence you accept comes down to whom you trust as reliable, different societies (or sections thereof) will choose to trust different people

Which in itself is maybe a return to the historical norm - the truth of Catholicism was obvious to all in 12th century Rome, while the truth of Islam was equally obvious in 12th century Mecca

> Which will result in different groups of people living in different realities

People have always been living in different realities, since there have always been people who believe false statements, and people who doubt true statements.

True, but I think we are talking about the degree of that issue.

A big enough difference in degree, the same issue starts to look like a different one.

Back in that era (and continuing today) rumours were routinely believed and significant harm was done via rumour.

Convincing people that photos and video are as believable as a rumour is not as helpful as it should be.

Convincing people that photos and video are as believable as a rumour is not as helpful as it should be.

It is very helpful to some people, namely those parties who flourish among the ignorant and poorly-educated. Remember that the real goal of disinformation isn't to make you believe false things; it's to make you believe nothing.

> People will have to learn that nothing can be believed no matter the medium unless there is a verifiable chain of custody to the information.

How are "people" actually supposed to know there's "a verifiable chain of custody to the information"?

I think this case is instructive to the workability of that idea: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killian_documents_controversy. A major news organization was fooled by a forged document that was later identified as such by amateurs. How is any organization supposed to have "a verifiable chain of custody to the information" for leaked information? That's the avenue for a lot of important information, and without it you'll just have a lot more reporting on press releases.

Something something block chain something something AI something something tokens?

> the chain of custody is trustworthy

This seems like the hard part. How do I know that anything anyone is sharing is trustworthy? It's not like I'm going to trust any news org, government, non-profit, corporation, anonymous individual, etc.

And the other side of this coin now is that people can do truly horrific things that can dismissed as created by AI.

How do we verify/trust chain of custody of, idunno, "Mark Zuckerberg calling for the killing of all lefthanded people"?

What I think will happen is that it'll be like what we have now but worse: some podcaster will make an offhanded remark about Mark Zuckerberg "saying some horrible stuff about lefthanded people" causing frantic TikToks about that it means killing lefthanded people, all based on a supposed "secretly recorded video" that no one can validate due to all of the noise.

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