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I wonder what will happen to the entire legal system. It used to be fairly difficult to create convincing photos and videos.

AI can probably fool most court judges now. Or the defense can refute legitimate evidence by saying “it’s AI / false”. How would that be refuted?

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Trials have rules for evidence. You can't just pull out some footage out of nowhere. Where did that come from? From what camera? What was the chain of custody on its footage? Etc.
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For better or worse, the only admissible evidence going forward will probably be either completely physical or originated in attestation-capable recording devices, i.e. something like a "forensics grade" camera with a signing key in trusted hardware issued by somebody deemed trustworthy.

Given the obvious personal safety upsell ("our phone/dashcam/... produces court-admissible evidence!"), I think we'll even see this in consumer devices before too long.

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Yes, that is a major worry of mine, too. CCTV evidence is worth nil now (could be generated in whole or part), and even eye-witness testimony can be trusted (sure, a witness may think they saw the alleged perpetrator, but perhaps they just saw an AI-generated video/projection of someone).
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MS13 was literally tattooed on his knuckles!
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Multiple data sources, considering the trustworthiness of the source of the information, and accountability for lying.

You might generate an AI video of me committing a crime, But the CCTV on the street didn't show it happening and my phone cell tower logs show I was at home. For the legal system I don't think this is going to be the biggest problem. It's going to be social media that is hit hardest when a fake video can go viral far faster than fact checking can keep up.

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By having people also testify to authenticity and coming down like the hand of God on fakers, the same way we make sure evidence is real now.
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If it means anything, I have a 1990 Almanac from an old encyclopedia that warns the exact same thing about digital photo manipulation. I don't think it really matters at this point
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AI can also be used to fight propaganda, for instance BiasScanner makes you aware of potentially manipulative news: https://biasscanner.org .

So that makes AI a "dual good", like a kitchen knife: you can cut your tomato or kill you neighbor with it, entirely up to the "user". Not all users are good, so we'll see an intense amplification of both good and bad.

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AI is certainly a dual good but I think the project is misguided at best.

I put in one of the driest descriptions of the Holocaust I could find and it got a very high score for bias, calling a factual description of a massacre emotional sensationalism because it inevitably contains a lot of loaded words.

It also doesn't differentiate between reporting, commentary, poetry, or anything else. It takes text and spits out a number, which is a very shallow analysis.

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It's more work to fight bullshit than it is to generate it, though. Saying "Use AI to fight it" is inherently a losing strategy when the other side also has an AI that is just as powerful.
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And no amount of BS detecting tells you what is true. The challenge that I see a lot of people have is they really don't have a framework to incorporate new information into.

They're adrift, every new "fact" (whether true or false) blows them in a new direction. Often they get led in terrible directions from statements that are entirely true (but missing important context).

A lot of financial cons work that way, a long string of true statements that seem to lead to a particular conclusion. I know that if someone is offering me 20% APY there will usually be some risk or fee that offsets those market-beating gains (it may be a worthwhile risk or a well earned fee, but that number needs to trigger further investigation).

We need people to be equipped with that sort of framework in as many areas as possible, but we seem to be moving backwards in that area.

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Don’t blame the tools. Stalin, Mao and Hitler didn’t need AI.
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That pro forma response grows oh so very tiresome.

For the nth time: scale, easiness, and access, matter. AI puts propaganda abilities far beyond the reach of those men in the hands of many more people. Do you not understand the difference between one man with a revolver and an army with machine guns? They are not the same.

Nowhere in my comment am I “blaming the tools”. I’ll ask you engage with the argument honestly instead of simply parroting what you already believe absent reading.

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