With the recent news tsunami about ChatGPT and AI, there has been a lot of talk about AI being used to create term papers, images and video. On the Joe Rogan podcast, Joe often worries that we won’t be able to tel what is real anymore vs. what has been faked. He shows examples of videos of him interviewing people he never met, of Biden saying things he never said and of comedians impersonating famous people using apps that mimic a person’s voice and likeness.
I’ve written about online fakes before when I started noticing photo filters being used to significantly change people’s appearance for online dating app profiles. Then I leaned about apps like facetune and Instagram filters that do this for images and videos.
We don’t need to worry about “the future” create a false reality. It’s already here.
But unlike Rogan, I’m not the least bit worried. I can tell what is real from what is not.
Women do not look like Barbie dolls. Men do not have chiseled abs, square jobs and perfectly white teeth. Skin is not smooth and flawless. Eyes do not sparkle luminescently from their natural natural ice-blue or emerald green color.
Instead, real people have hairs, pores, wrinkles and cellulite. They have dry skin patches, pimples, age spots and love handles.
So whenever I see a “flawless” face/body, I know it’s fake. This includes any image or video from a Kardashian, a celebrity, and now, from an ever-growing number of “normal people”. When I see these, I can install recognize they are bullshit.
It’s the same way I perceive magazine cover images. I know they are airbrushed, photoshopped, professionally lit and modified. They are not accurate representations of something real.
I’m not even passing judgement on these anymore. I know that if there is a financial incentive to expect people to do whatever it takes to drive more money. I’m aware that even people without a financial incentive, many people do not feel that publishing fakes images of themselves is doing anything wrong.
So instead, my default is to be skeptical of everything I see online. Whether it’s a video from StarWars purporting to be a scene from the war in Ukraine, to an actor’s impossibly perfect body, to headlines about the latest non-peer reviewed study or poll, I suspect it’s all been modified in some way to manipulate the viewer (me).
Then, if I am actually interested in the content, I might dig deeper to look at statistics, read the pubMed study or search for other information to determine if the info appears to be valid.
Most of the time, I just tune out altogether and move on with my life.
Since I’m not a reporter, pundit or podcaster, and I don’t need to use fear, fakes or my uniformed opinions, that pretty easy to do.