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AI Propaganda, Deepfakes, and the Law of Undignified Failure
A few days ago, a video appeard on Twitter of two white Scottish girls, 12 and 14, yelling, "DON'T TOUCH US," at an unseen cameraman and weilding a knife and a hatchet. Allegedly (though not shown) the cameraman was a migrant or other ethinc foreigner, was trying some form of assault or harassment, and the girls were trying to defend themselves.
The video is real. The event, insofar as it was depicted in the video, is real. Scottish police really did charge a 14 year old girl with brandishing a bladed weapon.
What is not real is this AI-generated image of a young girl emblazened with Scottish garb and Celtic war paint defending her home and honor with sabre and battleaxe. The image does not even purport to be real. No one could possibly believe that this is a real image. And yet, this fake image (and the countless others in the replies below) elicits much stronger emotions and sympathy from me than the real video. I know that the AI image is not real, it is operating on me at a cognitive level below logical propositions concerning real entities and events. One might say that the AI image represents certain ideals and concepts in a more-or-less true way (a sort of "truthiness" if you will), but the image itself is not evidence of anything.
Unless you are brand new to internet political discussion boards (in which case, welcome aboard) you have heard the concerns that AI-generated images and video will usher in a brave new post-truth world in which you can no longer trust the evidence of your own eyes and ears. Concerns typically center around some sort of incindiary event which is in reality totally fake, but which is indistinguishable from reality due to the photorealism of the AI media generation (so-called "deepfakes"). More sophisticated commentators point out that even just the threat of such "deepfakes" renders all multimedia depictions of events questionable, since it would no longer be possible to use the media artifact itself to determine the underlying truth or falsity of the events it depicts.
The sad truth is that none of that shit matters, because reality itself hardly matters. The law of undignified failure states that, "when plans and people fail, they do so in a less dignified way than you imagined." Perhaps you imagined that the forces of goodness would fight valiantly against the forces of epistemic darkness, only being finally overwhelmed by an exploitable quirk in the degeneracy of the vectors that make up abstract image space. In undignified reality, we get done in by anime girls waving flags.
You might object, "yes, but the rape of white British girls really is that big of a deal! We need propaganda to get across how bad the problem is." Maybe! but I hope you can see that this is not exactly an asymetric weapon as far as truth is concerned. I do think that AI-generated propaganda helps the right more than the left in the current environment, if only because conservatives live in more of an inherently audio-visual culture compared to liberals.
I don't have much to say about this, even though little girls and bladed weapons form a major part of my life. It's cute, I guess. The incident in the video I mean. As far as propaganda goes, we've seen so much that this is just background noise. And as for the AI image...okay? Doesn't really do much for me. I found the real video more interesting, though neither is worth much. Even the real one could be staged or manipulated. And even if real, what did we see? A girl screaming at the camera and briefly pulling out two things that might have been weapons (in someone elses hands). Girls do dumb shit all the time. Maybe this one wasn't dumb but actually heroic. But we don't know. How the hell would we be able to tell?
We live in an epistemic desert, where all information is mirages.
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the object level issue is too muddy to comment on until more information surfaces. Perhaps the teenager had sympathetic reasons for brandishing knives, perhaps she did not.
However, the general point in this case feels like a nothingburger. I don't think AI images are doing anything new. Before the advent of mass photography and telex, all pictures in newspapers, magazines and other contexts were illustrations, designed to evoke emotions yet supposed to illustrate real life events. Even with photography, many news photos have been intentionally staged to be evocative. During the past decade, meme texts, pictures and shopped photos have been cheaply available from 4chan. Only difference is that quality of freely available illustrations have been slightly upgraded, but it can be assumed the audience is soon desensitized.
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Friend, if crappy bog-standard AI beige cartoons that are blinkin' well everywhere elicit strong reactions of sympathy from you, congratulations, you are Pavlov's dog.
Which probably is the entire problem in a nutshell, now I come to think of it.
Does anyone else hate that cartoony style because of over-exposure to it, even for 'serious' discussions of topics? I was about ready to throw a glass at the screen when Freddie deBoer used the crappy cartoony bastardised-Ghibli chibi of Joe Rogan, for pete's sake!
