The deepfake era threatens to further erode people’s ability to tell truth from lies, and bring cynicism and conspiracism to new levels. We can keep this from happening, but it will take the hard work of building trustworthy media institutions.
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Actually this might be a postive thing in the long run. Since that it should force people to not automatically believe people whatevery they see on the internet and always look for sources to verify important things
Unfortunately, this is wishful thinking. Daniel Gilbert authored an interesting paper on how the human mind uses a Spinozan system, which basically means that comprehension and acceptance of information are tied at the knot, then people decide whether it’s credible or whether to unaccept it; a consequence of this is that the deck is ultimately stacked in favor of accepting information in most cases.
Although suspension of belief is possible (Hasson, Simmons, & Todorov, 2005; Schul, Mayo, & Burnstein, 2008), it seems to require a high degree of attention, considerable implausibility of the message, or high levels of distrust at the time the message is received. So, in most situations, the deck is stacked in favor of accepting information rather than rejecting it, provided there are no salient markers that call the speaker’s intention of cooperative conversation into question. Going beyond this default of acceptance requires additional motivation and cognitive resources: If the topic is not very important to you, or you have other things on your mind, misinformation will likely slip in.
