Fake Protest Videos Are the Latest AI Slop to Go Viral in MAGA World
https://gizmodo.com/fake-protest-videos-are-the-latest-ai-slop-to-go-viral-in-maga-world-2000669656Open linkView original on lemmy.world845
Comments173https://gizmodo.com/fake-protest-videos-are-the-latest-ai-slop-to-go-viral-in-maga-world-2000669656Open linkView original on lemmy.world
This is not slop, this is political
misinformationdisinformation. Call it what it is.Slop is annoying, but it's just AI generated spam. This is much more purposeful and insidious. The tools you used to make it are irrelevant.
Disinformation. Misinformation is when it's unintentional.
Right, that's more accurate.
As much as I hate to use this term because of the most prominent person associated with it:
This literally is an infowar, this is an actual psyop.
Targetted and fairly convincing mis and disinformation deployed at exactly the moment it would generate the most chaos and distrust in your own ability to evaluate reality?
Yeah. Yeah.
Thats a psyop, that is what an actual psyop is.
If they can take something like "woke" and use it to mean something bad, we can take infowars and use it for something good (and correct/accurate). Make that usage of the word the default when people hear it, not the other thing.
Misinformation is too nice of a word.
hence disinformation, which intentional form of misinformation designed to manipulate the views of the viewers/ or in other situations to give false info to illicit a certain response. misinformation is just ignorant false info being presented with no malice. alot of news media confuse between the 2, when in fact it almost always disinformation.
Yup. Seems quite ragebaity.
It's both. Slop can be meaningless drivel or deliberate misinformation.
Republicans want to hate so badly, they'll literally create fiction to manifest it and be the victims...
Always have. Most of them have never met the people they've been taught to hate. Or believe for some reason that the few they know are some sort of exception. The token "good ones".
Right they hate these straw people. I mean, I;m not going to say my own cognitive projection of "conservative" is 100% accurate, but at least my nightmare scenarios are about actual bad things happening, and not like conservative nightmares of genetically inferior people getting to enjoy the gifts of civilization.
The difference between us and them is that we don't want to do things to hurt them. Far from it. We honestly want to do things to help them. When we do hate them, it's not for who they are, but who they choose to be. And that makes all the difference.
plus thats why they fall for scams very easily.
What's wild about this is that people predicted AI would be used for nefarious purposes, but generally in the form of like, showing your opponents doing crimes. But here it's being used to show their own side doing crimes while the other side is only made to look "cringy" or more like a stereotype.
It really speaks to the utter depravity of the US right that, given a machine that can generate any video of anything they could imagine, this is what they do. These people are utterly incompatible with any kind of free or even functional society, and I really don't know what could ever be done fix them or their culture.
If they instead made convincing AI generated videos of some imaginary leftists going first and starting a revolution, then it might not have the intended effect.
The phrase “I voted for this” has become a common thing for far-right supporters of Trump to say when something particularly brutal has happened to their political opponents.
I'll tell you what's at the bottom of it, If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you. -- Lyndon B. Johnson, attributed by Bill Moyers
That last part is still accurate He had it right.
I remember as a kid growing up in a extended family just emerging from the worst kind of american poor. My fathers generation was the first to have decent living conditions but still faced hunger as children. They all could remember when they got electricity and running water. The older generation of aunts and uncles would often say things like 'We may be poor but at least were not N******s". That hasn't changed a lot in some circular family tree's.
I've met racists who love this quote, they just think that "convince the lowest white man he’s better than the best colored man" is equivalent to "convince a colored man he’s as good as a white man" here. They really do.
Also there are plenty of people who don't consider themselves racist, yet think their (American, British, whatever) color hierarchy exists outside of English-speaking countries and people there have to take it into account.
The kind that "is not racist", but if someone is racist, it's only the way that they are on top. They can't conceive that a Vietnamese or a Chinese racist may have a racial hierarchy where they are near chimps. When facing evidence of such being possible, they lose their mind and behave, honestly, quite racist.
