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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.
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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