Content-type: text/html Downes.ca ~ Stephen's Web ~ AI and the collapse of a shared reality

Stephen Downes

Knowledge, Learning, Community

So here's the troubling truth: "our shared reality has collapsed. AI generated fakes spread like wildfire through echo chambers of like-minded groups, and even when discovered to be fake, there is no effort to make corrections if the fake fits the group's narrative… and any real media that doesn't fit that same reality is easily dismissed as a fake." But I am more sanguine. I don't think we ever had a shared reality to begin with - my reality, for example, growing up as a working class labourer in eastern Ontario, is very different from that of, say, the Harvard educated author writing news and magazine articles. Their view of the world was deemed to be 'shared reality' but it never squared with mine, and goodness knows, I never did trust anything they had to say about it. News media have always misrepresented the world (to wit); they didn't need AI to do it. Once we embrace this - the idea that we can't trust media at face value - we will be prepared to move forward. Related: first bilingual team fact checking network in Canada.

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Stephen Downes Stephen Downes, Casselman, Canada
stephen@downes.ca

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Last Updated: Aug 14, 2024 2:26 p.m.

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