Money will have to be wasted on unnecessary flights to see stuff or meet people in-person instead of video, and the availability of actual information will become more and more limited as the sea of online information gets polluted with crap. It may never be possible to calculate the full extent of the damage in monetary value.
For me the solution is in signed e-mails and signed documents. If the person invites me to a online meeting with a signed e-mail, I trust that person that it's really them.
Same for footage of wars, etc. The journalist taking it basically signs the videos and verifies it's authenticity. It is AI generated, then we would loose trust in that person and wouldn't use their material anymore.
Ultimately ID requires either a government ID service, a third party corporate ID service, or some kind of open hybrid - which doesn't exist.
All of those have their issues.
Or the opposite, where people attempt to get out of trouble by calling real evidence into question by calling it “AI”
identity serivce is not useful because that person might be a real person but they might just be a pipe to ai like we see on linkedin.
More in-person stuff feels like a win to me (and I say this as someone who probably counts as introverted).
Not being able to trust any online interactions anymore? Seems like a new height in what was already a negative.
There is a thing about many people. I don't remember the phenomenon's name, if it has one, but it goes like this:
Given enough time to reconsider options, people will be endlessly flip-flopping between them grabbing onto various features over and over in a loop.
People will default to believing something is AI if there's no downside to that opinion. It's a defence mechanism. It stops them being 'caught out' or tricked into believing something that's not true.
As soon as there's a potential loss (e.g. missing out on getting rich, not helping a loved one) people will switch off that cynical critical thinking and just fall for AI-driven scams.
This is the downside of being a human being.
A summary, courtesy of chess dot com:
> The name of this "syndrome" comes from GM Alexander Kotov, author of the classic chess book Think Like a Grandmaster. In the book, Kotov described an incorrect yet very common calculation process that often leads players to select a suboptimal or bad move.
> According to Kotov, in positions where the lines are complex and there are numerous candidate moves and variations to calculate, it's easy to make a hasty move. A player in that situation might spend too much time going over two moves and all of their ramifications without finding a favorable ending position. In that process, the player is likely to go back and forth between the two different lines, always coming to the same unsatisfying conclusion—this wastes precious mental energy and time.
> After spending too much time evaluating the first two options, the player gives up the calculation due to time pressure or fatigue and plays a third move without calculating it. According to the author, that sort of move can cause tremendous blunders and cost the game.
Easy to replicate by asking someone something obvious, like the weather, and when they reply ask “are you sure?” - they won’t be so sure any more (believing it’s a trick question)
If I ask my mother if I’m real, she’ll have a pause because she has never had to entertain such a question, or the possibility her son over the phone is an impostor. Good way to push someone towards paranoia and psychosis.
Interestingly, these are both phenomena where we start to _lose_ the ability to question our thoughts or introspect. These are phenomena of self-confidence rather than of self-doubt.
I have personally intervened in one of those when I heard someone reading off a 6 digit number.
So at each stage in the loop they are always super convinced of the position.
Actions might include some continuous checks in them, like the famous plan, do, check, act.
Solipsism already tell us that anything beyond current present self experience, existence of anything is uncertain. So, almost everything one have to take for granted to make anything outside metaphysic argument require an act of faith.
How was this solved, actually? More training data, or was there more to it?
Imagine your crying grandson who caused a traffic accident in Mexico and the police planted drugs in his car and now he needs money to pay them off. He is in pain and probably has a concussion (explanation why he can't remember what you are asking), the police is hassling him to get off the phone (time pressure, explanation why the quality of the call is terrible). Will you get hung up on some code word he asked you to memorise years ago and you can't even know where it is anymore? And if you bring it up he just starts crying and tells you that you are his last chance to turn his life around. And you remember when he was a wee little kid and he fell and scraped his knee and you comforted him. Just the thought of pressing him on the code makes you feel like a terrible person. Or not. And then the scammer just finds someone more gullible. Theirs is a number game after all.
> The solution the world's leading experts have landed on is one your grandparents could have come up with: codewords. You, your family, business partners and anyone else you communicate with about important subjects need to come up with a secret phrase that no-one else knows you can use in an emergency to verify each other's identities. Think of it like a convoluted form of the multi-factor authentication we all use to login online.
> "My wife and I have a codeword that we use if we ever get an unusual call," Farid says. "We haven't needed to use it yet, but sometimes I ask just to test her to make sure we don't forget it."
So it's all context clues really - i.e. if the video tracking shot is sort of within the constraints of the models, plays to obvious agendas etc. then I might tweak to go looking for artifacts...but in the propaganda game? That's already game over. And we're all vulnerable to the ground shifting beneath us - i.e. how much power would there be if you had a model which could just slightly exceed those "well known" limitations?
IMO the failure to implement strong distributed cryptography much earlier in the digital age is going to punish us hard for this - i.e. we haven't built a societal convention of verifying and authenticating digital communications amongst each other, and technology has finally caught up that it can fool our wetware now. It was needed well before this - e.g. the rise of the telephone scam and VOIP should've been when we figured out how to make sure people were in the habit of comprehending digital signatures and authentication. It isn't though, and now something much more dangerous is out there.
Perhaps we need tamper proof authenticated cameras in all major cities worldwide that publish a livestream 24/7 and you can then stand in front of them to prove your human existance...
This could be something that notaries around the world could offer as a service.
The options I have seen so far were a) using our digital IDs, which is very handy or b) having a bank verify my identity in person with my ID, which is also pretty good.