181 | The Truth is dead, long live the ???

The truth is based on facts and enables conversations and arguments revolving around all subjects of life, BUT, the concept of truth, as we know it is dead, or at least dying. 

Truth has been challenged throughout history, from the days of Kain and Abel.  

In recent years social media, and the democratization of content creation tools has put truth under more pressure, but still extensive massive truth manipulation required resources who can only be obtained by governments and large corporations.

All this changed with the introduction of generative AI. Tools like:
💥 ChatGPT
💥 Mijourney
💥 Dall-e
💥 Runway
Enables anyone to create highly realistic documents, images and videos of events and "facts" that never existed. This will practically enable anyone to create their own truth to promote any agenda.

You may think that there would be tools that would allow us to detect AI-generated content, but so far, these tools are falling short of being reliable. In the best-case scenario, there will be an arms-race between detection tools and manipulation tools, and the manipulation tools would always be ahead.

In this episode, you will learn more about the current AI tools, the capabilities they bring, and the implication it has on the concept of truth.

Hi, It's Isar the host of the Business Growth Accelerator Podcast
I am passionate about growing businesses and helping CEOs, business leaders, and entrepreneurs become more successful. I am also passionate about relationship building, community creation for businesses, and value creation through content.
I would love it if you connect with me on LinkedIn. Drop me a DM, and LMK you listened to the podcast, what you think and what topics you would like me to cover 🙏