5th generation warfare. It's bots saying that (aka human slaves in large slave networks)
If right wing people were smart they wouldn't be right wing. Of course they're going to believe and share AI slop video. They're emotional driven fools.
Don't tell me that 🇺🇸Steve2A🇺🇸god🇺🇸penises🇺🇸 Is a bad person. I just can't believe it.
If he's even real.
The smartest move I ever made was dropping all mainstream social media. I don't get any of this BS. Meta, Twitter, and Reddit are a plague on society and I'll have no part in it.
Nothing prevents it totally. It could 100% be just as bad as Facebook. But only those servers owned by those propaganda pushers. It is harder to take over the whole and push your agenda to all users, when they can simply block your instance and let you stew in your hate.
Best example for that: the tankies, which are mostly ignored or ridiculed outside their own safe spaces.
And while I do think there will always be nationalistic fuckwards, I think the big number now and in the past are only possible due to massive propaganda. If that is not possible, people steer more to "normal" stuff. Because most people are not majorally negatively affected by the status quo.
tell me you live in a rich country without explicitly saying so
Yeah, after writing it I felt it was wrong. What I meant is: most people are not hurt by what is being pushed in the mass media as source of the problem. If that outside factor goes away, they will focus more on what is happening around them. That the status quo in our current world is hurting a lot of people is absolutely correct, sadly.
You'd need to convince every one hosting a Lemmy instance (and all possible future ones) to sell their platform for money or blackmail them into submission...
With Reddit, they only needed to convince Spez which is like convincing an alcoholic to have a free shot of his fav poison
If Lemmy, or any other fediverse social network, ever got that big, you would be guaranteed there would be plenty of splinters of de-federation in the network. There would be small networks totally isolated from the mainstream cluster, and others that only federate parts of it. You could choose to hang out in some counter-cultural bubble, or choose a curated connection to the biggest networks, if you didn't want to engage in them fully. The trick would be finding "your people," but the tech works.
It’s not moderated the same way as Reddit
reddit and all commercial social media make more money when they have more users, so they attract a lot of users with ragebait and clickbait.
we don't profit if we have more users, so we don't have an incentive to send clickbait and ragebait, and the absence of these toxins alone will probably drive up the quality a bit.
If they can't differentiate between Ai Slop and reality, maybe we should start generating videos of ICE terrorizing Maga people.
They don't care. They probably convince themselves its based on real antifa videos
I never have to wonder what the Nazis in Germany would have done with modern technology. I wish I didn't know.
I see people daily due to living in a city and it only makes me hate them more.
But equally of course!
Right! Living in a city grows your disdain for all of humanity. But not any particular race.
It’s not just the city. I’ve moved to two small villages that are louder and more obnoxious than the city. It’s our culture and the devaluation of humanity.
Yeah, true, I'm not racist and I think being in multicultural environments since childhood was basically what did it, international boarding school, city with big international population, etc.
Human psychology is the same no matter the tech.
It just makes it easier.
And deadlier.
This has to be what trump is seeing over on Truth Social that's got him thinking cities are burning from protests, or at least that could be what his advisors are showing
How many AI videos of them eating the dogs are there?
Fuuuuck, gaslighting the gaslighter in chief. This is how humanity ends. All bc reality has become trapped within an endless circle of AI generated gaslighting and fuckery thanks to these idiots.
I want off this ride.
'No worries, we'll stop at our earliest convenience. Till then, please remain calm and stop struggling so much, it's off-putting for our other guests.'
And mind the gap
See it
Say it
Sorted
Expect much more of this and soon enough it will be impossible to distinguish between Real and fake videos
We can fix a little with digitally.sigbed videos to at least show that a video came from a verified source but that still won't fix the issue with leaked videos. Basically, leaked videos and open mike videos / audio clips are over, we can't ever trust them anymore
I think the article really makes the point that it doesn't matter. The videos can LITERALLY have a watermark on them from the AI software, and people just dgaf. The battle is lost before it begins.
