The Scariest Thing About the Misinformation Epidemic? No One Is Immune to It.
Yes, that includes you and me as well
I’m not sure why the Algorithm Gods of social media decided to place an AI-generated video of a dancing toddler dressed as a cabbage on my homepage a few days ago, but they did.
And that sent me down a rabbit hole of similarly bizarre — yet insanely popular — content featuring babies dressed as all sorts of other vegetables and fruits, happily bopping to tunes you’d expect to hear at a disco for heavily caffeinated badgers. What’s slightly worrying, though, is that quite a few of the comments on these videos are along the lines of, ‘the mother did a great job filming this’ and ‘what a talented baby.’
Our ability to discern what’s AI-generated from what’s real is clearly eroding — or perhaps it was never that sharp to begin with — but so is our ability to tell what information is true and what isn’t. And that’s scary. Because for every relatively harmless dancing cabbage baby (although I think I lost a few brain cells watching it), there are countless posts out there that aren’t so innocent.
We’re swimming in a digital ocean increasingly polluted with low-quality information, spam, deepfakes, half-truths, mistruths and blatant disinformation, and the rise of generative AI tools…
