Pablo Núñez Palma

With the advent of high-quality AI-generated media and the soon-to-be reality of generation on a real-time basis, I'm seeing a version of the same type of questions going around: how will we be able to distinguish real from generated? I think that's the wrong question to ask. It's worth remembering that generated videos have been around for 60+ years. And we are all okay. We actually already have a term for it: computer-generated imagery (CGI). Most movies and shows you watch are partially or entirely generated. Remember those dinosaurs in Jurassic Park? Guess what? They are not real. (yeah, sorry to break that) But sometimes, CGI is harder to find. Look for David Fincher's VFX breakdown of The Social Network, for example. The best CGI is the one you don't notice. And society has been perfectly fine about it. Under that premise, then, the real concerns do not seem to be how to distinguish what is real from what is not, but what happens when everyone has the tools that a David Fincher movie budget has. What happens when everyone can create anything they can imagine. My long-term position is that what is needed moving forward is a focus on i) digital literacy and ii) social awareness. i) Digital literacy: you need to adjust your mental models for every new technology. We keep discussing how fast technology changes, but we rarely discuss how fast culture adapts. We tend to underestimate speed of cultural changes and human adaptability. The best way of updating a prior is to have experience and exposure. One of the earliest films ever made was “The Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat Station” by the Lumière brothers in 1895. Legend has it that when the film was first screened, the audience panicked and fled the theater, convinced that the train in the film was going to burst through the screen and run them over. You can cure your fear of trains in films by understanding how movies are made. ii) Collective awareness: Social verification is key for any malicious type of content. We are already collectively good at sussing out malicious things that are trying to be passed as truth but are not. We get better at collective awareness by exercising more of i). The solution to potential challenges posed by ubiquitous access to high-quality content creation tools is not merely technological but also cultural and educational.

Not true. We said exactly the same thing about photoshop 30 years ago. When considering technological change, you should also factor in the human and social behavioral changes that come with it.