Embracing the Apocalypse of Deep Fakes
Deep Fakes and AI generated content will only push us to understand the true roots of reality and truth.
There seems to be a lot of political anxiety about the potential impact of new deepfake technologies on our democracy. Aside from the irrational notion that to save democracy we may need to abolish free speech and replace it with censorship, there is a real problem here for each of us.
If we cannot tell truth from fake, how are we going to find the truth? The moment when a deep fake video of anyone saying anything will be a perfect replica of reality is not so far away. Some fear that reality will simply dissolve, and anarchy and chaos will doom human culture, one largely built on the taken-for-granted concept of objective reality and truth.
The point of this text is that the effect of perfect deep fakes, however problematic already, is ultimately mostly healthy for modern civilization. Only our illusions will dissolve, not reality itself.
In short, the era of "image-is-everything" is coming to an end. And this sudden shock will bring back some important values at the core of how civilization works. Reality will never dissolve, it will simply be defined by different means.
The tyranny of image
In a culture where image is everything, including reputation, deep fakes are especially problematic. Let's pause for a moment and look around at our politics, business, and entertainment. Elections are won not because of beliefs, values, or ideas, but based on "image" - i.e., being likable, not convincing anyone of anything as we all agree that politicians lie. So it's only natural that politicians struggle to build likeable images while embracing lies as a needed tool for that. As technology has levelled the playing field, brands rely more and more on image rather than product; cars are a great example, they now literally look and perform the same. And in entertainment, image is truly king and merit has long since taken a back seat — think of the damage done to the careers of talented actors because of ridiculous personal scandals, and the long list of less talented actors who have taken their place simply because they had the right image. It is image, not merit, that determines success in most areas of human activity today.
But an "image-is-everything" era can only function if there are tools to tightly control that image, i.e., to "build" it. It's also where the money is, in the means to build it and make it reach its intended "targets". And finally, it's where the real power is because it's through image that politicians can be made and unmade, or indeed that any public figure can be elevated or assassinated. Who would expect the people in charge of these powerful tools to quietly accept their loss? What we're seeing these days is not the damage that deep-fakes and fake news are doing to our society, but the reaction of those who are threatened with losing control of society because of these new technologies.
Judging by the massive efforts to denounce deep-fakes and fake news, one might think that truth itself is at stake, as we're now living in some kind of "truth era," mortally threatened by these new technologies1. But we all know that this is not the case. One thing the pandemic has made clear is the amount of official lies and omissions those who control the message can produce to suit their agenda. The tight grip they have on the media and the Internet to control the message and outright censor inconvenient information has pushed that message farther and farther away from the truth. The fact is, they didn't need deep-fakes to lie to us on an unimaginable scale.
So a strange possibility arises: what if someone uses deep-fakes to get politicians to tell the actual truth? The possibility of having a video recording that recreates a conversation that really took place behind closed doors in the White House is, at first, mind-boggling. But the fact is that technology itself has always been neutral, only the reason people use it can be good or bad. And the motives are not in the machines, but in the people. So, yes, we'll be able to use "deep-fakes" to tell the truth!
The making of Truth
But how do politicians control the truth? We tend to forget that what they are really trying to control is not the message itself, but public opinion. What we tend to call "the truth" since the death of Socrates has not been the truth itself, but what most people are willing to believe it to be. A whole art of crafting messages to sway public opinion has developed over time, and the good old rhetoric used in Greek or Roman public meetings has become a corpus of black arts, including real-time sentiment analysis using AI, rapid polling techniques, dirty journalists, and slick copywriters. Truth is the last reason for this hidden industry. But its very existence proves that there is another hidden problem in all this discussion of truth and reality: public opinion.
A crucial difficulty that civilization has brought to man is that the never-ending expansion of knowledge has forced each individual to rely not on what he knows directly through his senses, but on what others say about things far from his direct reach. Most Romanians have never traveled to America or met Americans. However, they have forceful opinions about them, and they usually do not realize that these are opinions fabricated by others that they have received and chosen to believe. In school, we never question the truth of the teachings we receive, even if experience later proves that maybe we should have. And we used to believe what a highly respected paper like WP wrote during the Watergate era without questioning the truth of their investigations, mostly because we believed that those who wrote them were making sure they had the facts. There is a long list of examples of informal "truth-validating institutions" that lie at the heart of our civilization, mostly transparent to us in this respect, but nevertheless crucial in selecting what is offered to us to believe as true. In other words, what we call "truth", and consequently "reality", is in most cases not some objective output of our senses, but what we choose to believe it to be, consciously or automatically, in the messages we receive from others, mostly from "reputable sources".
