Artificial Intelligence Is Making Everything Dumber Article with supporting links. caitlinjohnst.one/p/artifici…

So it turns out Israel’s mistake was starting its genocide right after Palestinians gained the ability to quickly share video footage of what’s happening in Gaza, but right before the moment when any video footage shared online could easily be dismissed as AI. Just today I saw two viral tweets that had received Community Notes from Twitter users warning that the posts featured AI-generated videos. Both were shared by right wing accounts with large followings, and both were used to spread Islamophobia. The first was shared by Israeli-American pundit Emily Schrader, who has 194,000 followers on Twitter. The tweet features a fake CCTV video of a man in Muslim garb approaching a non-Muslim woman on the street in a way that’s meant to look intimidating before getting attacked by a house cat. As of this writing Schrader’s tweet has more than 612,000 views, and carries a Community Note that reads “AI generated. Time at top is a telltale sign. Also she starts off with a white and black bag then only black.” The second was from a right wing British account called Basil the Great, which has over 210,000 followers. Their tweet features a fake video of an English-speaking teacher showing white children how to pray a Muslim prayer, captioned “I‘ve been sent this footage twice today. It shows a Muslim Teacher instructing British children in the ways of Islam in school. I hope it’s fake but it wouldn’t surprise me if it was real. In fact the left will probably say they don’t see anything wrong with this.” It is not real. As of this writing the tweet carries a Community Note which reads “Video is AI generated. The teacher ‘sits’ on an invisible chair at the end of the video, which was not there at the beginning.” The video has had 1.7 million views. This is Twitter, not Facebook, which had already been ravaged by fake AI content that’s been duping older users for nearly two years now. Fake AI videos are now getting so good that they’re able to fool younger people who are much more aware of what’s out there. Australia’s ABC recently ran a segment where they showed different video clips to teens and asked them to determine which ones were real and which ones were AI, and they couldn’t do much better than randomly guessing. For decades, video footage was the gold standard for evidence that something had occurred. For a few sweet years there was a period when anything significant that happened in public would usually be recorded on video, because in any group there was bound to be a few people with a smartphone in their pocket, and then those videos could be shared with the world as evidence that the significant thing had occurred. Now whenever there’s footage of a crime, or an act of government tyranny, or just a famous person doing something ridiculous in public, people aren’t going to believe it happened unless it’s corroborated by eyewitness testimony. So in that sense we’ve sort of backslid to where we were before the invention of photography, when eyewitness reports were the only thing we had to go by. A video can help illustrate what the eyewitness is talking about, but without a physical witness willing to attest to its veracity, it’s often not going to be worth much in terms of proving that something happened. Which of course serves the powerful just fine. Videos of genocidal atrocities, police brutality, and authoritarian abuses have been causing a lot of headaches for our rulers these past few years, so they’ll be happy to see the information ecosystem entering a new era where inconvenient video footage can be dismissed with a scoff. Generative AI is making everything dumber. It’s crippling people’s ability to write, research, think critically and create art for themselves. It’s making it harder for us to discern truth from falsehood. It’s causing people to become divorced from their own humanity in weirder and weirder ways. It’s getting harder and harder to know what’s real on the internet. That photo could be fake. That video could be fake. That song could have been made without any actual artist behind it. That essay could have been written by a chatbot. That social media account you’re interacting with could be a chatbot themselves. This is going to have a massively alienating effect on networking technologies whose initial promise was to help bring us all together. When the internet first showed up people rejoiced at their ability to connect with others around the world who had the same interests and passions, saying “At long last, I’m not alone!” When AI showed up people started logging on to the internet and wondering, “Uhh… am I alone?” Because you can’t be sure there’s anyone in there. It reminds me of a passage from Charlotte Joko Beck’s “Everyday Zen”: “Suppose we are out on a lake and it’s a bit foggy — not too foggy, but a bit foggy — and we’re rowing along in our little boat having a good time. And then, all of a sudden, coming out of the fog, there’s this other rowboat and it’s heading right at us. And…crash! Well, for a second we’re really angry — what is that fool doing? I just painted my boat! And here he comes — crash! — right into it. And then suddenly we notice that the rowboat is empty. What happens to our anger? Well, the anger collapses…I’ll just have to paint my boat again, that’s all. But if that rowboat that hit ours had another person in it, how would we react? You know what would happen!” Beck is touching on the Buddhist doctrine of no-self here, which is a discussion for another day, but this parable has so many layers that say so much about humanity and human connection. The only reason we put so much mental energy and attention into our day-to-day interactions and relationships is because we assume we’re relating to other human beings like ourselves. We assume there’s somebody in the other rowboat. Nearly all of the love, lust, anger, hatred, shame, guilt, passion, enthusiasm, attraction, aversion, delight and disgust we feel from moment to moment throughout this human adventure has to do with other humans. We don’t experience those big feelings toward inanimate objects like rowboats, cars or shopping carts, because we know there’s nobody in them. There’s no real connection to be had with them. Our big feelings come from our meetings with real people, real family, real lovers, real enemies, and real art from real artists. AI is an empty rowboat, and the more it takes over the internet, the emptier it’s going to feel. People won’t feel like they can find the connection they’re craving in any of the areas that are dominated by artificial intelligence, and they’re going to go looking for it elsewhere. Maybe they’ll start going looking for it in places where there are physical people in physical bodies they can touch and make eye contact with, who they know for a fact are real people with real feelings and hopes and dreams like themselves. And maybe that would be a good thing. Humanity is becoming too disconnected and dissociated as it is. We could all benefit from digging our roots into reality a bit deeper. There are some technological developments where as an individual you have to draw a line for yourself. Modern civilization has made it possible to work from home and eat ten thousand calories a day without ever exercising or leaving your apartment, but most of us have the good sense not to do this because we know it would be very bad for our health. We’re going to have to start looking at AI the same way we look at McDonald’s: sure it’s there, but that doesn’t mean you have to consume it, because it’s really not good for you.

