Fake news, fake photos, fake audio, fake videos… all very bad compared to our own real objective reports, real image perception, real conversation reconstruction, real memory of witnessed events, right?
Wrong. All fake. No one really know the whole thing, but science indicates that all stories are subjective, our eyes don’t capture 3D images, we guess and forget and great deal of what we hear, and impression of memories are live reconstructs that can be altered as the whim of your mood. Which, by its turn depends on your gut bacteria health.
I am not saying all the new fake is welcome, nor that all innate fake is bad. But when we get great articles such as We’re underestimating the mind-warping potential of fake video
By Brian Resnick @ Vox we must remember that what is at stake is the privileged status of faking reality. Old ways, such as education and culture are in. New such as fake video, is out.
My fear is that we skip the criticism. Can’t fake videos be used for education and culture? If so, should them? What about our innate bias? Let them reign free into our bonobos land, right? Afterall, few generations back did not use fake porn to breed batches of people we would call sexually repressed/depraved.
That being said, some excerpt of the definitely worth reading article:
“Seeing is believing. And because of this fact, we’re screwed.
Due to advances in artificial intelligence, it’s now possible to convincingly map anyone’s face onto the body of another person in a video. (…)
Combine fake audio with fake video and it’s not hard to imagine a future where forged videos are maddeningly hard to distinguish from the truth. Or a future where a fake video of a president incites a riot or fells the market. “We’re not so far from the collapse of reality,” as Franklin Foer recently summed up at the Atlantic.
But I fear it’s not just our present and future reality that could collapse; it’s also our past. (…)
Here’s what they know: The human mind is incredibly susceptible to forming false memories. And that tendency can be kicked into overdrive on the internet, where false ideas spread like viruses among like-minded people. (…)
Think about what this means. Doctored photos can change the way we remember history. And not just our memories for facts, but possibly even our recollections of what we saw with our own eyes.(…)
Why we form false memories, and how
Human memory does not function like a videotape or a digital recording. When we remember, we don’t wind back our minds to a moment in time and relive that exact moment.
Instead, memory is constructed.
This is a tricky thing to understand. When we call on a memory, we have to piece it back together from disparate pieces of information that exist in our minds. Some of what ends up in our recollection is the truth. But there’s a laziness to our recollections. In reconstructing our memories, our brains often grab the easiest bit of information to recall. And information that we’ve learned since the event will be added to fill in memory gaps.
Our memory is not like a videotape. A more helpful metaphor is that it’s like a video editor working on a millisecond deadline. In its mad rush, the editor splices in bits of truth with whatever filler is handy. And what’s handy is often our biases, or new information altogether.(…)
Familiarity is critical too. The more familiar we are with an idea, the more likely it is to get inserted into our memories as the truth. Studies find the more often a lie is repeated, the more likely it is to be misremembered. And we tend to forget the source of a piece of information, Frenda explains. After seeing a falsified story from a not-credible news outlet online, it’s possible to later “misremember that you actually saw it on CNN,” he says.
We can misremember whole events that never happened
False memories don’t just fudge the fine details. It’s also possible to falsely remember whole events.(…)
Let’s put this all together. False memories fester when they make sense to our political worldview, when it’s familiar and repeated ad nauseam, when we trust the source of the information, and when this information is corroborated, shared, and discussed by like-minded people.
Where else do all these things happen? Social media. Fake stories tend to move more quickly to people on these platforms than the truth, fueled by surprise and bias.
(…)
We do not yet know how to inoculate people against forming false memories. In fact, it doesn’t seem like any human is immune to forming them. ”