Eva Macie ~ A Creative Life

Shifting fact from fiction in today’s world of AI

Not long ago I read this article in my local newspaper, the Dunwoody Crier. The author’s name is Ray Appen and he is the Publisher Emeritus of the paper. He wrote:

My son Hans texted me a link.

So of course, I opened it because he never sends me something that is not interesting, new, or worthwhile.

I clicked on it, and it took me to an in-depth broadcast news show that was fascinating. Think a cross between “60 Minutes” and possibly a national news broadcast at 7 p.m. on NBC or CBS.

The show was anchored by an articulate, polished, attractive, very professional female journalist dressed in a dark blue suite who did a flawless job. She showed clips of events and seamlessly wove them into and out of her stories. There were live feeds. There were interviews with on-the-scene witnesses. She switched from story to story and never missed a beat.

She even cracked a few jokes and made a few sage observations.

The content was compelling. The execution was perfect. And, as I said, the anchor was a real pro.

The only problem with the show was that it was 100 percent AI-generated. The people on the show, the clips, the dialogue, the interviews, the on-the-scene events, the countryside, the city backgrounds, the witnesses, the cops – everything – not real. It was created by artificial intelligence software. The anchor was an avatar – an online constructed image. Think “animation” but refined to a degree that one cannot tell if the animation is an actual human being or only something that mimics one.

Without someone letting you in on the back story, there was absolutely no way – none – to have known that every word, every story, every video image was made up – fake, artificial – that it was all pretend and staged like a Broadway show or a Netflix docudrama.

And I guess I owe Kelly Ann Conway an apology; yes, there are alternative truths out there because, as Hans mentioned at the end of his text to me, “it’s here.”

That was a couple of days ago. I have stewed about what I saw. It bothered me. It didn’t actually surprise me, although it did. So, what keeps rolling through my tiny brain, is “what’s next? Where do we go from here?” That is, how are we going to deal successfully with this? Can we successfully deal with it?

It is hard to imagine that we will be able to digest this aspect of AI and how and why we will process information going forward. How will we know what is real and what is not – what is true and what is not – who we can trust and who (what) we cannot? How are we supposed to figure out what is geared to influence/manipulate us instead of objectively and factually inform us? And will we need to redefine what we consider the word “real” means.

And what will be the impact of this ambiguity to us as a society or as a country? We already saw the impact – the utter chaos caused by this information veracity deficit last election. Our election process was flooded – overwhelmed – by a tidal wave of false and misleading information originating in other countries and other governments, as well as from domestic political parties, individuals, and operatives via social media and other digital information conduits. Safe, fair and reliable elections are the foundation of our democracy – that and “rule of law.” How is that working for us today – tomorrow?

What are the answers? Are there answers? Obviously more regulation of the internet and the information it carries has to be part of the solution, but will the amount of regulation required to actually address the “problem” be so great that it destroys the positive contributions of the free flow of information on the net? That is, would the cure be worse than the illness? Probably.

Perhaps the most disturbing is even the very idea of the government increasing control of what we know – of what information we have access to – and of the means to transmit that information. Surely, today we are in the most consequential Pandora’s box in history.

Maybe we should ask ChatGPT what it thinks?