this post was submitted on 22 Mar 2024
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Stalin famously ordered people he had killed erased from photos.
Imagine what current and future autocratic regimes will be able to achieve when they want to rewrite their histories.
This checks out, here's an article about it: https://www.history.com/news/josef-stalin-great-purge-photo-retouching
So why are you downvoted? Maybe because your view is too optimistic? And the problem isn't only with autocratic regimes. But much more general.
How do we validate anything, when everything can be easily faked?
With AI video also getting increasingly impressive and believable, I worry that we will soon live in a world where you could have actual video evidence of a murder, and that evidence being dismissed or cast into doubt because of how easy, or supposedly how easy it would be to fake.
Better than having people get convicted based on fake evidence, though.
I think they are both equally scary. I'm imagining cases where photo and video evidence have played major roles in proving police abuses of power for example. We will certainly have an onslaught of people making faking evidence of all sorts of things to push a political narrative, but equally in any politicized narrative, any politically inconvenient photos or videos of real things that really happened might be swept under the rug as "someone probably just faked that for political gain." Sure you could have an investigation to look into the authenticity of the evidence, or look at other forensic evidence, but probably only if you can afford to have such an investigation done, or enough public attention gets drawn to it. I fear we are reaching a scary time where, in a sense, reality will be whatever people want it to be, and we will increasingly be unable to trust anything we see as real with absolute certainty. We have been headed down this road for a very long time, but this will just make it much worse