Transcript

Isar Meitis: 0:00

I've got a very scary announcement to make. And that is the truth as we know it is dead, or at least it's dying and it's in a very bad shape. And the reason I'm saying all of that is the capabilities of generative AI and how fast they're moving and the things that would enable anybody to do in the very immediate future. Hello and welcome to the Business Growth Accelerator. This is Isar Meitis, your host and I've got a very scary announcement to make. And that is the truth as we know it is dead, or at least it's dying and it's in a very bad shape. And I know this may not be directly correlated to business, but it has huge implications on everything we know, including businesses and including our personal lives, obviously. And the reason I'm saying all of that is the capabilities of generative AI and how fast they're moving and the things that would enable anybody to do in the very immediate future. So, let me give you a quick summary and then we'll dive into the details. Generative AI enables you today to generate images that are near perfection and extremely realistic and is almost impossible to detect definitely with an naked eye, whether it's an actual photo or an AI generated photo. And the same exact thing is gonna happen to video. Anybody will recreate a realistic video of anything they want just by typing what needs to be in the video. That's it. Which means generating quote unquote facts that will support whatever truth you wanna tell will become at the fingertips of anybody who wants to spread Any kind of news, stories, scientifical research, personal stuff, et cetera, every new thing will be able to be generated in seconds and be highly, highly realistic. Before we dive in, let's define what is truth. so if I look up dictionary definitions of what is truth, it says something like,"that which is true or in accordance with fact or reality, or a similar one, a fact or belief that is accepted as true." And you can see these two definitions are taking slightly different approaches. One says something is true if it's according to a fact or a reality, and the other says it's a fact that is believed to be accepted as true. Both are definitions over truth, and both are extremely problematic with those new capabilities that I'm talking about. Before we dive deeper, I wanna say that when the concept of truth was born, the concept of lying, was born with it. People have been using lies to achieve goals by deceiving other people since the beginning of time, all the way back to Cain and Abel. That being said, a lie from one person to the other on general information is easy to fake. When it comes to quote unquote, selling lies to the mass population is something that requires more and more resources. So the bigger the lie you want to tell, the more resources you need. And because you need to be able to fabricate the relevant facts that will be supporting evidence to the lie that you're trying to sell. Hence why governments when they try to deceive one another, have the resources to do these kind of things. So the concept of manipulating the truth or telling lies or deceiving other people has existed for a very long time in recent years with advancement in technology and social media availability, and the ability to generate content and to distribute that content through channels which are not monitored by anyone, has took a very serious swing at the concept of truth. And just a few examples. You know, the recent war between Russia and the Ukraine, we've seen multiple videos that had nothing to do with actual war in Russia and Ukraine, but was published all over social media and in some cases by national media as videos from the war and they're actually not. There are multiple instances of Iran launching rockets to show its capabilities when people very quickly caught up that the number of rockets launched are duplicated. So the same exact rocket is showing in more than one place just to show that they have more fire power than they actually have. We've seen numerous marketing campaigns using fabricated truths to promote different things, from the very basic of people standing next to Lamborghini, that is next to an amazing mansion on the beach that they hired for 30 seconds, paying a lot of money, just to make you believe that they are really rich and hence you should follow whatever they want to sell you. All the way to much bigger deceiving campaigns that companies are pulling off in order to sell you different things. Another example is photos of models. Right? We all know that every image that we see on a magazine or on social media and everywhere is being photoshopped. Like the model doesn't look in real life as good as it looks in the photos that are being shared. So all of these are examples of where people with a lot of resources are able to manipulate the truth and distribute it to a relatively wide audience in order to create the perception of something to promote a goal that they have. So the question you probably are asking yourself, so if this been going on for so long from the Bible, and definitely in the past few years, why are you jumping right now and saying that the truth is dead? And the reason I'm saying that is the latest advancement in generative AI technology have moved from government and large companies to literally anyone. Those of you who haven't seen generative AI tools, I urge you to forget about play with them. Go and do a little bit of research and look at what they're producing today. So MidJourney just recently announced Midjourney 5. Midjourney is a company that allows you to write text and get an image out of it. You can write anything you want and the image gets created. You can ask for whatever style you want so it can create a Renaissance painting. it can create a cartoon and it can also create a highly realistic photo. And their fifth generation will blow your mind because there is absolutely no way that the naked eye can tell the difference between an actual photo that was taken in a camera, in an actual scene versus an AI generated image. Anything you can imagine, anything you can describe with words can become a highly realistic photo, but that's, like I said, it's just a part of the equation. The next generation of all of this is text to video. there are already two examples of this happening right now that you can see samples of. One, you could go to a company called Runway. They have been doing incredible things with manipulating video and still images and turning them into video, but now they've announced their second generation that will allow text to video. And do I think it will be highly realistic in gen two? I don't think so, at least according to the examples that I've seen. But Gen three will come very quickly after that and so on and so forth. The other version of this is just by going to Huggingface and looking for model scope, text to video synthesis. It's available and open to the public right now. You can go in there, type anything you want into the prompt, and it will produce a short video for you. Again, not fully realistic yet, relatively short, but the capability is there right now. So I'm going back to the definitions of truth. First definition was that which is true in accordance with a fact. What is a fact? A fact, if I go back to the second definition, a fact or a belief that is accepted as true, so it's kind of like a circular thing, right? If you believe something is true, it becomes a fact, which then can be used in order to establish another new truth based on the fact. If I can fabricate facts by fabricating a video