Ever since the advent of social media, especially everyone's favorite alma mater - WhatsApp university, I have been forced to wonder about the nature of reality. This has built into a near obsession after the recent spate of improvements, if one may call them that, in Artificial Intelligence.
One does understand that, with the growing paucity of the natural version, there is a felt need for bringing AI into existence. I mean, yeah, it exists but, somehow, it appears that we have collectively lost the instruction manual and, therefore, most of us do not know how to use it. Once AI matures, we can heave a sigh of relief and lose ourselves completely in whatever our respective screens throw up for us.
The problem, though, is that I am increasingly feeling lost about how to identify what IS reality. (Yes, yes, I AM antediluvian that way. I still need reality, or a semblance of it). Apart from the immediate vicinity, I used to rely on news to tell me what was happening in the rest of the world. Came Social media and, suddenly, news became a doubtful source of reality. I mean, what I thought of as news had to be fact checked every time.
At least I could rely on pics and videos; on sting operations which showed me the reality of my leaders; on the devastation of a current war, on the sorrows of extreme poverty, on the wonders of Mars...whatever. Yeah, Photoshop did its best but that, too, could be found out.
And now...Alas, Now! AI apparently can make me look as though I'm doing a tap-dance on top of the Vatican and nobody can tell that it is fake! Your favorite leader can be shown to be feeding the poor multitudes of Somalia or running the gas chambers of Hitler depending on who is telling the AI what to do. Yuck! If this, then the vice versa. NOW, even if you have a video recording of an interview where the chap says something incriminating, he will not say wishy-washy things like, "They are showing it out of context". No, he will coolly say that you used AI to fake it. What price reality then?
I'm afraid that there is only one answer to that question, "What is reality?" You have to ask, "Whose reality?" and serve up what they want. There will no longer be anything accepted as universal reality any more.
