I understand the term “fake news” as referring not to a particular story or a set of stories being untrue, but to the uncertain status of truth itself—the news about the fakeness.
This has been much talked about. The breakdown of the old media structures leads to a breakdown of the consensus reality. The search and social media algorithms create reality bubbles designed to keep their inhabitants online and engaged. This changing environment gives power to post-modern sensibilities and characters ranging from trans rights activists to Alex Jones to Pepe the Frog to Donald Trump.
But there’s a more concrete dimension to it, associated with the ever-increasing capabilities of neural networks working with imagery, sounds and language. Given enough data to train on, they’re starting to be really good at imitating a person’s voice and appearance, and lately they’ve been making advances in generating natural text: we’ve seen a news story written by an AI, a “philosopher AI” answering prompts, …
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