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Culture War Roundup for the week of May 19, 2025

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Do we know how good it is at building coherent multi-scene videos? Can I have the same two people in the same room, from a different angle? Ideally in a long continuous shot, but even after a cutover would be amazing. Otherwise, this is pretty limited in utility for entertainment media - maybe commercials.

But either way, it's enough to be a problem for trusting video. It's like the world envisioned in The Truth Machine, in which everyone tells the truth. Everyone becomes highly trusting, and life is good. Only with AI video-gen, it's inverted: everything could be lies, so no one believes anything, so life is terrible. Fun.

If my (extremely amateur) experiences with images is any guide, then it’s extremely bad at permanecense (google tells me this is not a word but I feel like it is).

maybe "continuity" is the word you're looking for?

everything could be lies, so no one believes anything, so life is terrible. Fun.

For most of human history, you didn't believe something unless you saw it yourself or someone you trusted told you about it. Photo and video evidence wasn't a thing. If we lose it, it would be a shame, but I don't think it would make life terrible.

There are ways to mitigate this of course, multiple independent sources. A problem is if you have a large group of people with institutional/cultural power willing to act semi-organically to further lies.

I haven't heard anything one way or the other in terms of building coherent multi-scene videos. This, from my experience, means that it's probably pretty terrible at doing this. If it wasn't, people would be aggressively showing it off.