As with things like quotes and claims that could always be fake, it's back to the old journalistic practices of verifying sources with a second source. But that means being ignorant of things that were not being investigated by journalists, which creates a different filter bubble.
that has as a necessary pre-requirement that people are actually interested enough in an objective truth that they're willing to pay some journalist to do the research.
is that really the case anymore? I can see it being useful in the 20th century when people were interested in new economic developments and stuff
Journalists don't verify anything these days, because their bosses are focused on being the first to publish. Doesn't matter if it's right or wrong, the article only exists to get the advertising to load.
Pity the journalists all got fired.
"dOnT tRusT the MSM" but they expect you to trust the guy on your insta feed / telegram / truth social?!
With the way things spread on social media from user generated content it would be hard to get that done I'm sure. Like the video almost everyone saw of Charlie, the video was indeed real but the spread was so beyond control that ot broke almost every filter algorithm on social media. I can't imagine how much "suppression" talk would be mentioned if we had digitally sign the source even though it would be totally valid. [Viral > Truth]
The troll farms are disastrous to this country.
The foreign ones or the domestic ones?
Yes
Yes
You don't even need to hire a "troll farm" now. You can just do it all with AI.
Even if the images were real, I see a woman using her first amendment right to speech and assembly being assaulted by someone who has sworn to uphold the constitution.
Confederate psy ops. The civil war is back, you just don't know it yet.
Its not fake if MAGA believes it ... that puts it into psyops territory.
Not real, but not exactly "fake".
Trump supporters making shit up and constantly lying?
next you're gonna tell me the sky is blue
Well, sometimes, it's white, red, or black.
WELCOME TO THE WORRRLD OF TOMOORRROW!
Where truth doesn't matter anymore.
This is actually pretty scary because they can just put their enemies in the videos to justify arresting people they don’t like
Not much different than grabbing the neighbors and telling them to say a few statements as witnesses, false or true. A new spin on an old game.
True I mean without due process nothing will matter
A new spin with far more reach.
That's a lot of work for something they can do already
Some dumbass sumbitch eating this up. Unfortunately it’s like 50x that. So many dumb motherfuckers, not enough natural disasters to help the rest of us along.
We really are in a post-truth society.
I don't know. My entire life people have more or less told me the truth is stupid and worthless. Pretty sure were never were a truth society. It's just that now we have given up the pretense and pretext that it even exists and have decided bullshit is what really makes us happy.
AI propaganda slop aside, fucking rise up already... FFS
can't, watching football, eating Jack Link's
Go away, baitin.
Muricans are all talk.
Pretty sure Trump will need to start the war.
AI is coming along at the perfect times for these jackals, and as we got closer and closer, through deep fakes, etc., we all knew who would be the first side to abuse it for its political propaganda power. They even knew it, they could hardly wait for the tech to catch up to their nefarious requirements.
I'm convinced AI content generation was created with the sole intent of manufacturing outrage material for gullible idiots.
because the rate at which these technophobic illiterates have adopted AI, and expertly use it to generate bullshit, is too high to be otherwise plausible.
Yeah, no doubt. My mother got radicalised by Facebook over the years. It went from cute dog and cat things to "harmless" conspiracy theories (think bigfoot), culminating in fucking her with QAnon propaganda indoctrination. Last I checked up on her, there's machine generated rubbish all over her feed. She's beyond saving at this point. Suppose she was always primed for this kind of thing, being pro-homeopathy anti-vaccine person.
She doesn't question the machine generated content at all, and I saw that if someone points it out, which a scarce few have done, she just justifies it with "well it could be real, this kind of thing does happen."
At this point I don't think it matters if this technofascism was a knowing plan, or an unfortunate series of events that by themselves seemed justifiable to the people making the decisions, but it doesn't really matter. We're here now. They're not only trying, but succeeding in coercing governments and undermining democracy.
real sad that she'd throw away all her family and love, for the expense of crazy online conspiracy theories and obsession.
It's all about normalising boots on the ground in American towns and cities.
Well, if it spreads democracy overseas, stands to reason it will work even better locally.
