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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.
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 would be more than slightly different context. There is certainly context clues that make it probable the 12 year old wasn't trying to attack a 28 year old man for no reason. You would agree attacking an old man is different? from your story. I feel if the races were different so would be your response. But maybe I am wrong. Are you aware of what has been happening in the UK? Or do you think it is made up hysterics?
The UK is much nearer to my country than to yours, and the context is not the same. There's more immigration, or at least over a longer period, in Scotland but it's not as much as in England and the environment of underclass whites is enough that they were already stabbing and attacking each other before ever a brown guy showed up.
You tell me what this kid was protecting himself from: threat of rape by a Mongolian immigrant woman, or he went out tooled up to rob at age 14? Already with drug addiction and broken home behind him at that age? And had attempted to rob another woman and produced a knife before this?
This is not Rotherham Part Deux, and you don't understand the social cues and clues that are leading us over here to doubt what is going on. If I said "white trailer trash" it might make it clearer, but even then that's not an exact equivalent.
Is this just the British isles equivalent of ghetto blacks?
Not precisely, although there is some overlap with social conditions (long term generational unemployment, poverty, criminality, single motherhood, drugs, and so on). There's also the modern interventions in school and via social workers which teach the baby criminals that the best defence is attack, i.e. if witnessed committing crimes or hanging around in groups likely to be up to no good, immediately start yelling about racism/you're attacking me, help help/paedophile (as here, this is the newest angle of 'turn the accusation around') and the likes.
I don't know why the guy recorded those girls. Maybe he was a paedo brown creep who was creeping on innocent white Scottish girls. Maybe they had done or said something before this and he was recording in case things kicked off. but walking around with a knife and hatchet is not "I'm defending myself in case a brown rapist paedophile tries to get me". It may well be "I'm defending myself from the other violent white girls around here" or "I'm commencing my career of petty crime by getting ready with my mate to threaten and mug a passer-by" or even just "I'm acting tough and copying the older petty criminals and feral teenagers around here".
We haven't enough information as yet to know what exactly was going on, but there's plenty of reasons not to immediately assume the girls were innocent little blossoms just pre-emptively ensuring their virtue was safe by going around with knives.
I mean, yeah, I assume she’s trying to impress some teenage drug dealer because a hatchet and butcher knife is not a normal choice of self defense weapon- if this had been a folding knife, even an illegal one, it’d be different.
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