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Comment by daxfohl | Hacker News Reader

I don't get the spike in drama though. "Don't believe everything you read on the internet" was a common sense maxim long before AI came around. What is so different now? If anything, it just amplifies the maxim, which is arguably a good thing.

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Before only "dumb" people gets fallen into the trap. Its like getting scammed by a Nigerian "prince" scam. Now its much harder to tell apart fake and real. Pictures and videos can be AI generated so potentially you could be sold on an event that didn't happen. Or you can be convinced a real event was fake. It would be much easier to assume all footage of 9/11 was AI generated and fake because its unfathomable to think 2 planes actually flew into those buildings.

Yeah that's basically what I was going to respond with. AI makes the cost of believable bullshit near 0 for the user.

IDK, put a TPM or something on cameras and media players display an "untrusted" watermark if the key doesn't match. Or something. I have a hard time believing we won't figure something out. But even if not: gullible people will be duped regardless, most people have some semblance of a BS detector they are able to fine tune based on the amount of BS in their environment, and the rest just believe what they want to believe irrespective of anything else. I don't think AI changes much of that calculus at all.

I'm a lot more concerned about the future disparity between its math capabilities and its common sense; that a GPT will quietly break RSA without any awareness of the implications, and some unwitting person will prompt "what would happen if all the world's money was deposited in my account simultaneously" and GPT decides that there's only one way to know for sure.

I think you are underestimating how this misinformation will get distributed. You may not fall for an obivous AI post on a spam account, but if you have a trusted news source or individuals you trust, they might end up using AI to help them research and write articles, or get their info from sources who did. Now you are twice or three times removed from the source of the information, and someone you trust is your source. It wasn't even nefarious, it's just how information moves, and AI is now a source for many people.

Maybe you are a hyper diligent fact checker, and the sole originator of carefully considered opinions. Almost no one else is, even the smart people. Political discourse over the past 5 years is proof enough, it is not difficult to influence smart people.

I'm not a diligent fact checker at all. I just think that disinformation is already all over the place, and essentially always has been, that I don't think AI will have as much effect here as much as people are saying. The gullible will continue to be gulled, the unconvinceable will continue to be set in their ways, the general population will recalibrate their BS meters to account, and life will go on as it always has. Including reporters continuing to say we've never been more divided than <insert date of report here>.

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