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Notes -
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 want to register my prediction that the story of this video is far, far more complicated than what is being presented by agitprop Twitter accounts. (A bold prediction, I know.)
Is there at least a decent possibility that this girl and her sister are helpless victims of harassment by scummy Pakistani men and neglect by a heartless police bureaucracy? Sure! But we have plenty of teenagers here in America who carry weapons to use on each other, or occasionally on bystanders from outside their social class.
I have personally been harassed and threatened by roving gangs of feral kids in this country, and in many cases they were certainly no older than this girl. Now, those kids were pretty much exclusively from demographics which many people here (myself included) instinctively sort into “outgroup”, and therefore right-wingers have no difficulty taking seriously accusations against them. Like the girl in the video, those teenagers, if and when confronted by adults, effortlessly shifted from brash aggression to the performance of fear and vulnerability. (“We’re just kids! Stay away from us, you weirdo!”) It is trivially easy to see through this tactic when imagining a gang of, say, black teenage carjackers.
What Americans in particular seem not to grasp about Britain is just how terribly dysfunctional its white underclass is. American right-wingers love to smirk knowingly about stories of the rampant “knife crime” in the U.K., safe in the assumption that this is overwhelmingly a non-white phenomenon. However, Scotland and the North of England have had an entirely native class of dissolute criminal youths for a very long time. Drug abuse and broken homes have gutted these communities long before brown immigrants started showing up in any significant numbers. Yes, the mass immigration is obviously bad; it has both compounded existing problems, and introduced a slew of new ones. But trying to sort this altercation into a clear tribalist frame — “I see a white British girl and a subcontinental man, so I know everything there is to know about who’s in the right” — is widely irresponsible given the total dearth of solid information.
What I see as the likely explanation here is that these two girls, possibly as part of a larger group, were acting disorderly and aggressive in this park. The man filming and another woman (apparently his sister) either confronted the girl, or were approached by her, and began filming. He did so because he believed that, if this escalated, he would be served by having video evidence of her wielding weapons. (That way if she tried to ditch them somewhere and deny having them, he’d have counter-evidence.)
These girls are likely from a very broken family environment and may well have suffered abuse in the past — either from brown immigrants, or from their own white family members, their gangster boyfriends, etc. — and their fear in that moment could be genuine. (As could their fear of being caught.) That doesn’t make this guy wrong for filming them or approaching them. If these girls are old enough to roam around unaccompanied, carrying bladed weapons, they are also old enough to be filmed. That can be true even if their reasons for carrying the weapons end up being totally innocent/justified! Multiple people involved in this altercation can all have legitimate motivations and be acting rationally according to their perceived interests.
If the agitprop narrative ends up being fully corroborated, I won’t find it especially surprising. Obviously there have been massive negative consequences resulting from mass immigration to the U.K., including rape gangs targeting precisely this sort of dissolute underclass girl. This city, Dundee, has a foreign-born population of 9%, including apparently roughly 4,000 Asian residents. It wouldn’t be surprising if some of those guys have been caught harassing/propositioning white girls! Still, at this time we lack anything remotely close to enough evidence to confidently assume that’s what happened here.
This isn't why right-wingers smirk at it. "Knife control" was the right-wing reductio ad absurdum of "gun control" until the UK came along and said "yes, I am the straw man you would imagine, I don't even recognize I am saying exactly what you predicted in exactly the way that proves you right."
All demographic groups (including whites, including Anglo-Saxon whites) have much lower homicide rates in England than they do in America, which is usually the point the gun control advocates were making, no?
Maybe intelligent, informed gun control advocates. But most of them are shrieking about school shootings and ‘we swear there’s no slippery slope’.
That being said, brandishing a hatchet would be a crime in the U.S. I can totally imagine a teenaged white girl being charged for brandishing a knife at a Hispanic man telling her to quiet down in public or whatever, but we haven’t had a rotherham scandal- Epstein was not an ethnic group and didn’t recruit his girls off the street. And we don’t actually know what started the confrontation.
Sure he was; the political football being played with him currently is partially about to what degree that should matter.
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Nice quote, did you steal it from the President?
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For those not in the know, the above two users have revealed themselves to be Tumblr users. By saying I recognize this, I am also revealing myself to have logged into Tumblr in the past year. I hope you all appreciate the sacrifice I made to explain the joke.
Thank you for your service. Of course, you still won't be spared in the purge of Tumblrites...
I understand - double agents often make the ultimate sacrifice.
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