Trust is a dependency for human existence. Not just for civilization, but also very small communities and basic exchange of ideas, goods, and services.
I cannot foretell how the risk of trust destruction from GenAI will unfold, but I'm optimistic our creativity will win out.
If you think about it, though, the window for there being something resembling objective universal truth has been a very very short period of human history. It really didn't exist before the internet and ubiquitous smartphones.
Before the internet, TV, radio, newspapers were our sources of truth beyond just trusting people in our immediate vicinity, and these were all heavily filtered by what stories they decided to run, the amount of detail they focused on, any human bias that crept into their reporting, etc. I'm not a "FAKE NEWS!!!" kind of guy, but one has always had to ingest news from these sources with some level of filtering in this regard, and understand that there might be other sides to the story, or whole stories of importance going unreported.
If we revert to subjecting images/video/audio clips to the same level of skepticism we had with random people informing us of pieces of news with no proof, then we're effectively just at the same level of objective universal truth as we had been for the overwhelming majority of human history.
I'm not arguing this is a good thing - just that it might have been a small and blissful island that some of us had the privilege of enjoying.
This is partly why I'm so fascinated and disgusted by trolls and astroturfers. They erode trust in a given forum, which degrades the quality of discourse because no one wants to invest time in untrustworthy discussions.
Sometimes I wish I could get an honest answer from trolls about what they hope to achieve, but of course that will never happen.
> Sometimes I wish I could get an honest answer from trolls about what they hope to achieve, but of course that will never happen.
It's usually not that complicated: They enjoy provoking people, particularly people that can be reflexively upset by reading words. It's a game to them, against a party that they do not respect. The words they say might upset you, but the words ultimately mean nothing to them outside of provoking you, and the more chaotic they can make the situation the more amusing it is.
1. Spite/damage a community for perceived or effective injustice/discrimination. I remember this happening on Reddit and Stack Overflow circa 2010-2014.
2. Actually a neurodivergent person mistaken for a troll. I remember this happening on HN. Remember him being either schizophrenic or autistic. Another example might have been the creator of Temple OS.
I get/got trolled ALL the time, and it was extremely frustrating. I would get irrationally angry at them. Then I started doing it myself and realized it was fun. Not sure if it was really a coping mechanism or I was just bored or what. IRL I don't think I troll people or say inflammatory things, I tend to be quiet and reserved. But most online chat platforms I have been on have been extremely toxic, with not really any better alternatives, so I guess if you can't beat em, join em... but I think that mentality mostly evolved subconsciously in me over time.
I agree with this in principle but in my experience many trolls never change, and trying to act nicer just fuels them to keep going, because they love attention.
I cannot foretell how the risk of trust destruction from GenAI will unfold, but I'm optimistic our creativity will win out.