When a generated photo or video becomes indistinguishiable from reality, does reality just collapse? How do we know what’s real anymore, and if society deems an image/video as false, how do we know it isn’t just a government cover-up?
Just a few words into a Gen-AI program and there will be a video on the news of you commiting a terrorist bombing of a pre-school, even tho you were never anywhere near there. They can send the secret police to murder people, then post a video of the people they’ve killed as “resisting arrest” or “trying to shoot the officers on scene”, even tho they were unarmed and cooperative.
Like… do governments just get to shape the world as they see fit?
You need really need genAI for a country to become authoritarian.
My bigger point is that it’s counterproductive to think of a government as an external black box. At the end of the day it’s a reflection of society (at least to some degree).
What to do about it is another question. But IMO the first step has to be recognition of “how things got to be this way”. If you can’t do that, the discussion around the impact of genAI are IMO moot.
Take russia as an example. In the 90s they had a relatively open media landscape, chaotic and influenced by oligarchs, but critique was allowed and it was very prominent.
But the russians elected a KGB goon in 2000 and then reelected him in 2004 after he shut down most independent media in his first term.
To this day, the russian opposition continues to look for scapegoats (90s liberals, Yeltsin, etc.) and reject any responsibility of society more broadly (revanchism, supremacist ideas, imperialism).
If you can’t even do that, then how are you going to deal with the impact of genAI?
My bigger point is that, IMO, genAI is almost a red herring. There will always be tech that can be used to enable authoritarianism. There is no magical tech solution to what is fundamentally a social issue.