I thoroughly enjoyed writing about lying and cheating last Friday. Because it was mostly about other people, not me.
But it’s not just people who are lying, these days.
Even the puppets are lying… the AI puppets, that is.
In the well-loved story of Pinocchio, a lie grows and grows until it’s a plain as the nose on your face. Ah, if only that were the case. In the modern world of AI, a lie grows and grows until half the country believes it.
Artificial intelligence doesn’t get discussed much in Pagosa Springs, as it relates to our meager everyday existence here… because we don’t actually have much use for artificial intelligence here. Or any kind of intelligence, for that matter. Life is pretty simple, and straightforward. You make your coffee in the morning. Or stop by the coffee shop on your way to work… if you’re the type who likes to work. Which not many of us do. And fewer with each passing day.
It seems, however, that AI is working overtime.
I came across a quote the other day, in a new article by Carl Smith in Governing magazine.
One big concern is that AI will generate a thousand-year flood of falsehoods and automatically pump them into systems already overwhelmed by misinformation. There aren’t really legal penalties just for saying things that aren’t true, however.
We had a hundred-year flood here in Pagosa, back in 1911, that wiped out all the bridges and a few houses. But Mr. Smith is talking here about a “thousand-year flood”. He quoted a legislative manager:
“Drawing a line in political campaigns around when you can lie and what is a lie has been so difficult that we’ve essentially said that, legally, you can lie in political campaigns,” says Gideon Cohn-Postar, legislative manager for Issue One.
Mr. Smith was writing about the amazing, and growing, potential for using AI to spread lies during an election campaign. But of course, candidates have been spreading lies during political campaigns since at least the days of the Sumerian civilization (5,000 years ago, circa 2900 BC). But now, we can use computer technologies to spread even bigger lies, faster and farther than ever before. In the days of Sumerians, people wrote on clay tablets with sticks, so it was actually pretty challenging to spread political lies. It’s taken us 5,000 years to get to this point. Now we can spread a thousand years worth of lies in a single election cycle.
Puts a new meaning to the word, “progress”.
After reading Mr. Smith’s article (which, for all I know, might have been full of lies) I spent the weekend learning about “deep fakes”. Apparently, people have figured out ways to post videos on Facebook and YouTube, that show politicians saying things that they never actually said. So, you can now make a politician look like they’re telling a lie, when actually, they were originally telling a totally different lie. AI is making this process so much easier.
In a certain sense, this is nothing new. When I was a kid, a politician would tell a lie, and then the newspaper would lie about what they said.
Unfortunately, we now have a thousand-year flood coming. It’s enough to make you wish for the days of clay tablets.
But as my dad used to say, “If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em.”
Since AI is here to stay, and since one of the tasks of AI is the creation of better lies than we’ve ever had, this means — by extrapolation — that AI has the potential to be a better politician than our actual politicians. Our actual politicians are able to tell, maybe, hundred-year lies. AI can tell thousand-year lies. And they can do it automatically. (According to Mr. Smith.)
There aren’t any legal penalties, during a political campaign, for telling lies. Lying is an integral part of the political system. And bigger lies, and better lies, would seemingly have the potential to make America great again — a path the voters have endorsed all through the nation’s history.
Who can tell the biggest and best lies?
I rest my case.