Tag Archives: YouTube

Triangulating Toward the Truth

Models, Problem Practices, Rhetorical Mastery, , , , , , , , , ,

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It is not enough for a thinking adult to remain captive to the highly corrupted spaces of video fantasists.

With media such as YouTube, we have reached a point where the presumption going forward will have to be that the content is fake until it is verified.  More and more images and audio are A.I. fabrications.

Last week I was briefly taken in by the YouTube post, since taken down by the platform, that had columnist George Will describing a supposedly sudden transformation within the Republican Congressional caucus. He described their separation from President Trump, and even the possibility of using the 25th Amendment to remove the President from office. The video looked like Will and more or less duplicated his usually clipped cadences.

The first clue that all might not be what it seems was the source, which was not his newspaper, The Washington Post, but some sort of A.I. group called “Inside the Union.” A second was that the words put into Will’s mouth were not quite what he would use at this moment in time. Only a “synthetic content” flag visible for a short time in the corner of the video indicated that it is an A.I. fabrication.

My attention was initially heightened because I hoped the sudden report might be true. Alas, no one else at the AP, the New York Times, or The Wall Street Journal was reporting anything like this supposed GOP insurrection. Clearly Mr. Will had become an unwilling avatar for someone else’s political agenda.

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Tech leaders who present themselves as in the forefront of the race to the future haven’t even left the starting blocks in terms of controlling the veracity of their offerings.

As we know, A.I. technology is capable of more convincing fakes. It was only a matter of time until fake news would become ubiquitous across the political spectrum. As noted in an earlier post, we may be OK with images of a cat minding the fry grill at McDonalds. The joke is obvious. But we should be on guard when the likeness of a person with a curated reputation is hijacked in complete defiance of what they actually believe. Elon Musk’s Grok image generator has similarly been used repeatedly to create false and malicious images that can end up on other sites. And, obviously, X, YouTube and other platforms are not immune.  Tech leaders who like to present themselves as in the forefront in the race to the future haven’t even left the starting blocks when it comes to controlling the veracity of their offerings.

A person’s reputation for accuracy may be the most important character trait they have. Routine fakery should not be allowed to rob them of that. Whether we want to or not, all of us are going to have learn to do what journalists and prosecutors do to test the credibility of their sources.

Their method is sometimes called “triangulation,” where a given story is checked against other sources known for credible reporting. To be sure, this takes a little bit of time. As landmark movies about journalism remind us, investigative reporters usually need two or three sources to confirm that a narrative is accurate. Think of All the President’s Men (1976), Shattered Glass (2003) or Spotlight (2015). The related and honorable practice of fact-checking is also a tradition at major news outlets and legendary at The New Yorker. In addition, triangulation usually means getting out of the video media bubble and moving on to more reliable human and print sources. It is not enough for a thinking adult to remain in the highly corrupted spaces of video fantasists.

All of this is a reminder schools should be regularly teaching some version of a course in Evidence and sources in the middle and upper grades. Every citizen needs to know what high and low credibility looks like, as well as some of the basic rules of evidence, Navigating the swamps of digital media where anything can be faked is going to require cognitive screening skills that will have to become second nature.

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When ‘Tell Me’ Beats ‘Show Me’

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Internet giants seem to be racing to the bottom by turning their news sites into picture books with bright colors and sparse content.

Tech is turning out more drek. Why is almost every site trying to convert their news into clickbait pictures? We don’t need to see B-roll footage of the misery in Gaza for a story about what the next steps to secure peace might be. The real news lies in the thinking of figures in Gaza, the White House and Tel Aviv. We also need clear numbers rather than images to account for the ruinous health care costs facing many Americans.

For what it is worth, this insight came to me after a necessary upgrade to  Windows-11. After purchasing a new computer to be able to manage the decidedly underwhelming software, Microsoft thrust it’s MSM Webpage at me as an added bonus. It was enough to trigger my frustration.

Their page of ads and news “stories” caught my eye quite literally. The layout of the version I saw was a stash of videos dealing with everything from the weather to news about barely qualified people seeking White House jobs. The real meat of some of these stories could be more efficiently presented in straightforward reporting and more than 500 words of text.

One medium is never fully convertible into another medium.

We all love visual stories. But the hard truth is that a person’s world becomes highly circumscribed if their access to big and important ideas is hobbled with the need for interesting pictures. I noticed my frustration because my new computer came with glitches that needed to be fixed by adjustments to specific settings, none of which were well explained by a person on YouTube who assumed his job was to show me something. I was looking for lists and sequences, which had to be awkwardly communicated off camera by a tech who was trying to be helpful.

My mistake was turning to a visual medium. I finally got help from a print-oriented forum where the emphasis was on explanation and amplification, not interesting images.

As this site has noted before, many worthy ideas do not have an easy visual form. Policies, values, administrative decisions, directions on fixing a computer problem and similar kinds of topics need discursive amplification, not a talking head proceeding at the glacial pace of 200 words a minute.  Ditto for help in speeding up my slow computer. YouTube can be helpful in showing how to fix things; but not so much if there is a lot of telling to do as well. It has unfortunately become the default medium for explaining something, even when the explainer has no flair for visual communication. It is used because it is there.  If you find yourself frantically taking notes from a segment, you can understand the paradox of having to translate from a medium of images to a medium of ideas. As we know, at least intuitively, one medium is never fully convertible into another medium.

Recent news stories report another decline in the reading ability of the nation’s grade-schoolers occurring along with handwringing from professors at Harvard complaining that their students won’t read. If we wonder what the cost of turning our kids into smartphone addicts is, we may not need to look any further. The small screens of those phones and their equivalents are full of junk images and too little supporting text.

It does not have to be this way. A glance at The Week Junior, the popular weekly news magazine for kids, shows how non visual topics can be covered in effective ways. Even subjects like freedom of speech and the characteristics of good poetry can be explained in interesting and age-appropriate levels. The Week Junior is a model of how our children should spend more of their time.

Obviously, visual clickbait functions as a hook to pull a consumer in. But I worry that we are aiming at the low. Young “readers” may need primary colors and cartoon images at the gateway of literacy. But older readers should be self-starters. If we allow the acquisition of knowledge and new information to proceed at the pace of a poky PowerPoint show, we can only admire our predecessors who understood that advanced insights require the incisive comprehension of a master reader.