I know the quote below is supposed to sound bad & scary (like everything online), but to me it just sounds like storytelling. In fact, it sounds like exactly the kind of hyperreal storytelling that I’ve been doing (I’m up to 69 books).
Via the Atlantic:
The power of AI-generated histories, Horvitz told me, lies in “deepfakes on a timeline intermixed with real events to build a story.”
The quote is from Eric Horvitz, Microsoft’s chief scientific officer. You can find Horvitz’ paper here, which I haven’t read yet. From the abstract:
Compositional deepfakes leverage synthetic content in larger disinformation plans that integrate sets of deepfakes over time with observed, expected, and engineered world events to create persuasive synthetic histories. Synthetic histories can be constructed manually but may one day be guided by adversarial generative explanation (AGE) techniques. In the absence of mitigations, interactive and compositional deepfakes threaten to move us closer to a post-epistemic world, where fact cannot be distinguished from fiction.
“Post-epistemic” seems to be here a synonym for hyperreality.
For some reason, these scenarios don’t scare me all that much – perhaps because I’m already living them from the inside out… I think it would be a mistake here to only focus on the threats and ignore the opportunities to reinvent storytelling.
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