NOT true! MAGA are KNOWN to do Their Own Research TM and would Know if it's AI!
Lenin dreamt of this kind of propaganda power.
hold up. so now we don't even have to do anything for this this to escalate?
I mean....if I'm gonna get blamed for cheating I might as well cheat, you know?
Yeah? Kinda the point. Like absolutely nothing was happening in Portland. Nothing at all. But trump sent troops anyway because Portland is such a hellhole. Now there’s protests, but they seem to be far more entertaining and mocking than anything else.
Yet another reason they probably want to stir up violence. Not only does it tip us closer towards civil war, capturing public violence means more data to feed into AI and generate violent videos.
Manufacturing consent 3.0
Fake videos and fake comments pushing us to the edge
Russian psyops
The American right are nasty enough to do this all by themselves.
While you are not wrong, I think the vast majority of them easily fall for that kind of thing.
I fear it could be something even more dubious than that.
A marketing campaign for an American company with a foothold in the Whitehouse.
The sooner you realize that the call is coming from inside the house, the better. We're dealing with a revived KKK and a government that openly supports them. These people are very capable of running their own psyops.
It doesn't have to be one or the other.
Reality is now a Who's Line Is It Anyway. Everything isn't real and points don't matter.
Nothing is true
I'm saying it again: We can't know what's true anymore. Whenever something happens more than a few miles away, chances are high that you know nobody who was involved there physically, so there's no reliable way of knowing what actually happened anymore.
I think we can only make reasonable choices about things that are close enough to ourselves; not about very far-away entities.
I have no way to know whether the USA really exists.
it's real because nobody could make up so much bullshit
Idk have you read Ayn Rand
I'm pretty sure that dancing frog was real. It has soul.
If you record a video on your phone, is there no Metadata to help verify its validity? Gotta be something we can do about this.
There are forensic fingerprints that match a video to an image sensor. Maybe they could be faked by a sophisticated actor but let's be honest: the people watching these videos aren't checking that closely.
So we've achieved Barefoot In The Head sans drugs.
I feel like AI generated videos of very active things like protests would be easy to debunk. Just look at the people in the background and point out the people disappearing after moving behind another person, or look for changing faces.
Doesn't matter how easy it is to debunk. I assume you were around for COVID and Trump's first term?
You haven't seen a lot of Sora 2 videos. Identifiable traits require a pretty careful eye in many videos to spot.
You absolutely can't even rely on the watermark, since removing that watermark is trivial to the nation-states running disinfo campaigns, and even for end users removal is trivial compared to creating typical public AI video models.
Even that little blur effect people use to get rid of watermarks, sure it's sora but it could as easily just be a tiktok username, which people remove all the time. So the people who want to believe it, will.
In the article they mention videos with literal AI watermarks being passed around as if they were real. The targets want to believe they are true and will ignore anyone debunking them.
Taylor Lorenz has had some great videos on AI Slop lately.
Say it ain't so! Not James Woods! Fuck, this time line sucks....I want a different one 😤
He's been a right-wing asshole for a long time, unfortunately.
Maybe I'll regret asking, but what could "haiku-level brilliant" even mean?
Typical MAGA astonishment at 17 syllables.
MAGAts are typically older, so they have less technical knowledge, so they're more likely to fall for AI slop and conspiracy theories.
Anyone acting out violently should be culled from society. Not partisan issue. I definitely lean like way left and there is much to be done without murder. Work ‘em into a frenzy. Let them eat their own. Let them have their violence upon themselves. See, I didn’t do a goddamn thing. These fuckers are gonna off themselves quicker than Howard Dean can say woooo!
Ok, so why do they utilize these tools and the left cries about it.
I've said this for a while. The hate of AI on lemmy was encouraged by Astro turfing methods. This way leftist who usually are at the cutting edge of things instead knee cap themselves on a technology that acts as a force multiplayer. They will use this and advance. We will bitch and moan. The end result will be that they gain more and we don't. So you can be upset and you can cry and hate this or me for pointing this out. That will never change the outcome. Your feelings don't matter. What matters is outcomes right now. It matters what will get people to vote when it's time. if you concede tools that help you reach eyes and ears of voters, be ready for consequences.