This is the biggest scandal in higher education right now. Why isn’t it on every front page?

Western-backed Zionist filth bombed another vehicle in the Barashit area in southern Lebanon. Western embassies and media in Lebanon remain silent because they are allies of the ethno-supremacists. This is not a ceasefire.

Israel bombed the historic Saint George’s Church in Lebanon… This church was built in 1867, 80 years before the establishment of Israel. Saint George’s Church is located in downtown Beirut, Lebanon

Hay algo que desde el fin de la Segunda Guerra Mundial es una ley: si intervienen militarmente los EEUU, todo empeora. Y hoy están peor en Yugoslavia, en Libia, en Afganistán, en Siria, en Irak... Y hay dementes que quieren que los marines invadan sus países...

Israel killed 14-year-old Faris Odeh 25 years ago today. This photo was taken 10 days earlier. For decades, they’ve tried to convince you that children throwing rocks are the problem and not the occupying force that murders them.

🇪🇭🇪🇭🇪🇭 ✊🏽 🇪🇭🇪🇭🇪🇭

Colonos sionistas perpetraron esta noche un pogromo contra la aldea de Abu Falah, al este de Ramallah (Cisjordania), prendiendo fuego a una casa de una familia palestina con niños dentro. Esta persecución racista del sionismo jamás sale en la prensa occidental, si fuesen casas de judíos ardiendo, sería un escándalo mundial.

🚨 🇷🇺🇺🇸🇻🇪 ÚLTIMA HORA: Rusia ratifica apoyo a Venezuela y pide a EEUU reorientar su lucha antidrogas hacia el interior de su país

ABC. La prensa democrática. Para no olvidar.

El régimen marroquí sigue con su circo. En esta ocasión disfraza a los colonos marroquíes en el Sáhara Occidental de saharaui y los lleva en autobuses para filmar una supuesta “celebración” de la supuesta población saharaui en las zonas ocupadas de la última resolución de la ONU

Venezuela drug cartels, Hamas beheadings/rape...Iraq WMD, all a creation of these fuckers.

We’ve cancelled our Paramount subscription. Reports suggest the company’s new CEO David Ellison may be punishing actors who spoke out against the genocide in Gaza.

⚡️🇵🇸🇮🇱JUST IN: Israel is systematically harvesting the organs of Palestinians for black-market trade and medical “tests.” Following the October 10 ceasefire, over 280 bodies of Palestinian hostages were returned by the Israeli army. Forensic teams reported that many were missing vital organs, including the heart, lungs, kidneys, and corneas. Dr. Abu Sitta, a Palestinian surgeon and professor, told Al Jazeera that medical evidence shows the chest cavities were surgically opened with bone saws, the organs extracted intact, and burn marks consistent with tissue-preserving chemicals found on the skin clear signs of organized organ harvesting under Israeli control.

No solo se robó la sigla. También los aportes, en dinero efectivo, que hicieron los militantes y funcionarios públicos, durante todos los meses de su gobierno. Por eso fue expulsado del MAS. De nada le sirvió nombrar dirigentes a dedo; intentar matarme físicamente; bombardearme con juicios sin pruebas y proscribirme. No pudo destruir el verdadero movimiento popular-indígena, rebelde, antiimperialista, anticolonialista y defensor de la soberanía nacional. Dejé su gobierno no por mi candidatura sino porque detecté que estaba gobernando por la plata y no por la patria; porque traicionó al pueblo, porque fue títere del imperialismo y la derecha local. Montó una organización criminal-jurídica para difamar, acusar, perseguir y encarcelar a sus compañeros. Él se desestabilizó y se bloqueó con su escandalosa corrupción familiar, desaparición del dólar y los combustibles, el incremento de precios, la inflación, la pérdida de poder adquisitivo, el nepotismo, sus pactos para el retorno de la derecha, la liberación de golpistas y el aniquilamiento del original MAS-IPSP. Se va como el peor presidente de la historia de Bolivia y del continente.

"La sociedad israelí es odiosa, narcisista y supremacista judía, igual que Netanyahu, es un odioso narcisista supremacista judío. Cuando lo ven a él, se ven a ellos mismos" "Las FOI matan a los niños como pasatiempo. ¡Como pasatiempo!, para ellos gazatíes son basura." —N.F

Hoy fue investido Rodrigo Paz y en su primer día como Presidente de Bolivia ya excluyó a los pueblos originarios retirando la bandera Whipala del Palacio de Gobierno, negando el Estado Plurinacional. Un gesto de provocación y no de consenso. Vienen momentos de choque en Bolivia.

Hoy en Madrid están permitiendo esta marcha neonazi de los fascistas de Núcleo Nacional. Así campa a sus anchas el fascismo en España.

Annie Lennox: “Desde el acuerdo de alto el fuego en Gaza, el genocidio israelí no ha hecho más que continuar: nos hemos acostumbrado a verlo como normal, pero el genocidio no se ha detenido.”