Wildmimic

Like i said in another answer, maybe that loss of confidence in the authenticity of what we see online has a positive effect in the future where people start rejecting what they see on the web as the truth and start believing in what authoritative people say again; i hope they start listening to their doctors, teachers and scientists again instead of grifters and con-men. In that case anonymous social media will find itself dead in the water, with media using verified and authenticated profiles winning out.

It might cause the combined stupidity - that made things like qanon possible - to fall apart into the small splinter cells of town idiots they were before.

That’s an age-old problem, just scaled up. There has always been misinformation in social media (and before that in every bar). In the US it’s especially bad, mostly because the GOP profits directly from misinfo and has done as much damage as possible to the education system to ensure it stays that way. That’s also the reason there wont be any legislation regarding labeling of AI content (which is preferrable, but not enforceable even today) coming from your continent in the next few decades, sorry :-(

That might still be a “good” thing. More people than before become aware that what they see in social media is not reality, but entertainment that might or might not be real. It could lead to a general rejection of the notion that SM shows the truth.

But all in all it is still of no importance if it’s imagery to give cozy feelings because of cute animals like in the meme. An entertaining story does not have to be true to be entertaining, and in the same vein a cute pet image doesn’t have to depict a real pet to be cute.

If someone tells me a entertaining story that connects with me emotionally, it’s not so much important if the story is true per se, it’s important that it’s told well. The storyteller might have invented the whole thing or based it on something similar and modified/exaggerated it, but that doesn’t take away from the story. If i tell myself a story it wouldn’t be satisfying either (if i’m not worldbuilding or an author, where the satisfaction has other sources).

It’s an interesting thought and would explain why people react so intensely. I for my part was very quickly picking up on the fakeness of facebook - when i was riled up during the arabian spring in Libya, i realized that i get easily emotionally manipulated by the served content, which made me quit.

Nowadays i know much better how to verify information that’s important to me; a dogs picture licking a cat which makes her purr will always emotionally positive for me, because a) it doesn’t matter outside of my satisfaction, just like the well told story, and b) i can’t check it for authenticity either way, so i do not care about authenticity.

I’d say its less removed - the person reenacting is acting on his own interpretation of what happened, while the generated images are the distilled versions of real people winning the lottery.

Also, like I said, life is much easier accepting that not everything that i can emotionally connect to has to be authentic. I can very much connect to the notion that there are happy pets out there even if i see a drawing of a happy pet.

The information that there are happy dogs out there doing happy dog things isn’t wrong tho, regardless of how many images of happy dogs are real or fake.

It’s pretty simple: if it’s not important, who tf cares if it’s AI or not. If it’s important, there normally is a way to verify if the portrayed information is authentic because it will be important for others too (the info is the important part, not even if the medium where you got the info from is real or not). Life is easier this way, and important info should have been verified before AI too.

This bears behind has been sponsored by Blue Ridge Mountain News!

It’s definitely good for people who struggle with a wide array of mental health issues, and is good prophylaxis against the same.

an asterisk in regular expressions indicates an arbitrary amount of characters, so its probably avocados