Tag Archives: A.I.

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Seeing Is . . . Well, Just Seeing

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Lately, I have seen too many cats smoking cigars and dogs playing poker.

Pardon me for saying the obvious. But it is no longer possible to trust photos we routinely see on many internet platforms. Perhaps I am the last to notice, but a combination of photo-shopping and animation has begun to make it a challenge to tell the difference between the real and the fake. Lately, I have seen too many cats smoking cigars, dogs playing poker, and a preschooler performing Shostakovich. A.I.-produced photos and videos have gotten that good. A few days ago I saw an image of the President playing golf, but looking mighty wide from the back. The photo suggested that seat belt extenders would definitely be a required item on Air Force One. That picture was probably photoshopped, much like what his own team does when he shows up in a meme that would be an eight-year-old’s idea of an action figure.

Fast Food Worker From the Feline Community
byu/ZashManson inaivideo

As in the above example, some images are too cute. But it must be getting harder for photo editors in various news organizations to verify less playful images that come their way. That’s one advantage to keep photojournalists on staff. By contrast, social media represents the equivalent of the wild west. Too many people are willing to ignore the courtesy of sincere veracity that would have been honored even a generation ago.

If we already live in a world where fantasies are mistaken as fact, what are we to do with the age-old axiom that “seeing is believing?” We all recognize the obvious giveaways in classic animation and set-ups like the above example of a feline fast food worker. It is quite another thing to conceal artificial creations about subjects that matter in photorealistic material. Apparently, our non-literate President has already been deceived by “news” videos of indeterminate origin passed on by others; Trump gorges on his preferred medium of images.

There are folks on YouTube who have tried to show how a fake can be recognized. I appreciate their efforts. But short of seeing a third arm on a person, I often miss the ostensible giveaway in a fabricated piece. And there appears to be no uniform or emerging norms for labeling a counterfeit picture or a video.

Of course the larger context here is that hand-wringing over hybrid kinds of media is not new. Critics and theorists have debated for some years about the authenticity of all sorts of arts that are easily reproduced. A classic is Walter Benjamin’s 1935 essay, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. And there is the conductor and composer John Phillip Sousa, who claimed that the “canned music” of a recording debased the real thing. Add in the complexity that an estimated half of all social media content now is created by various forms of A.I. and we have a problem.

Many who have made a systematic study of the internet generally note that there has been a steady decline in authentic human-generated content. Again, this applies most directly to platforms like X, Facebook, and the like. A more recent transformation is video, where producers can add facsimiles of live action in convincing photographic detail.

Film and video have always been used to spin out fantasies that speak to our fears and desires. But it is a newer twist to mask the fake in reproductions that are plausibly real. Will newer generations have the skills to detect plausible but fanaticized reproductions? Can a culture function when source authenticity is always in doubt? More than ever need the solid anchor of conversing with people in real time and space.

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What “News” has Become

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                                  New York Times

We seem to be bleeding out the positive energy that was sometimes the national style. 

For many Americans this can seem like a season of despair. the constant din of alarming news on various platforms is wearing us out. Our politics now is fraught with controversy over the undoing of years of progress. Normal routes of trade and international cooperation have been undermined.  And, as ever, gun violence continues at about 47,000 deaths a year: much higher than most other peer nations. All of this has been made worse by a president who has mostly abandoned the usual roll of ‘binding up the nation’s wounds’ with appeals to transcendent values. Instead, his ersatz rhetoric of hate punishes individuals and institutions unaccustomed to having to defend their usually laudable objectives. Add in the fact that that legacy television news is folding under the crush of MAGA and FCC threats. ABC, CBS and NBC have yielded enough to have imprints of the President’s shoelaces on their foreheads.  How can a person escape this doom loop?

Most communities are safe, but the assurance of it is gone.  No wonder people are looking to A.I. for prepackaged nostalgia for times that weren’t necessarily better, but seemed more civil.

Researchers like Harvard’s Stephen Pinker note that a look at a lot of hard data reveals our world is now safer and less violent than in previous years (The Better Angels of Our Nature, 2010). The difference is the expansion of the personal boundaries of the known made possible by news sites and social media that have penetrated and been absorbed by the culture. Clearly, Americans think they are less secure. Their perceptions of violence and disruption penetrate our mediated spaces: from school shootings to the collapse of the social or physical infrastructures of whole communities.

Through all of this it is worth remembering what “news” has become. It is now a 24/7 preoccupation for many of us. And we shift seamlessly from video news, social media, and various online sites devoted to updates and opinion. There is a transformation of attention to reporting from a one-shot glance at a newspaper or evening newscast into incessant doom scrolling throughout the day. All-news channels like CNN mostly attract an older audience and continuous viewership. This has been confirmed by research that includes the corollary that these viewers feel less safe even in their own communities.

What exacerbates the problem is the decline in the kinds of activities that generally made people feel better about themselves and others, such as attending live events, attending church services, or participating in clubs and service organizations.

If we remember that traditional news has usually included the worst things that happened on a given day, the pool of available encounters within a population of nearly 400 million is always substantial. Hence, we get Robert Putnam’s representative image of a person bowling alone to feed our sense of personal isolation. Our discomfort is also fed by the steady drone of crime as entertainment, such as the elaborately produced and popular Netflix documentaries about lethal family members.

Solutions

So if news is now ubiquitous and a heavy tax on the soul, what are the solutions? How do we become less sour and more productively engaged? Of course, expressing opposition to the authoritarian impulses of this administration is a must. But it may also make sense to follow neuroscientist and musician Daniel Levitin’s advice to seek the restorative power of music. Among other things, music can reinstate our faith in the ability of different people to come together in support of one single vision. The parts of any composition are complementary rather than competitive. It is also gateway to those parts of the brain that tap into positive feelings rather than harsher binaries of languages that ask us to pick sides. One can chose any musical form open to the non-discursive world of moods and feelings that are usually resolved in harmonic resolution. As  Nietzsche noted, “Life without music would be a mistake.”

Baroque music usually lifts my spirit. It always reminds me what smart people working together can achieve. The lucky souls who have the talent to effectively enable this inventive world could be playing Bach. But they could also choose a modern classic like that selected by the Danish Girls Choir.

Some people find respite in putting digital media aside in favor of hiking, fishing, reading, or a simple game of cribbage. Modern media observers note that A.I. images of nostalgic scenes from the 90s or earlier on Instagram can do the trick. But anyone temped to find redemption through a richer experience of life can do better than find it on a cramped three-by-five device. Our politicians may be failing us. But there are still so many around us or nearby who are still on their game. Why commit to mediated experience through the filter of someone else’s political or ideological agenda?