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I'm sorry to be so blunt, but what the fuck are you talking about? It isn't even a good AI-generated image. You were hyping it up and I was wondering if when I clicked on your link I was going to see some kind of incredible cognitohazardous superstimulus version of the real incident (which I had already stumbled upon, found evocative in a vacuum, and now find even more evocative given the context). But what you've actually given me is like a low-rent obviously-AI-generated Ben Garrison knockoff. Get a grip, man.
Autism runs rampant on the Motte, and remember that anime is often preferred to 3D reality because it is easier to parse and safer to consume.
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It seems funny to me that the idea of Believing Women (w.r.t. them actually being harassed when the women react as though they were) is widely mocked on the right internet... unless the accused are migrant and especially unless the accuser is below the age of majority.
The media landscape I've been brought up on suggests to me that a certain demographic of women learn/are taught to scream rape to ward off any sort of attention, warranted or not, from very young age.
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So, I don't agree here and I'm curious as to which of our perspectives is the more common one.
Please answer the poll on which of the options elicits stronger emotions:
https://strawpoll.com/NoZrzw9oBZ3
Then there is the question of which of the two garners more engagement and there I don't really think it's a question of which is more engaging but rather which is easier to consume while still being reasonably engaging. An image is much easier to consume than a video and it fits much better in a text feed than a video does. You can glance at an image and then scroll right by, while a video breaks your engagement flow with the feed.
Since you don't give this option, I'll have to record "neither" as my answer here. The anime image is stupid annoying, the video is "why are these brats running around with knives and hatchets in public? they need discipline, have they no parents rearing them?" In a slightly different context, this would be "little thugs attack ordinary person going about their business in broad daylight".
It sounds like you had a stronger emotional reaction to the video than to the AI-generated image.
They both annoyed me, I think the anime even more because it's so horrible and is desecrating what remains of the corpse of public art. The video is "lower class criminals-in-training behave like such in public" which, unhappily, is too common to evoke more than "for feck's sake, where are the parents?"
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Well there's also the fact that the left has huge budgets to propagate their ideas, they don't need AI. They can pay 50, 100 people to make propaganda for a single show. They have entire broadcasting companies all around the world. They already have endless NGOs and cadres and academics pushing out meaningless words, they don't need to automate it. Automating it might even hurt them in absolute terms rather than just relative terms, rendering their patrons unemployed.
See my post here: https://www.themotte.org/post/2254/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/348142?context=8#context
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Here are a few riffs on the video that have crossed my feed (all should be viewable without logging in): https://pbs.twimg.com/media/GzUEppFW0AA_Ucc?format=png&name=900x900 https://pbs.twimg.com/media/GzSGAjkakAAp7VP?format=jpg&name=4096x4096 https://x.com/bitcloud/status/1960179071511585038/photo/1 https://x.com/RealDixonUranus/status/1960232042341244985/photo/1
I do think these new capabilities benefit the right more than the left in the current environment. You correctly point out that these are asymmetric weapons, but that needs to be interpreted in the context of an information "battlefield" that is heavily tilted against the right. There are comparatively very few right-wing institutions that staff full-time paid journalists, political cartoonists, and commentators to pump out high production value propaganda in response to the news cycle. Technology that allows anons on Twitter to turn their idea into reality with a few prompts and a bit of tweaking in photoshop is a democratizing force that helps level the playing field. Twitter is an incredible incubator for these ideas and messages as well, now that they have dialed back the censorship. The most effective messages rise to the top, while the low-effort slop (mostly) languishes at the bottom of the replies section.
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I hate to tell you, but this is not a new phenomenon.
I think we can go back even more.
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What do you think of when I show you this image?
If you were paying attention to The News at the time, then you'd recognize this image captures important social commentary. It was disseminated by our very best, professional national media outlets. Attached to it was a story about a MAGA chud laughing in the face of a noble and indigenous savage. The media manufactured and corralled the narrative in less than a day. Full blast an hour or so before I knew the entire encounter available for viewing on Youtube. This was not much slower than the Twitter story of the mysteriously well armed (for Britain) chav(?) teen that is alleged to be warding off
PakistaniAsian advances. Alternatively, a teenager making poor decisions.I don't think the AI connection is very relevant here. You can argue the image generation enhances the meme, but I don't think it is central. The video is enough. To take off it requires a common understanding and a major demand. There's a lot of demand on Yookay Twitter. I judge that the demand can be largely laid at the feet of British institutions and culture which are paying a cost for past transgressions. You may judge differently. This does not absolve propaganda for feel mads or Twitter bucks.
