There is measurable vulnerability in people who lack experience outside a single story. We documented this in terms of who falls victim to Advance Fee Fraud (419 scams) but it also applies to the AntiFa and BLM scams spreading lately.
A story-teller on TED may explain it far better than I ever could:
Army Captain Florent Groberg, who received the Medal of Honor for charging a suicide bomber in Afghanistan, calls this opening up to others so you can “have a conversation”.
Here’s a weird footnote in deepfake history…
Old publishers of “facts” like map makers and encyclopedias gave up inserting fake data after the US Supreme Court ruled their facts can’t be copyrighted, as a New Yorker article from 2005 explained.
If Mountweazel is not a household name, even in fountain-designing or mailbox-photography circles, that is because she never existed. “It was an old tradition in encyclopedias to put in a fake entry to protect your copyright,” Richard Steins, who was one of the volume’s editors, said the other day. “If someone copied Lillian, then we’d know they’d stolen from us.”
The clever habit of sprinkling fake facts among the real ones declined when money couldn’t be made from proving someone copied facts.
It kind of makes sense that they lost the copyright.
Stealing a fact seems absurd, made only more absurd by polluting a fact to prove it was stolen (an act essentially proving it impossible to steal a fact), and then made even more absurd by trying to prove the decoy (deepfake) is NOT a fact.
“Its inherent fakeitude is fairly obvious,” she said. “We wanted something highly improbable. We were trying to make a word that could not arise in nature.”
They had to make the fake obvious, yet hidden, because they wanted to prosecute people for copying facts that couldn’t be distinguished from fakes. Uh-huh.
In the end there were better ways to create uniqueness (such as very specific distances) versus these silly falsifications. Money for copyright violation seems like such a low bar though, in terms of why someone would insert fakes into a map.
Food for thought when you look at your next map and wonder if you can detect a deepfake. As I wrote in 2020, maps are inherently political and about power.
At 9:40 AM on Feb 17, 2016, using Twitter for iPad, the @brian_bilston account tweeted:
Here’s a poem entitled “America is a Gun”.
Strangely, however, you will not find this poem anywhere on Brian Bilston’s official “Poetry Laboetry“.
Since I was a teenager I’ve preferred watching non-American movies because they aren’t saddled with the boring good/bad split.
Drama becomes exceptionally lame when you are told who is good, who is bad, and then you take an obvious side and wait out the inevitable results.
Nothing is at stake.
This was always one of the first points I made when I was teaching ethics to computer science graduate students.
A simple good/bad binary is like an empty premise, not food for thought; doesn’t come anywhere close to reflecting the messy and hard decisions of the real world.
On that note, here’s an interesting essay that says Robin Hood was transfigured into a moral tale to excite political resistance:
As part of this new nationalist consciousness, other authors started changing the old stories to make a moral distinction between, for example, Robin Hood and the Sheriff of Nottingham. Before Joseph Ritson’s 1795 retelling of these legends, earlier written stories about the outlaw mostly showed him carousing in the forest with his merry men. He didn’t rob from the rich to give to the poor until Ritson’s version – written to inspire a British populist uprising after the French Revolution. Ritson’s rendering was so popular that modern retellings of Robin Hood, such as Disney’s 1973 cartoon or the film Prince of Thieves (1991) are more centrally about outlaw moral obligations than outlaw hijinks. The Sheriff of Nottingham was transformed from a simple antagonist to someone who symbolised the abuses of power against the powerless. Even within a single nation (Robin Hood), or a single household (Cinderella), every scale of conflict was restaged as a conflict of values.
My immediate thought is that this presents a chicken-and-egg dilemma. Were old stories changed only after nationalist consciousness, or did they create it?
I mean these narratives may have changed as a reflection of nationalist consciousness, but that doesn’t preclude narratives from having moral spin. Nor does it preclude moral stories from being messy and complex to stimulate thought instead of obedience.
Overall the essay lacks a lot of oral traditions and mostly centers around Greek literature. It makes no mention of Native American or African stories at all, for example, so I am unconvinced it has a fully researched view.
One clear danger is how a good/bad narrative is a terrible way to practice intelligence, let alone threat detection and mitigation. Some people broadly apply a very precise term like “terrorism”, for example, to be a generic classifier of “bad”:
The terrorism label, for them, is a way of distinguishing who is in the wrong. Brian Jenkins, a leading scholar of terrorism, observed in 1981: ‘Terrorism is what the bad guys do.’