The disinformation crisis is entering a new age, as digital and AI technologies advance at a faster pace than government regulations or societal norms can keep up with. In this environment, lies can spread faster than truth, and audiences can’t agree on facts.
Straight Arrow News contributor Jordan Reid experienced this in her own life recently while she was watching what she believed to be the Super Bowl, prompting her to reflect on how AI and CGI are impacting how we trust our sources. Reid also worries that this growing disinformation crisis is feeding more and more into the U.S. partisan divide.
We were watching [the Super Bowl] for maybe 10 minutes when my 12-year-old came in the room and said, “Why are you watching an animated football game?”
What we had been watching wasn’t real. It was a CGI version of the Super Bowl, and I guess because our eyes are too old, or maybe because we weren’t really paying attention, we had no idea. We had to stand up, walk over to the TV, and really scrutinize it to find the tell-tale pixelation, and even so, it took us a minute to be certain.
That is wild to me.
By now, we’re all well aware of the prevalence of deepfakes, of the dangers of misinformation, of the erosion of the public trust in the images that we see with our own eyes. Watching 10 minutes of a fake Super Bowl is one thing, but watching, say, an Instagram video about the Israeli-Hamas war and finding out it’s actually a clip from a completely different conflict in a completely different year and a completely different country — or just full-stop CGI — that is another issue.
How do we know what to believe, when our own eyes can betray us so easily?
It’s these kinds of anxieties, I think, that are cementing the political tribalism that’s characterized the last several years, to our country’s tremendous detriment. It’s easier to just fall along party lines — just parrot what you hear in your own information bubble — than it is to try to parse truth from lies.
