There has been no bigger purveyor of disinformation these past several years than the federal government and its corporate media allies. As they exercise their raw power to push lies and discredit dissent, the truth can often be hard to find.
But with new and powerful artificial intelligence technology just beyond the horizon, the truth could soon become all but impossible to uncover.
The COVID years showed just how hard it is for honest actors to disseminate accurate information when the full weight of American institutional muscle comes down on them. Government agencies, social and traditional media, and nearly all of corporate America worked in lockstep to create the most powerful censorship regime in human history. They promoted the lies that masks worked, that school closures didn’t hurt kids and that mRNA vaccines stopped transmission, and many took them at their word, choosing not to believe their lying eyes.
But soon, powerful disinformation campaigns won’t even need to convince you to act on faith. They will be able to create visual proof of their own fake narratives. (RELATED: The Biden Admin Is Pursuing Total Domination Of Americans’ Digital Lives)
Axios sounded the alarm on Wednesday, but for all the wrong reasons. The outlet spoke to tech leaders to expose “what AI architects fear most,” which is that new technology will “make the easy — almost magical — creation of fake videos ubiquitous.” One “leading AI architect” told the outlet that even developers “no longer can distinguish fake from real” — something they “never thought would be possible so soon.” AI technology is now so advanced that it can do what was once purely the realm of science fiction.
Nearly every respondent (95%) in a new Axios-Generation Lab-Syracuse University AI Experts Survey describe AI’s audio and video deepfake capabilities as “advanced.”
🚨 “This is a really authoritative alarm here: ‘Hey, we have a deepfake problem.” https://t.co/XXXg8Txenq
— Axios (@axios) November 16, 2023
The technology will be available to the public as soon as “early 2024,” according to Axios. Some AI experts even suggest that by 2026, up to 90 percent of content on the internet could be “synthetically generated.” That figure could reach 99.9 percent by 2030.
It’s hard to see much of a silver lining here. Sure, our information economy will become a lot more efficient as the “tech industry rolls AI into every product used to create and edit media.” The mid-level managerial class will find themselves in solidarity with the working class they so despise once their fields suddenly become technological anachronisms. This development has the potential to create some seismic political realignments that favor national conservatism and strong restrictions on tech against an even smaller ruling elite that gets rich off the automation of the knowledge sector.
But mostly, it will be the bad actors who have the most to gain from weaponizing open-source AI technology.
For Axios, those “bad actors” are exactly who you’d expect: anyone who spreads “misinformation” online “[j]ust as the 2024 presidential race hits high gear.” One of the top concerns is that Vladimir Putin will use AI to “push for a 2024 win by Trump.” As progressives have made abundantly clear with their double standards, misinformation usually means anything that undermines their own authority.
Reid Hoffman — co-founder of LinkedIn, “peddler of disinformation” and progressive megadonor — hammered this point home. “Of course, it’s a worry,” Hoffman told Axios on the threat of AI, warning that a “negative outcome” was likely. But for Hoffman, a stalwart defender of AI, the solution is to develop only closed-source AIs. “[O]pen-source models (free for anyone to use) are the biggest threats,” he explained. (RELATED: Left-Wing Disinformation Peddler And Megadonor Reid Hoffman Reportedly Visited Jeffrey Epstein’s Creepy Sex Island)
Stanford Human-Centered AI Institute co-director @drfeifei tells @ryanaxios at Axios’ AI+ Summit in San Francisco why she told President Biden we should consider a “Moonshot mentality” for investment in AI: #AxiosEvents pic.twitter.com/n3eLZ70oER
— Axios (@axios) November 8, 2023
The White House predictably sides with Hoffman. As tech giant Mozzila points out in an open letter, open-source AI contributes to “transparency” and “accountability.” If you’re an administration campaigning for reelection, determined to stick to a wildly unpopular and radical agenda, then your only choice is to convince people that what you’re selling is actually popular and sane. Transparency and accountability are the absolute last things the Biden administration wants. Instead, AI seems destined to become one more tool to empower elites to control and shape reality.
The Biden administration’s push to regulate AI is an attempt to do just that. In a first ever executive order on AI, Biden issued the “most sweeping actions ever” to preempt further development outside the government’s watchful eye. The administration will now have a hand in setting “new standards” on everything from safety and security to development and rollout — with an emphasis on “advancing equity,” of course.
Such technology can do more than just impact an election. It can change the fundamental nature of our world. As we surrender our reality to machines, we lose touch with our natural instincts. The ability to distinguish between the fake and real begins to lose its evolutionary value as the machines make the assessment for us. The more AI shapes what we see, how we think and ultimately live, the less human we become.