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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 wouldn't be surprised if they were two chav-adjacent girls doing chav-adjacent things in the park with their friends, and an innocent immigrant found himself caught up in the mix. I also wouldn't be surprised if they were indeed two Scottish girls innocently defending themselves against a molesty migrant with a knife and hatchet, in which case they can call me in a few years to fix them, but they don't need fixing. Yes, yes, I know, how brave of me to fence sit.
The online right becomes two-soyjaks-pointing when there's a potential young female heroine to simp for in pwning the libs, even if the vibe/behavior/lifestyle of said potential heroine would, ex-ante, be nominally contrary to the modal views of the online right. Funnily enough, in the AI-generated of her in Scottish garb and Celtic war paint that's making the rounds, she's still emblazoned with the Nike swoosh, which the online right would normally denounce as the ultimate symbol of globohomo. Free advertising for Nike.
Recently there was Sydney Sweeney, who somehow became a darling of the online right while being famous for getting naked and simulating sex on screen. There was Taylor Swift before her, who has a music video promoting a fictional half-black love-child, and who's about 2/3-3/4 of the way to being able to fill out an 11 v 11 football game with a list of just her known paramours (the side with the NFL tight-end would presumably be the massive betting favorite). There's somehow like an entire ecosystem of rightoid e-girl influencers—who surprise surprise, basically just thot around like any other e-girl behind the scenes.
They're not mutually exclusive options, either. Chavvy white underclass girls doing chavvy things in a park, molesty migrant approaches them because they're chavvy and he's molesty, and he bites off more than he can chew.
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Nitpick, but north of the border, the preferred term is ned, not chav.
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If this were the case, why is he following them around and filming? He’s walking toward them, and they’re backing away, not the other way around. Certainly I can believe that the two girls are not, themselves, “innocent” exactly. But it is very weird to follow two teenage girls around the park with a camera.
Although it is very strange that the released video is from the man’s perspective, which is a point in favor of his innocence. Has anyone seen an explanation for this? Did he post it himself? Has he accused them of stealing from him, or anything like that?
Seems almost identical to the video of the minnesota girl saying nigger. We don't see the initial brandishing of the 'weapon' in either case, but presumably right after that, the guy pulls out his phone and tries to bait it out again to share on the internet, even if he has to pursue her a bit. And in both cases, the guy filming suspects he'll be more sympathetic.
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Okay, I got my conspiracy theory.
This was all pre-planned by one of those creepy NGOs to be a Central Park Karen situation kicking off Boat Migrant Lives Matters, except it backfired by being YesChadded into orbit.
Did this…happen? I vaguely remember some Central Park nonsense. I don’t remember it being a psyop.
Depends what you mean by "happen", as I was half-joking. There was a guy recording himself following some woman around the park. I think her dog was somewhere where they weren't allowed, and the guy was complaining about that. She wanted to be left alone, but after being ignored for too long, he pulled out some dog treats out of his pocket, and tried to get the dog to come to him. She freaked out, and started screaming that if he doesn't stop, she'll call the cops and tell th a creepy black man is stalking her. This during BLM times was seen as an implied death threat. She promptly became the face of racism, I thinkbshe lost her job, and for a while even her dog.
I don't think any NGO was involved, that part was the joke, but honestly at this point nothing would surprise me.
I don't think an NGO was involved, but the media kerfluffle appeared to be an attempt to kick off the racial reckoning (that didn't fully work; they got the formula right with Floyd).
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There's Central Park Dog Karen (really, two of them; it was a case of dueling Karens) and Central Park Bike Karen (which involved no Karens, as it turns out). As far as I know neither was a setup by a creepy NGO.
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I don't understand why anyone records themselves committing crimes and then uploads them to the internet with some sob story about how they are actually the victim. And yet it just keeps happening. And there are always people willing to take their side, which I suppose shouldn't shock me anymore, but it still does.
I was watching some old Gad Saad interview maybe 10 years ago, and he was talking about the pathos of the 3rd world regarding honor and truth. Which basically amounts to, commit fully to the lie, and never stop doubling down and escalating, no matter how obvious the lie is. His example involved an uncle he was having a debate with over some fact, and who was right about this particular fact. The next day he mentioned to his uncle that he looked it up, and had in fact been correct, and his uncle just calmly claimed that the sides of the debate had actually be reversed. Broke Gad's mind for a minute. He had spend the afternoon arguing for *A when his uncle was vehemently claiming Not A, and then suddenly the next day his uncle is claiming it had been the opposite in the cold light of fact? All to maintain some facade of having been correct?
But that's just how some people work. Just tell a brazen impossible to believe lie, and there exist some subset of people who will throw out everything they know about how the world works (if they knew anything at all) and just default to "Well, it's one person's word against another, I just don't know"
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IMHO these speaks to the innumeracy and propaganda of the age. It's like when people were polled about how many black men were being shot by the cops, and they thought it was thousands, nay, tens of thousands, when it was in fact dozens.
And this is triply so when it comes to mountain of evidence that the grooming gangs, and the failures of the state that are on a scale that beggars belief. It's almost the inverse of the BLM disconnect from reality, where you might assume dozens of girls have been raped by Muslim Immigrants, when in fact it's tens of thousands. Nay, hundreds of thousands!
That you are pulling some sort of "equally believable" fallacy here is a mockery of reason. I mean sure, all things are possible. But gun to my head, 10-1 some groomer was trying to pick the 12 and 13 year old girls up.
Scottish cities have long had a bad reputation for a reason. If a girl is going around with a knife in a Scottish city, she’s probably not someone you want to meet.
2-1 I’ll give you.
If you saw that video, and thought "Ah yes, this 13 year old girl holding a knife and hatchet wrong is clearly a hardened criminal who is harassing an innocent adult male who is following her for purely altruistic reasons, like returning a wallet she dropped", then I can't help you. Even being true that this Scottish city has a reputation for lower class whites being involved in violent crime, that it would factor into your thinking at all with respect to a 13 year old girl speaks more to your own prejudice (either against whites or for browns) than it does to the reality on the ground.
And I mean, like I said, maybe I'll end up with egg on my face. Maybe we won't find out the guy following her and filming has a history of being known to the police and was caught and released on a laundry list of sex and violent crimes of various severity. Maybe we won't go on to discover that the poor 12 and 13 year old girls hadn't already been sexually assaulted, or grew up watching their friends and family get sexually assaulted by Muslim rape gangs.
This actually reminds me of that minor thing where a gang of black teenagers was trying to steal an e-bike from a pregnant nurse. In a town where it's a well known "victimless crime" for black teens to snatch e-bikes from the people who rented them and ride off. And people tried to take some "well it's her word versus his" position when it was patently obvious the black teens were lying as their story involved this pregnant woman forcibly removing them from the bike and then getting on it to leave before the camera began rolling. Which would require an ignorance of physiology and gender differences that might be par for the course for "rationalist".
Literally nobody is claiming this.
Somebody is claiming this.
That’s not remotely the same as your straw-man claim.
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