Yeah, this person's right! We should start making inflammatory AI videos, too! Dump that whole tanker ship in the fire, fuck it!
No. I am sorry, but no. The hate on Lemmy is not against AI as a technology, it is against how it is being used, how it is being peddled, how it is being shoved down everyone's throats, and how much damage it's doing to our environment (edit: and society, and art, and culture, and politics, and economy, and wellness, and overall desire to maintain a steady heartbeat!)
And, to your point about feelings not mattering, from what I've seen, most people (including myself) are exhausted! We are surrounded by people losing their shit left and right, bigotry, racism, hate in general are mainstream, Fascism is out, about, and in power, and it looks like we're all forgetting that the planet is literally burning up again.
We are tired. Most of us have already been through enough shit as it is, we would want nothing more than to see the end of this string of "once in a lifetime" disasters, yet we understand that the easy way out means we'll end up becoming exactly what's ruining our lives right now. This isn't just about winning, HOW we win is equally important, if not more so. Because that will set the tone for what would follow.
Not to mention that the bullshit in AI videos made by the left would absolutely get called out in every propaganda outfit on the right. It would just give them more ammo (without the usual lies).
But even more important, it will grant legitimacy to everyone who responds to damning video evidence by claiming it was AI. We don't need to make shit up, the reality is already horrifying. All AI will do is make it harder for people to believe their own eyes.
Enslaved with honor is still enslaved.
Oh, I said nothing about honour! There's being nice, and there's being fair. I'm more for being fair than being nice, and as I see it, it's fair to hit back. The difference is in the nuance of how I hit back. Why eliminate when immobilise would suffice, y'know?
It's absolutely exhausting knowing how much potential humans have to do great things, but having to watch humanity choose to destroy themselves instead.
In all ways imaginable, especially emotional. I've seen some sad shit in my life, but this overall bend toward mindless self-annihilation our species seems to have is by far the saddest...
We gain by generating counter-slop? Wtf are you on about.
Anybody with a half a braincell can see the detrimental impact AI is having on social media & internet content generally. It's not astro turfing, it's just constantly dealing with generated nonsense that's causing the hate.
People who are more susceptible to manipulation, which unfortunately seems to be right-leaning folks, seem to fall victim into believing & spreading it the most. They rarely do any form of fact checking.
Everybody is susceptible to manipulation. Are you crazy. Who do you think you are. It's basic shit here. You need to push a singular message through repetition and people adopt it every time. The left are so ignorant to basics which is why everybody and their grandma knows about cat litter boxes rather than the arguments against it. This era of leftist are absolutely outclassed by a mile.
They 100% are. There's no doubt
They utilize these tools because they have no morals. They are willing to lie and cheat their way into whatever they want.
The left does not have that advantage. We don't want to lie, we don't want to cheat, we want the liars and cheaters to be removed from power. Lying harder isn't going to work for us because unlike the right, we will call out our own for it.
Yea sure the left are morally superior obviously. Not weak and ineffective. Morally superior
Same thing unfortunately. No honor in a real fight.
Right which is my point. But why does the left fall on their own sword. They have all the ability. If we truly believe the left have more people, that Gerry mandering is needed because most people lean left. Then it should be a no brainer than the left needs to activate a fire under each other to overwhelm spaces. But we do the opposite. We retreat. The only conclusions I can think of when I read between the lines is that we were targeted by right wing astro turfing as much as the right was. Or we're just not smart people as a whole and it's actually maybe a good thing we're being backed into our corners
I think part of the issue is that people on the left also tend to see nuances, which means more things to disagree over. Left falls out, right falls in line and all.
I think it’s pretty obvious why people would be upset about a propaganda machine being used by a government to demonize its political enemies and voting base? The Iraq War started over less false pretenses, and look how that rolled out. The damage produced by this lying machine will be unimaginable.
