1, #79 - A picture is worth ... less, now

Estimated Read Time: 49 seconds.

“The Treachery of Images” by René Magritte.

How much do you worry about misinformation? Does the prospect of AI-generated videos & images increase that concern?

This week, I read a quick essay by Kevin Kelly suggesting that this change isn’t so large as we may expect. Or, at least, it’s nothing new—we’re simply reversing a relatively recent change.

For most of human history, Kelly says, trust operated on a local scale: You believed things based on your direct experience with that thing or with the person passing along the information. Over the past 200 years, photographs became a sort of irrefutable source of proof—“Pics or it didn’t happen,” right?

So, Kelly is saying, the arrival of AI-generated media that’s indistinguishable from reality may be frustrating and disconcerting… but it mostly just takes us back to where things were, before:

We will come to see that our default of “trust first and check later” was only a short temporary anomaly in our long history. We are back to the state we have been in for most of our time as humans, where we “check first and trust later.”

Do you think this return to a more relational form of trust is mostly good or mostly bad?

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Insight inspired by

Kevin Kelly

(our friend from 1, #10 + 1, #34 + 1, #50), and his recent essay: The Trust Flip.