We will adjust. And guess what, before photography, people managed somehow. People gossiped all sorts of stuff, spread malicious runors and you had to guess what's a lie and what's not. The way people dealt with it was witness testimony and physical evidence.
We'll have to adjust, certainly. But that doesn't mean nothing bad will happen.
> People gossiped all sorts of stuff, spread malicious runors and you had to guess what's a lie and what's not.
And there were things like witch trials where people were burnt at the stake!
The resolution was a shared faith in central authority. Witness testimony and physical evidence don't scale to populations of millions, you have to trust in the person getting that evidence. And that trust is what's rapidly eroding these days. In politics, in police, in the courts.
The media's been lying to us for as long as it has existed.
Prior to the Internet the range of opinions which you could gain access to was far more limited. If the media were all in agreement on something it was really hard to find a counter-argument.
We're so far down the rabbit hole already of bots and astroturfing online, I doubt that AI deepfake videos are going to be the nail in the coffin for democracy.
The majority of the bot, deepfake and AI lies are going to be created by the people who have the most capital.
Just like they owned the traditional media and created the lies there.
Right, by which standard truth has never been a shared grounds of discussion. I think that there's a big difference between "some people lie" and "there's no agreement on shared truth."
Marconi demonstrated radio in 1895 and the first broadcast radio station started in 1920. By the 1930s Adolf Hitler was routinely using the medium to broadcast vile propaganda about Jews and others which lead to the holocaust in the 1940s.
About 40 years later the Rwandan genocide took place and many scholars attribute a preceding radio-based propaganda campaign as playing a key role in increasing ethnic violence in the aware.
Since then the link between radio and genocide seems to have decreased over time but it's likely that this isn't so much because humans have a better understanding of the medium but more so because propaganda has moved to more effective mediums like the internet.
Given that we didn't actually solve the problems with radio before moving onto the next medium it isn't likely that we'll figure out the problems with these new mediums before millions die.
It was easy to spread lies through print and through good old fashioned word of mouth too. No radio needed.
And apropos radio, the War of the Worlds radio drama in 1938 is know to have made quite some afraid that it's real. And plenty of people collected money in communist Hungary for the sake of the enslaved Isaura (protagonist of a Brazilian soap opera). But most people adjusted and understand that radio dramas are a thing, movies are a thing, and will adjust to the fact that pixels on a screen are just that.
You seem to be suggesting that there's no noteworthy difference in the speed and effectiveness of different communication mediums like spoken, written, or radio and as such there's no noteworthy difference in the outcome of their deployment.
Is that a fair assessment of your comment? Is there a way to test your assertion?
No I'm saying that people adapt, society adapts. Most people today don't shit themselves in the cinema thinking that the monster will appear among them, they understand that characters in TV series are not real and only the mentally ill will berate the actor in the street for yesterday's episode.
It will take some time but it's in fact quite easy to explain it to older relatives if you make a few custom examples.
The bigger point is that realism is a red herring. You can spread propaganda with hand drawn caricatures just as well or even better. It's a panic over nothing. The real lever of control is what news to report on and how to frame it, what quotes to use, which experts to ask and which ones not to. The bottleneck never was at HD realism.
> they understand that characters in TV series are not real
They do not which is why a reality TV star who is 'good at business' is the current US President.
Reality TV is the old media and people are still falling for it and the consequences of them falling for it will be felt for decades. It will be the same with newer technologies but worse.
The novel threat that something like Sora poses isn't just from realism, it's also from the fast turn around and customized messaging. It will enable the exact things you caution about but at an unprecedented scale.
This idea that it all new media is going to be just another case of 'meet the new boss same as the old boss' is ahistorical and shortsighted.
If that's how you view the majority, you simply can't simultaneously be for democracy. It takes some impressive mental gymnastics to redefine democracy as one where somehow people can vote but all truth-production is centralized to the Expert Consensus narrative. I mean, maybe that's right. In fact basically no society till the 20th century has absolute full 1 person 1 vote election based democracy. It's an odd development. In most historic societies they restricted political affairs to certain "intellectually qualified" classes. Of course we see that as deeply unjust and exclusionary. But I'm not sure how else to interpret your type of complaint than as a wish for some kind of restriction on who can have decision power in political matters. But at the se time this is also called defending democracy. It's weird.
> It's finally now dawning on the majority of Britons that Brexit was a mistake
As of June 2025, 56 percent of people in Great Britain thought that it was wrong to leave the European Union, compared with 31 percent who thought it was the right decision.
When the Remainer Establishment refuse to use new freedoms and possibilities, and spend the intervening nine years telling people it was a bad idea, then I’d be surprised if it didn’t have an impact on public opinion.