Cool, it's super important to be aware how getting punched will affect you while getting punched. Just don't punch back because that isn't what we're about. In the end we win somehow. Maybe they'll break their first on our head I dunno.
How much water and electricity does it take to punch someone?
Depends if you're in their labor camp or not. There's a time and place for everything. Why be concerned about the environment if creates an environment where the people who will outpace you will destroy it anyways. You're not saving anything by letting them seize power
Lemmy’s daily active user numbers are not big enough to be a worthwhile astroturfing target.
The real reason people shit on AI here is because it’s a platform with a bias toward people who are fairly tech savvy and or work in a technology field. Which is why every 3rd technology post here is a Linux circle jerk.
A lot of users here understand the technologies and are working in spaces where they’re being asking to “implement AI” by idiots who don’t understand the tech and aren’t trying to solve a user problem.
I have seen this recently pretty often that people seem to believe Lemmy is an equal representation of the real world. It’s probably one of the more niche media platforms, though. I come here because I enjoy every third Linux post. I also know that I have to go out of my way to find someone who has even heard of Steam, let alone a Steam Deck in the real world.
It 100% is perfect for astroturf. It's the perfect size for it. Large population need more money and effort to afford astroturf. Lemmy is the right amount then you let the Lemmy users generate more content for you.
We all saw this with Reddit. They always started with smaller city subs before moving to bigger ones. Always
Nah, it wasn't astroturfed. Current gen AI is little more than automated theft ATM. A lot of artists had their work stolen with no compensation. And now have an even tougher time ahead, competing with the thieves than they already had before. A lot of the angst and hate has been knee-jerk and lacking nuance. Doing as much to alienate people from their cause as bring them to it. But it's real.
What's equally absurd however. Are those that naively think we could use AI against those already using it. They're building farms that consume more power than major cities. With more compute than even large groups of average individuals will ever be able to muster. It doesn't matter how much of a force multiplier it is. 10x return on a force of 10,000,000 is exponentially more return than a 500x increase on a force of 100.
Ai may just be a tool, but it's not going to turn the tide in favor of the left.
Yea of course, that's what all the headlines were shared kept trying us everyday multiple times a day. They told us they would take our jobs, they'd assault our women and children, they threatened our way of life. Familiar
‘AI is an immigrant’ is a wild fucking take.
Is it? Can you show me that the AI headlines and hype on Lemmy is different from NY Post website's approach to immigrants?
Same coin different faces. If you told a republican that they bought into anti immigration astro turfing what would that tell you?
Yeah, why would people not want to use lies and misinformation to promote their side. It truly boggles the mind that anyone could value truth, honesty and integrity.
Is your goal to be truthful or not labeled a terrorist and put into a camp. Take your pick. Truth is subjective.
Truth is absolute. There is no such thing as "subjective truth" or "personal truth".
Something is either true or it isn't.
You're wrong, entirely. There's an absolute truth but we never get to use that. We can only ever use subjective truth. That's the whole point of the allegory of the cave. The absolute truth is blinding. And your desire to win an argument is creating a subjective truth that is blinding you to something that is critical to understand why they are winning in this era and the left is losing.
Metaphysical nonsense is not a good argument.
It's very literally the argument. Again your truth and mine don't align on that which is more proof
Belief in nonsense is called "delusion". So you go ahead and continue being delusional.
Why can't I want both things?
Give me a truth. I bet it'll be subjective.
The sun exists.
How do you know. If I tell you it doesn't exist how do you prove it. You can say we see it. And I can tell show you illusions or examples of how we hallucinate or theories and simulations. There is a Truth no doubt. But we deal with truths always.
Whether truth exists is a different question from whether we one can prove it.
However, we know the sun exists because of its effects on us. Light, heat, gravity.
The multiple independent effects which can be experienced all around the world, reliably and consistently.
https://files.catbox.moe/7qaw0m.mp4
Ya, I don't really get the hate either. It's just a fun new way to make memes. I feel like most are blowing things out of proportion because the media is telling them to.