And that worked pretty well until the Internet era, but not as well as one might be inclined to believe today.
All of Western civilization is morally defined by two crimes that were possible because "public opinion" was swayed by bad people: The murder of Socrates and the crucifixion of Jesus. The impact of these events on the development of the modern Christian world can hardly be underestimated. The whole concept of modern justice has its roots in these two unjust killings. But the reminder is there: what we choose to believe as a community is not always the truth.
Writer and journalist Walter Lippmann wrote his masterpiece "Public Opinion" in 1922; after witnessing the power of propaganda to change people's minds during World War I, he became truly distrustful of the collective wisdom of the masses, whom he called the "bewildered herd". For herd we were. In retrospect, after the years of the great totalitarian tragedies of the past century, Lippmann's "bewildered herd" is far too gentle a phrase to describe what the masses of people are capable of in the name of truth.
More recently, Martin Gurri, a retired CIA analyst and gifted writer, wrote "The Revolt of the Public," a book that looks in depth at how the Internet has changed the way public opinion is formed. Gurri looks closely at the challenges the Internet poses to those who control the message, but the underlying idea is that the "mechanism" by which collective knowledge becomes "truth" is being broken by technology, and the establishment is totally unprepared.
Upon closer examination, it seems that human civilization has been at odds with truth and reality since its inception. What "deep fakes," "fake news," and the beloved mantra of "disinformation" remind us of is not that we are about to lose a paradise of civilization and truth (insistently but falsely called "democracy"), but that a problem we have chosen to ignore can no longer be hidden: what is truth? What is real?
Knowledge and faith
At this point, the reader should take it as a mostly undisputed truth that, given the limitations of our senses and the need to rely on information _from others_, what we call "real" is what we decide to believe is real2. Except for a limited set of truths from logic and mathematics, science itself, since Popper, has been bound by the fundamental idea that scientific truth is always temporary. In other words, most of what we call "reality" is real because we have chosen to believe that it is.
This text is not intended to enter into the philosophical discussion of truth and reality. Instead, I'm trying to point out the simple fact that when we decide that something that is not in front of our eyes (i.e., most of what we know about the world) is real or not, when we decide that some statement we hear or read on the Internet is true or not, it's our decision, not some "objective reality" that's imposed on us. And this split-second decision we make thousands of times a day to trust or not trust the source of the information we receive is based on the fact that we believe the source to be reliable. To many people's possible surprise, we know things because we have faith in the quality of the sources from which we get our knowledge, not because the world imposes that knowledge on us. We simply do not have the time and resources to double check everything that comes to us as "knowledge" and "truth"; we choose to believe.
This may come as a shock to modern man, because science has brought with it the mythical belief that scientists always double-check everything, and that this produces some sort of objective, independent reality. It is true that they do, they check the data (or at least they should). But data is never more than numbers, the fact is that you can be buried under mountains of data and never get closer to any understanding which is the foundation of truth and reality; a pile of data has no meaning in itself, you cannot call something you do not understand what it is "true" or "existing", at least it should have a name and an analogy behind it; so to understand the data we have built some theories and call them "true". The truth is in the theories, not in the numbers. But then we take these theories, not the data, as established truth, and when we say "the data never lies," we are not referring to the numbers, but to the theory we use to explain the data. However, scientific theories are only temporary logical constructions aimed at explaining the data, a temporary truth we have chosen to believe, and are never any sort of established truths. Simply put, even in science, we have chosen to believe that something is true or not.
For example, the data shows that global warming is real. But to date, there is no sound scientific theory that proves human activity is responsible for the warming. There are a number of sound and plausible hypotheses about various causes, including cosmic cycles and human activity. However, many manipulatively assimilate the truth of the data to the truth of a hypothesis. If you then point out that there is no evidence that human activity is the only cause, you are accused of denying the evidence of the data! Global warming arguments aside, the point is that even scientific truth is ultimately what we choose to believe. Science has only hidden this reality by using the confusion between data (which is mostly objective) and theories explaining the data (which are temporarily true and ultimately false).
The fact that belief and faith play such a crucial role in the way our collective knowledge of the world (including science) evolves points to what will happen once the Deep Fakes demolish the actual structures and institutions of truth validation: we'll be forced (finally!) to question how we chose what and whom we believe. And, to the possible surprise of many, this is also a religious problem.
Truth and faith
In the end, all that a potential deluge of deep fakes submerging our civilization will accomplish is to make everyone question their faith in the sources of their knowledge. In a way, a world in which any video recording can be fake is only a world in which video recordings cannot be trusted. But there are other ways to get to the truth besides video recordings. For one thing, direct contact between us, humans, will become crucial, paradoxically so in an era of virtuality, video calls, and AR avatars, where the future of our children's mental health is endangered by having their lives sucked up by screens of all sizes.
