Thanks to rapid advancements in generative AI and a glut of training data created by human actors that has been fed into its AI model, Synthesia has been able to produce avatars that are indeed more humanlike and more expressive than their predecessors. The digital clones are better able to match their reactions and intonation to the sentiment of their scripts—acting more upbeat when talking about happy things, for instance, and more serious or sad when talking about unpleasant things. They also do a better job matching facial expressions—the tiny movements that can speak for us without words.

But this technological progress also signals a much larger social and cultural shift. Increasingly, so much of what we see on our screens is generated (or at least tinkered with) by AI, and it is becoming more and more difficult to distinguish what is real from what is not. This threatens our trust in everything we see, which could have very real, very dangerous consequences.

“I think we might just have to say goodbye to finding out about the truth in a quick way,” says Sandra Wachter, a professor at the Oxford Internet Institute, who researches the legal and ethical implications of AI. “The idea that you can just quickly Google something and know what’s fact and what’s fiction—I don’t think it works like that anymore.”

  • kromem@lemmy.world
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    8 months ago

    A reminder for anyone reading this that you are in a universe that behaves at cosmic scales like it is continuous with singularities and whatnot, and behaves even at small scales like it is continuous, but as soon as it is interacted with switches to behaving like it is discrete.

    If the persistent information about those interactions is erased, it goes back to behaving continuous.

    If our universe really was continuous even at the smallest scales, it couldn’t be a simulated one if free will exists, as it would take an infinite amount of information to track how you would interact with it and change it.

    But by switching to discrete units when interacted with, it means state changes are finite, even if they seem unthinkably complex and detailed to us.

    We use a very similar paradigm in massive open worlds like No Man’s Sky where an algorithm procedurally generates a universe with billions of planets that can each be visited, but then converts those to discrete voxels to track how you interact with and change things.

    So you are currently reading an article about how the emerging tech being built is creating increasingly realistic digital copies of humans in virtual spaces, while thinking of yourself as being a human inside a universe that behaves in a way that would not be able to be simulated if interacted with but then spontaneously changes to a way that can be simulated when interacted with.

    I really think people are going to need to prepare for serious adjustments to the ways in which they understand their place in the universe which are going to become increasingly hard to ignore as the next few years go by and tech trends like this continue.

    • SomeGuy69@lemmy.world
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      8 months ago

      Your comment reads like rambling, unless you’re so much smarter than anybody else. I couldn’t make out many cohesive thoughts, merely guessing here.

      First of, our universe doesn’t change the moment we touch something, else any interaction would create a parallel universe, which in itself is fiction and unobservable.

      Then you talk about removing persistent information. Why would you do that and how would you do that? What is the point of even wanting or trying to do that? An AI robot talking and moving isn’t that different than when we had non AI, case based reasoning. Even the most random noise AI can produce is based of something. It’s a sum of values. We didn’t and don’t generate a computerized random number any differnt.

      You can’t proof that our universe is or isn’t simulated, simplified the simulation would only need to stimulate your life in your head, not more. Actually what your eyes see and what your brain is receiving, is already a form of simulation, as it is not exact.

      No Man’s Sky is using generic if else switch cases to generate randomness. Else you’d get donut planets for instance or a cat as planet, but you never will in infinite generations. Just because there’s mathematical randomness by adding noise, doesn’t make it change much about its constraints. Even current AI is deterministic, but the effort to prove that isn’t realistically approachable. I personality believe even a human brain would be provable deterministic, if you could look into the finest details and reproduce it. But we can’t reverse time, so that’s going to be impossible.

      However we can only observe our own current universe. So how would AI change that now? Also our universe is changing even when you yourself interact with nothing.

      It would help if your were more precise in what you’re implying. What change of anyone’s perspective? Doesn’t seam to be any different to the past, unless you mean tech illiterate, like people would react on seeing a video/photo of themselves for the first time. It’s not like AI can read your mind and interact with things the same way you would, nor even predict or do the same as you.

      AI is just guessing and that’s often good enough, but it can be totally wrong (for now) by doing deterministically things with only one solution. It can summarize text but will fail by simple math calculations, because it’s not calculating but guessing by probability, in its realm of constraints.

