When seeing ain't believing!

Here's some old rules for navigating our new world:

I’m old enough to remember the saying, “A picture is worth a thousand words.” But before too long, photo manipulation became so cheap and easy to do that people stopped saying such foolishness.

Much more recently, you would often get impatiently cut off when telling people about a thing that happened to you with a brusque, “Video or it didn’t happen!”

Well, you can say goodbye to that saying too. AI-generated video is here — and it’s really good. Check it out from this post on X.

And here’s another X thread with 10 more videos of people and happenings that… are not and did not.

If you click around on the X platform for a while you can easily find many more examples.

So, what does this mean? It means we are all going to have to get in the habit of keeping our epistemology squeaky clean and upping our levels of skepticism when being shown “proof” that some event actually happened here in the real world.

In a way this is good. We all lived through several years of “getting ruparred” where deceptively edited video clips were used to tell political lies. This is just more of that — but much more powerful and easy to do.

That’s fine. It’s an improvement if people don’t give so much credence to a photo or a video. These things are “maps” of reality, not reality itself — and maps can be altered — or inaccurate to start with. We’ve always known this back when our tech was less sophisticated.

Now we just have to “relearn” this old and essential truth. That’s all. No biggie.

But it will be an adjustment. Best to start making it now rather than later. Be more skeptical. Don’t believe any picture or video any more than you’d automatically believe some narrative you’re presented with.

Be more reserved. Hold back quick judgments. Seek confirmation — ideally, from multiple sources.

We’ll be okay. We just have to be more mindful. And actually, that’s always a good thing to be reminded of.

Naturally,

Adam