I’m hearing all this hype about AI writing lies and have to admit being confused by it.
First of all, there’s the panic that it’s going to corrupt society with its fakery and lies. I don’t wish to sound rude, but have the people who panic heard of something called ‘advertising’, and what else is advertising but fakery and lies?
The hype ignores the fakery that already dominates discourse. The American Fox News is notorious for constantly lying: for example about elections, about murder. It’s their lies that earn them money by targetting the socially ill, by confirming their cognitive errors.
But they’re not unique. The UK’s Daily Mail is infamous for supporting similar far right ideology as Fox News, especially in the 1930s: How Britain’s Nazi–loving press baron made the case for Hitler. They continue to publish outright lies supporting the politics of bigotry.
It’s not just the extreme right that do this. One can hardly ignore the Soviet penchant for their own genocide, which they carefully symbolised by cutting disliked ex–comrades out of photos.
Don’t get me wrong, the black & white news industry isn’t black & white, the fact that the worst kinds of media liars support the politics of bigotry and mass murder doesn’t mean the media that supports other politics are clean. Genocide isn’t restricted to bigots on the extremes. No media is clean, it’s just that not all media support potential contemporary mass murderers as per the politics of Hitler or Stalin, mostly because politic beliefs such as live and let live don’t naturally commit genocide.
As I’ve already hinted, fakery, nonsense, and lies aren’t limited to the media. I can’t think of a company that doesn’t have marketing and sales, and the secondary purpose of those is to say whatever nonsense they think necessary to sell product. The thing that holds them back from outright lies is not honour, is not the principle of doing the right thing, but simply the knowledge that a conned customer is less likely to come back to buy something else. It’s difficult to find a commercial website that isn’t fronted by beautifully–presented lying airhead fluff, through which you have to battle to find any hint anywhere of something that might actually be information. This is hardly new.
The idea that AI will suddenly introduce mass fakery and lies to the world is starting to come across as stunningly naïve.
The bollox about AI spreading fake news everywhere completely ignores the detail that fake news is already being spread everywhere. It stinks, not so much of warning of something nasty coming, but as fear of competition, the fear of loss of control by the existing industry of lies. I am coming round to believe that AI represents, not the introduction of mass fakery and lies, but merely its potential democratisation.