Back in the old days when I was a teenager hanging out with my friends, we’d share hilarious (to us) stories about getting drunk, doing silly stuff or seeing something that made us crack up with laughter. Occasionally, when the storyteller was out of breath from laughing so hard, he’d look up to see his friends standing there stone-faced, not laughing at all.
“I guess you had to be there…” was a common response from the storyteller to this non-reaction.
I was thinking about this line the other day while listening to a podcast talking about the proliferation of AI generated videos, impersonations and fakes that have now reached a quality that is nearly indistinguishable from real video.
Now, like photo editing via photoshop and instagram filters, with video you can no longer “believe your eyes“.
The podcasters were bemoaning that nobody will be able to determine what is real from what is fake.
I thought about this for a while.
I remembered when I watched a news story about something I had direct knowledge of in my 20s and how incompetently they reported on the “facts.”
I recalled stories in trade magazines and business press throughout my professional career that were wildly inaccurate and misleading.
I thought about my awakening to minimalism, anticonsumerism, and frugal living that began during the 2008 financial crises when I started to question everything I had been told about money, work, stuff and spending (aka conventional wisdom).
People have been misrepresenting the “facts” for my entire life. For that matter, they’ve been doing this for much of civilization. Any light reading of history provides numerous examples.
Then I had an epiphany.
It doesn’t matter that photoshop, filters and AI has enabled realistic fake video creation at the click of a button.
If I want to know what is real and what is a fact, I have to see it with my own eyes or experience it in person – not via a screen streamed over the Internet.
I consider video the same way I do most Internet content – it’s likely bullshit that was created to capture eyeballs, attention and money.
We can all tell the truth from the lies- you just have to be there.