The era of mass media will meet its natural end, that of a gigantic entertainment machine that lives and thrives in fantasy, with no relevance to what we call reality and truth. The merging of fiction and truth in the workings of this machine today, the way everything is "gamified" and turned into a show, the way crime becomes entertaining news3, the dissolving line between fiction and documentary, between science fiction and scientific truth, is already poisoning our minds with the demons of absolute doubt. An extreme demonstration that _nothing_ this machine produces can be believed will lead to its demise.
And perhaps the written text will once again become crucial to understanding and shaping politics. One can quickly argue that AI in the form of large language models can already impersonate anyone. It's true that it's easy for a pattern-matching machine to match the style patterns of Trump. But it can only imitate the old, not create the new, and to a certain extent the real weakness of Trump is that he is only made up of his style patterns, and there is no real intellect behind him capable of speaking freely, as Reagan did at the 1976 Republican Convention when he lost his nomination to Ford4. ChatGPT can be convincing in its imitation of Biden, but will never be able to create out of nothing the Churchill speech in the House of Commons from June 19405.
This reminds us that one reason why the quality of today's politicians everywhere is abysmal, their culture non-existent, the sad number of books they read so low, is precisely because these things are not necessary in an "everything is image" world. And if anything, the demise of this world can only bring back politicians who are a true creation of the culture they want to lead into the future, and not some fake persona with an engineered image to please the masses.
What AI will help us achieve is to get rid of impostors everywhere by showing that being an excellent imitator is not enough. LLMs will drown political copywriters in their own platitudes. Video-generating machines will multiply mediocrity and mannerism to the point where we'll be desperate for authenticity. Humans cannot live in a world where everything is relative, so the effect of deep fakes on our civilization will undoubtedly be the opposite of what we fear today: it will lead us to the true sources of knowledge and expose false knowledge for what it is, a lie.
In the process, we'll be confronted with the inescapable fact that it is we who choose what to believe, and it is we who collectively define what we call reality. And in this shocking yet obvious truth lies the true possibility of reconciling science and faith. In the end, we're left with one proof: if it is we who choose what to believe, there's no real contradiction between believing the universe began with a big bang and believing God created everything. There is no contradiction between believing that the reason a vaccine works is because our immune system works and believing that angels can guide our lives. These are not, as we're inclined to see them today, alternative realities, but part of the same and only reality, where everything in it is there because we've chosen to believe it is6. Ultimately, there is no conflict in us choosing to trust the logic of science and at the same time choosing to trust God's covenant with us. And this is possible because everything we know, about science or God, is ultimately just a matter of faith. This we cannot see clearly today, but once the old institutions of truth will be demolished by all sorts of fabricated realities, we will.
Isn't it amazing that the ultimate gift of technology is to bring back to us the God Nietzsche declared dead some time ago?
There are plenty of headlines and conferences on "AI endangering democracy", like this is the only problem democracy has right now.
Of course, there are strong reasons for this belief, rational arguments for that. But there is always a chance that what we take as truth is not quite that.
An interesting analysis of how the huge commercial success of OJ Simpson car chase broadcasted live on CNN led to the launch of the rival Fox News is to be found somewhere on Substack, I have lost the link but the story stuck.
This is one of the most formidable free speeches in modern history
and there are scores of young people, future politicians, who decided after that speech to enter politics. And this is also a speech ChatGPT will never be able to create, even if trained on everything else Reagan ever said or wrote.
"We shall go on to the end, we shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our Island, whatever the cost may be, we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender [...]"
Keep in mind that most of what we call “reality” and “truth” today is inaccessible to our direct senses. Of course, one cannot deny what he sees in front of him or what he hears with his own ears and chose to believe it's not there; this is madness. But the overwhelming part of what we know about the world is based on what we choose to believe to be true, precisely because we cannot check ourselves. I never met Reagan, yet I believe it lived. This is not different from the fact that I never met God, He never spoke to me, yet I believe in the covenant he made with us. No matter how credible the sources, the fact is that reality changes and truth evolves, and we're forced to constantly decide what to believe. Even in science, considered by many the ultimate bearer of objective truths, knowledge advances precisely by relentlessly questioning said truths. In a way, Einstein decided not to believe Newtonian mechanics was true. And Heisenberg chose to believe an electron cannot have a precise position. At a larger timescale, science is only an uninterrupted chain of temporary truths, determined by scientists ready to prove them false by choosing so.