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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.
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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