My brain short circuits a little seeing a girl dual-wielding hatchet knife in public. That is not a situation that organically transpires. About the closest thing I can map it to is various criminal situations in lower-class environments filmed for entertainment.
I look forward to more information than five sentences in the Daily Record. Why do you lot need so many tabloids and why do they need to be daily? The Weekly World News is a world class tabloid.
This is a Scottish newspaper, so it's local rather than national, unlike The Sun or The Daily Mirror (and you get regional versions of those, e.g. The Irish Sun). A lot of the daily papers got hoovered up by the Murdoch behemoth and brought downmarket as tabloids to become profitable. Your question is a bit like asking "Why do you need the Minnesota Star-Tribune, isn't USA Today enough?"
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I honestly don't know what you're objecting to here, if you're objecting to anything. A part of me wants to go on a Fruck-eque diatrabe, but his point seems so obvious that I feel like I must be missing something about yours.
Please confirm that you believe that this meme, which you yourself admit does not even pretend to be real, represents some novel danger to the truth, which we haven't faced already on a much larger scale.
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No, the way I would object would be to remember the last ten years of mainstream media and laugh at your concerns about propaganda until I hyperventilated.
You are right, it is an asymmetric weapon. And the establishment want to keep it that way. So it doesn't matter that explicitly government backed propaganda was used to protect migrants who raped little British girls, or to cover up said rape of little British girls, or to protect the people who covered up the rape of little British girls. It doesn't matter that slightly less explicitly government backed propaganda has been used in the decade since to paint the 'migrants' as scared women and children fleeing tyranny and to defame and punish anyone who doesn't like them. It doesn't matter that government propaganda hid nigh constant protests in France for years, or was used to defame a presidential candidate, to censor social media, to protect corrupt and incompetent politicians, to launder public support for useless and pointless wars, to hide the intel agency to big tech pipeline, to convince everyone to fear their neighbours and cripple childhood development and wear a stupid fucking mask/not wear a stupid fucking mask and give up their bodily autonomy in the name of self righteousness. What matters is that Tommy fucking Robinson can whip up a meme in ten seconds. That's when propaganda is dangerous.
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I think it does demonstrate that people are starved for a heroic/mythic figure to rally around or organize under and to inspire them to collective action towards some (ideally) righteous goal.
We're really short on such people these days. No politicians really live up to their own hype. Trump's reality warping field is strong enough that people DO find him inspiring. But he is simply not a 'leader of men' in the sense that one can't imagine him at the front of a cavalry charge on a battlefield or marching into a conquered city to personally accept terms of surrender.
Unlike, say, George Washington or Ulysses S. Grant.
Made all the worse in the U.K. which has a literal king who has a literal sword and in theory has the ability to deploy the military inside and outside the kingdom.
But, and maybe some British Citizen can clarify, its also impossible to imagine the British military rallying under the king's declaration to purge the isles of the invading hordes or what-have-you. Just, wouldn't happen under the current structure of things and social expectations.
And so, the right is really groping around for ANY figure that could possibly rouse their tribe to war and actually hold the coalition together long enough to rout the hated enemy. And they grasp upon a 13-14 year old girl with behavioral issues as their long-awaited queen.
And hey, the U.S. does it too. Rittenhouse, Daniel Penny, Shiloh Hendrix... just 'normal' people who happened to pull off a 'win' in a very specific place and time, and weather the onslaught of publicity and scrutiny, and did something that lefties really didn't like.
They get elevated to the status of 'heroes' but man, they pretty much fade out once it is clear they don't have the chops for maintaining the spotlight, much less being the core of a movement. And who does? Who can you actually imagine being dynamic enough to challenge existing power structures, stable enough to not fall to personal scandal, and somehow also strategic enough to win meaningful, repeated victories when it counts.
AI is good for creating imagery from that slightly-more-idealized world you wish you lived in. I do it pretty often, to create a vision of the future that I find appealing and would like to live in/escape to. But I try not to very directly make alternate versions of the present, especially one that supposes people or individual persons are different than who they really are.
That is, I don't want my actual perception and memory of reality to be supplanted by a version that I prefer but that simply isn't correlated with the truth. Believing the true things even when you'd prefer the true things be something else means NOT believing the false things even when they are exactly what you would prefer be true.
