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Culture War Roundup for the week of July 29, 2024

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A bit of a tempest in a teapot, leading to a tangent:

A manipulated video shared by Musk mimics Harris' voice, raising concerns about AI in politics

A manipulated video that mimics the voice of U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris saying things she did not say is raising concerns about the power of artificial intelligence to mislead with Election Day about three months away.

The video gained attention after tech billionaire Elon Musk shared it on his social media platform X(opens in a new tab) on Friday evening without explicitly noting it was originally released as parody.

(emphasis added)

I remembered seeing it in this format, with the disclaimer intact, so I thought it was a classic "don't trust your lying eyes" situation (not helped by the refusal of every site except CTV and Business Insider to actually link to the tweet). But...

Link and screenshot to the tweet in question, and link and screenshot to the post he was retweeting.

X changed its layout recently, and the text of the original post wasn't carried forward in the retweet. Their claim is accurate.


I'm guessing that there was a slow rollout of the new layout, so some people saw it in the old format and some in the new.

I would like for primary research to build common ground off of a shared foundation of facts, but that can't happen if the results are different based on the person looking. You can (presumably?) see it with the website's layout. It happened with personalized Google recommendations here last week.

I'd count when I almost missed half the context in a post last week (not helped by bitrot in the top level post), and noticing all of the intact teleprompters (so Trump's ear wasn't hit by glass in the assassination attempt) as marginal successes in primary research, but who's to say that the next issue won't be "personalized" so I can't actually see what other people are talking about?

Eh, I'd say tempest in a teapot is right. The Argentina Election last year was sort of a capability-demonstration of what AI-powered campaign support can do, and there's really nothing you can do to stop AI-propaganda given both the decentralized and also international dynamics to it. But that's not even new in and of itself- social media influence efforts are far more ubiquitous than most people realize, and so while in terms of volume greater AI role is increasing volume, that doesn't correspond to an effectiveness increase due to how people largely disassociate from high-volume propaganda they don't already gel with.