Distrust and Verify
In an age of mass misinformation and artificial articles, we must remember to distrust and verify.
Transcript
Two days before last year’s Slovakian elections, candidate and predicted winner Michal Šimečka went viral. In a short clip that circulated on Facebook and Twitter, he tells a popular radio host that he’s rigging the elections, partly by buying votes from the nation’s marginalized Roma population. In a separate clip, he informs voters that he’s going to double the price of beer once in power. These clips, of course, were misinformation generated by an artificial intelligence. Nevertheless, they nudged voters away from Šimečka, and he lost the election — with power of the government going to his pro-Russian opponent.
Democracy relies on the free and fruitful flow of information. And our digital age has offered us opportunities to communicate and learn, to promote democracy and freedom like never before. But it has also offered bad actors the same opportunities to fill the waves of the web with misinformation, and static. Of course, we’re all very familiar with misinformation — we all remember 2020 — but we are woefully unprepared for its newest mutation with generative AI. According to Stanford professor Alex Stamos, a single person using these generative tools can create as much misinformation as a group of 20 to 50 people working around the clock. Combine this with AI’s ability to analyze massive amounts of user data, and we had misinformation as tailored to your beliefs as your Netflix recommendation page.
Generated AI is the greatest threat facing the sixty-odd elections happening this year. The danger is not only the sheer quantity and quality of this misinformation. The problem is that if everything — text, photos, videos, audio — if everything can be faked, how do we know that anything we see is real? Nothing is true, and everything is possible.
But this universal distrust and cynicism of everything is just as dangerous. What if those clips of Šimečka were real? It’s increasingly difficult to tell when a piece of media was generated by an AI or not. So simply claiming that recording is artificial, even if it isn’t, casts doubt over its veracity that never goes away.
So what can we do to protect truth, protect this thing that undergirds every democracy? For decades, we’ve believed the Russian proverb popularized by Reagan: доверяй, но проверяй — trust but verify. And yes, its pedigree seems a bit ironic in light of current events. And because of these same events, that maxim is now a dead letter, and instead, we must listen to недове́ряй и проверяй — distrust and verify.
But as I said before, distrusting everything is just as dangerous. So our goal is to maximize our exposure to inherently trustworthy information and minimize our exposure to untrustworthy sources. So what can we do?
First, get your news from reliable sources and be aware of their bias. And no random Facebook or TikTok accounts are not reliable or unbiased. And especially when it comes to something you’re deeply personally involved in, remember to distrust and verify.
Second, be conscious of your own blind spots. Nobody can be incredibly well informed about everything happening all of the time, you’re more likely to believe something false or misleading. If you don’t know much about it in the first place. That’s normal. So when it comes to a new topic or event, distrust and verify.
Third, trust your gut. A lot of AI content still falls in the so-called uncanny valley, where we can tell that an email or a photo was made by an AI, but we can’t explain why. For some good examples of this, take a look at some of the videos that OpenAI’s new model, Sora, can create. If you feel that unsettling sensation in the pit of your stomach, stop, distrust and verify.
And finally, don’t propagate information without carefully considering the source and its trustworthiness. You owe it to yourself and everyone around you to make sure that any news or information you share is to the best of your ability true. So before you share in person or online, distrust and verify.
Truth is the lifeblood of democracy, and it is the air that our polity breathes. And in an age of mass misinformation and artificial articles, we must remember to distrust and verify.