      • kromem@lemmy.world
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        8 months ago

        First of, our universe doesn’t change the moment we touch something, else any interaction would create a parallel universe, which in itself is fiction and unobservable.

        https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double-slit_experiment

        Then you talk about removing persistent information. Why would you do that and how would you do that? What is the point of even wanting or trying to do that?

        https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_eraser_experiment

        No Man’s Sky is using generic if else switch cases to generate randomness.

        If/else statements can’t generate randomness. They can alter behavior based on random input, but they cannot generate randomness in and of themselves.

        Even current AI is deterministic

        No, it’s stochastic.

    • JackGreenEarth@lemm.ee
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      8 months ago

      I don’t understand all that you’re saying, but it seems you’re basing your argument off the incorrect assumption that free will exists.

      • kromem@lemmy.world
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        8 months ago

        Ah, Lemmy…

        “I don’t understand what you’re talking about, but you’re wrong.”

        • JackGreenEarth@lemm.ee
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          8 months ago

          Lol, I see how you could see it that way. I meant rather that I thought I did understand the part where you claimed free will existed, but not the argument based off that.

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            8 months ago

            While Superderminism is a valid solution to both Bell’s paradox and this result, it isn’t a factor in the Frauchiger-Renner paradox so there must be something else going on at very least in addition to it (which then complies less with Occam’s razor).

            And it would be pretty superfluous for our universe to behave the way it does around interactions and measurements if free will didn’t exist.

      • Buffalox@lemmy.world
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        8 months ago

        incorrect assumption that free will exists.

        Actually free will does exist, unless you define it by some ridiculous standard that I want to fly but I can’t.
        You have free will to pursue your survival and best interests, obviously within the limitations of our physical body.

        The way this is possible within a physical construct that must obey physical laws, is that consciousness exist within a virtual reality constructed within that physical construct by our brains. And is thus not directly tied to the physical realm, but instead indirectly. Which makes room for things like learning, memory, consciousness and free will.

        • JackGreenEarth@lemm.ee
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          8 months ago

          It’s actually the people who try to reconcile free will and a deterministic universe who make the ridiculous arguments, such as compatibilism, which basically just redefines free will. If free will were to be true, you have to have the ability to have acted differently.

          • Buffalox@lemmy.world
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            8 months ago

            It’s actually the people who try to reconcile free will and a deterministic universe

            The universe is not deterministic, but that’s completely irrelevant. The argument of free will does not rely on the lack of determinism of quantum mechanics. That was a philosophical argument once, but it doesn’t actually change anything.

            If free will were to be true, you have to have the ability to have acted differently.

            And how will you determine the existence or lack thereof, of the ability to act differently?
            I’d say we very probably have this ability, since we often reacts differently in similar situations. Ergo by your own standard, your conclusion is wrong.

            • JackGreenEarth@lemm.ee
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              8 months ago

              You have to have acted differently at that time in that situation, not at another time in a different situation.

              • Buffalox@lemmy.world
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                8 months ago

                That’s an impossible standard, you can’t act “differently” when you have already acted. That would mean you should be able to make two actions at the same time, It doesn’t make the tiniest bit of sense, and even if we could, it wouldn’t either prove or disprove free will.
                But you do have free will to choose your actions, only limited by your physique and kognitive ability. There’s a reason everybody has that feeling, and that is it is true.

                The idea that we do NOT have free will, is pure speculation based on arguments from ignorance. It boils down to: “I don’t understand how free will is possible given the physical reality as we understand it”. But just because you don’t understand it, doesn’t mean others don’t either.

                The reason that it’s possible seems to me to be that our mind that exist in out brain, is a virtual representation of reality, which means there is an abstraction layer between consciousness and the physical brain.
                This is the reason we can understand abstractions at all, which in itself proves that our minds can exceed what is possible in physical reality.
                We can think of a waterfall going up, despite that is impossible in reality. We can imagine reverse causality/entropy despite it’s improbable.
                This is only possible because we have a consciousness with free will that allow us those things, way beyond what is physical reality.

              • Buffalox@lemmy.world
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                8 months ago

                And how will you determine the existence or lack thereof, of the ability to act differently?

                You didn’t answer that. Probably because that’s impossible.