No. A 14 year old girl is not going to rally a nation to war, no Trump is NOT a divine instrument of retributive justice who also has six pack abs and a ten inch penis (he does alright, regardless, mind), no Zelenskyy is not some genius defensive strategist who can beat back Russian invasion via sheer grit and guile (and billions of dollars of aid and western weapons), no Luigi Mangione is NOT an avenging Saint, so on and so forth.
But people do, really really do, want that idealized version to be real and true, which is probably why they're ready to accept the digital fictions so readily. Which spells very, very bad things for our shared epistemic environment.
The last British King to rally the troops against his domestic political opponents was also called Charles, and ended his reign noticeably shorter than he began it. I don't think Charles III is going to be following his example.
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This little girl has absolutely had it with the rapacious diversification. That she has had to arm herself to protect her sister is a kind of condemnation on UK society we can't even come close to making ourselves.
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wait, explain Shiloh Hendrix to me?
https://www.postbulletin.com/news/local/crowdfunding-campaign-for-alleged-woman-involved-in-viral-tiktok-garners-over-100k
For context, this happened right after Karmelo Anthony, a black teenager, stabbed a white high-school student to death at a track meet and raised hundreds of thousands of dollars via fundraising sites. Hendrix also started a fundraiser to cover relocation expenses, and it went viral in the aftermath of the Anthony incident. From the sentiment I saw on social media, it seemed like mostly spite donations and people supporting her refusal to cave to the cancellation mob. There was a concerted effort to get her fundraiser above the Karmelo Anthony total, and it ended up raising something like $800k.
And just as it seemed like her 15 minutes of fame were up, she was just charged with three counts of disorderly conduct, apparently for simply using the n-word.
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Technically she was around 16 years old…
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Which just invites the question of why the left isnt using the same weapon against the right. Make its own cartoon memes of how bad things really are for the poor migrants and refugees and oppressed BIPOC.
Why, it may just be that the language wielding elite prefer to wage war on their turf where they can use vague words to shape perceptions using the moral weight of such words asymetrically. Refugee, child migrant, trans children, urban youth, journalist, UN worker. All these terms elicit a mental approximate closer to the stock image photo of what a sympathetic portrayal for such looks like, usually a prepubescent child eyes full of wonder or a do gooder westerner in squalid conditions with a heart full of hope and a belly full of vigor.
Maybe the push from leftist media to scrub images and videos of what happens on the ground is entirely because the definitional warfare breaks under reality and repeated evidence of "17 year old" of certain demographics being statistically overrepresented starts making Noticing more common. Worse if the left tries to pretend something is the inverse, like when Rittenhouse was portrayed as killing Blacks to supercharge the narrative of white nationalism running unchecked.
The Left can't use the low hanging fruit of visual art to its cause, a fruit plucked only by Ben Garrison or Stonetoss in the past but now accessible to every angry person with an internet connection. The meta is shifting, and its not in the favour of the left.
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The video is real , but what was the sequence of events that led to her brandishing those weapons .It's not like people carry axes when they go walking. were they just on the ground lying there or something.
The police haven't outlined any of the circumstances around the video such as was the foreigner harassing the girls. The will likely keep details to a minimum using the excuse of privacy for the minor.
Without clarifying that the girl was casually carrying the weapons before having met the foreigner, the situation is going to be memed into 'Scottish Boudica defends herself against the foreigner; where are the men?' I know this because this is currently being talked about on /pol/
Edit: There is also a shitshow of a thread on the scotland subreddit where you can expect usual reddit takes.
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That image is strictly within the capabilities of any decent artist, and it has that hideous brown tint that every chatgpt imahe has these days.
Sure political cartooning has become more democratized slightly, but very rarely will this shitty slop rise to the top over real artists.
yes it has that shitty Ghibbi style or whatever it is called with the obvious sepia background. it's not even good animation
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Sorry to break it to you, but uh, yeah it does.
https://x.com/JudiciaryGOP/status/1833154509222129884?lang=en
https://x.com/WhiteHouse/status/1905332049021415862?lang=en
Turns out demand was elastic. The ability to respond to the current thing in minutes with trivial input costs changes the game. Memes were a big part of Trump's 2016 win, but this is the next level.
but Ghibli is a dead giveaway . The concern over fakes is that they are subtly indistinguishable from a real-life event or the original image (e.g. slightly slurring someone's speech to convey inebriation) . Those examples you give are obvious fakes. Those fakes go viral for the novelty factor, not because people are confused or are mislead. Also, those are based off of photos, so there is no artist.
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