Without Marx Or Jesus

One day the people who pay the bills at these legacy news organizations will realize there’s been a relentless, coordinated character assassination campaign on their reporters who covered misdeeds of Silicon Valley billionaires for years and they did basically nothing to stop it.

— Ben Collins (@oneunderscore__) May 18, 2023

Or AI or Photoshop.

As much as we worry about AI being used for deep fakes in this election, it will be indispensable for an onslaught of truly moronic memes. https://t.co/gWXsQeHiWA

— Schooley (@Rschooley) May 19, 2023

I was listening to the teacher in Florida who was suspended for showing a Disney film with gay characters. She professed ignorance about the new Florida laws at the time of the “offense.” (She also said she’d quit a week before because of the politics, not of Florida, but of the school.) She was keeping up with her students and educating them; but she was not keeping up with the news. This is not unusual. And it’s highly unlikely “deep fakes” would have any effect on her.

It may be just as unlikely she votes. Which is also not unusual.

I just think “deep fakes” are going to have to get a lot better to be apocalyptically dangerous.  Using it for truly moronic means (how far down the rabbit hole do you have to be to get this one? Who does it move who isn’t already inside the bubble? If I hadn’t just seen a picture of the person at the center of this controversy, I wouldn’t have known who was on that can , or why.) is not exactly the weapon of mass destruction it’s supposed to be.

My daughter tells me Photoshop can be devastating on an individual level, but it’s akin to the problem of celebrity and impossible standards of perfection (which were being produced with an airbrush when I was a kid). Things we, unfortunately, learn to cope with; or that we’ve been doing without modern technology already. Yes, AI is more widely accessible than airbrush photography, but the fundamentals don’t change with the technology. And the fact is, the political ads everyone talks about (such as the famous LBJ “Daisy” ad) are commonly not seen by many. Bush’s “Willie Horton” ad was shown more in news stories than it ever was otherwise.

So the novelty of AI political ads may get some attention at first, but the world isn’t going to change for the much worse than it already is.