Is it the Battle of Verdun for the Media?
In 1916 the French fought the Germans around the town of Verdun. The battle took from February to December. There were perhaps a million casualties (reports are hard to verify from those days). The lines at the end of the battle were much the same as at the beginning.
I’ve been seeing extremely convincing AI video in the last few days. It was already pretty good, but is getting very lifelike. At least as lifelike as TikTok “influencers” ever are. One will be able to make one’s own virtual girl very soon. If you are on the cutting edge, you can do it already! I am told that there are AI OnlyFans models currently working and making money. It seems like an inflection point.
You can’t believe anything you see!
Let me repeat:
You can’t believe anything you see! At least, not anything you see on a screen.
Consider what this does to the media. In 1916 the machine gun met the trench and led to stalemate. The technologies were matched. You could spend lots of lives and gain nothing. In modern media, you can spend lots of money and saturate the market with your images and videos, but nobody will believe them. It’s like the trench and the machine gun. If all videos can be faked by anyone with a laptop, then no videos can be believed. No one sensible will ever believe anything that comes from the news.
The only thing you will be able to believe will be those things that you see with your own eyes or feel with your own fingers. The horizon of information will shrink, just as the horizon of battle shrank to the trench in 1916.
At least, until they get you to put a chip in your head. At that point, you won’t even be able believe your own eyes anymore.