of an event that did not actually happen with anybody's face on it in any actual location on the planet, this is what is possible within the immediate future. so anybody will be able to create any facts they want in order to establish a truth that relays on that fact to establish it. And then it's in the eyes of the beholder to decide whether they believe in that or not. Very quickly, in the very near future, we will have an endless stream of fabricated news, videos, images, facts that people will use to promote whatever goals they want. Again, it's been done today. It's just gonna be amplified by two orders of magnitude because of the ability to fabricate these facts on your home computer with zero additional resources, no cameramen, no editing skills, no photography capabilities, just by typing what your imagination wants in order to fabricate the facts you need in order to establish the truth or sell the story you want to sell. as I was getting to this realization in my journey through this process in my head, I wanted to go and check what the AI generated content, so ChatGPT will say about the topic. So I went to ChatGPT and asked it act as an AI agent and futurist. Since generative AI is becoming so powerful, it will soon be impossible to differentiate between the real photos and videos and AI generated ones. This means anyone in the world will be able to generate facts about events that never happened. Do you think this will alter the concept of truth? So that was my question. The answer that ChatGPT gave me is,"as an AI expert and futurist, I believe that the increasing power of generating AI will have a profound impact on our concept of truth. With the ability to generate highly realistic photos and videos that are nearly indistinguishable from the real ones, it will become increasingly difficult to discern what is real and what is not." And it goes on and on about this and gives more examples like creating propaganda and spreading false information and so on. All the bad impacts that this happens and its impact to everything we know, such as what's the point in having a news media channel if anybody can generate news? So our trust in basically anything will erode over time. In the end, ChatGPT goes and adds the following."However, I also believe that we will develop tools and techniques to detect and mitigate the spread of fake photos and videos. for example, there will be new technologies that can identify and verify the authenticity of digital media, and there will be increased efforts to educate the public about the dangers of fake information." Okay, so there are already tools out there today who can allow you to detect text that is generated by an ai, whether it's ChatGPT or any other platform. That being said, there are already tools that allows you to take the text generated by ChatGPT and Copy.ai and so on, and manipulate it until those detection tools cannot detect it anymore. So I went ahead and asked ChaptGPT about that as well. so I typed the following,"there are already tools out there that can trick AI generated text detection tools to think they are reviewing human generated text. Do you truly believe that future detection tools will be able to catch up to new developments of fake videos and images that will be trying to avoid detection?" Got a long answer, but in summary, it says,"in the future, I believe that there will be a continuous arm race between the creators of fake media and those developing detection tools to identify it."So what I think we're facing is think about the world of computer viruses, right? So new computer viruses are being created all the time. then companies who are making money by detecting these viruses, AKA antivirus software are finding the new tricks, the new methodologies, the new concepts that these viruses are using, and trying to mitigate them with the new version of antivirus. And then the cycle goes on and on and on where in the end of the day, The people who are trying to avoid detection can avoid detection forever because every time they get caught, they find a new technique in order to avoid being detected. And I think the same exact thing will happen over here. Yes, there'll be a multitude of tools that will allow us to detect fake videos, fake images, and try to avoid them. And at the same time, there will be more capabilities to generate videos that will avoid detection, and hence we will end up totally, totally eroding trust and the concept of truth. What does this mean? What does this mean to us as individuals? What does it mean on our personal lives? What does it mean to our business lives? What does it mean to society? The truth is, I don't have a clue. And the bigger and worse truth is nobody has a clue. And yet the strain of powerful AI capabilities just keeps on accelerating faster and faster. It may push us all off a cliff. We don't know what cliff it will be and when it's exactly coming, but it's definitely questioning the fabric on which societies are built, right? So trust and truth are some of the basic things on which societies and human relationships are built, and this will be put to question with these new tools. So while I don't know what it means on the bigger picture, like I said, I don't think anybody knows. I can say a few things for certain. One is the importance of being aware of what I just said and looking for tools that will enable you to detect what is true and what is not, and to do additional fact checking with additional sources beyond the one or two sources that come to you through social media or through your newsfeed, or even through national media. Go and check several different sources and the hope that that video or source that you're watching Has not been populated yet across all the other channels, so that's number one. The other thing that I see as inevitable is the growing importance of human connection and human relationships in the future, and this is the only thing that I see that can mitigate what I just said. Meaning, if you are in person speaking to people, shaking hands, having dinner, going to a conference together, meeting in an actual business, meeting with actual people, you can know that what's happening there is actually happening. Versus anybody sending you a video of something that presumably happened will be, and should be questioned as far as whether it actually happened or not. Even today as human and social creatures, we have a higher level of emotional impact when we're actually seeing and meeting people, whether it's on social interactions, personal interactions, romantic interactions, or business interactions, all of this will be amplified dramatically when people will be able to generate videos and images of stuff that presumably happened. I know this episode might be a little depressing to people who has not been in this field and has not been following what's going on. I'm sharing this information not to depress anybody, but to prepare you for what's actually coming and to have you aware of what's actually happening and is available. And doable right now, so not sometime in the future. and to get you to think about these topics and share it with other people. So as a society, we are better prepared for what's coming. I hope you found this interesting and I would love to. Your thoughts and feedback on this, please connect with me on LinkedIn, ISAR Matis, I S A R M E I T I S, and let me know what you think on this topic. I would really love to hear as many opinions as possible, and I really wanna try to spread a way for us to mitigate the Negative impacts of this AI wave that is coming.