When photography was invented, all manners of beliefs were almost immediately attached to it. The camera was an almost magical device. It was supposed to be able to capture supernatural, among other things… photos of ectoplasm and ghosts, for instance, became a staple (link).
In reality, the invention of photography meant that faking things was suddenly open to new and exciting options. It definitely became an opportunity for so many other things as well – immortalising memories, aiding criminal investigations, bringing nature and archaeology of far-off lands to people who would otherwise never see them, and so on -, but opportunism wasn’t far off either, and part of it is humans conning other humans.
The reason for the cons was simple. Ranging from financial to attention grabbing, it was an opportunity to get somewhere for the con-people. But it worked because it offered the people who were being duped something that they needed or wanted.
For some, it was a sense of adventure. For others, it was a form of closure; Menotti’s opera The Medium, for instance, deals with the problem of a fraudulent medium who comes clean to the audience when she thinks she is being haunted – she’s in fact experiencing a combination of alcoholism and bad memories – and the interesting development is that they vehemently disbelieve her, because they are hooked on the idea of being able to communicate with their children.
Others again saw, in the photos (which were supposed to be incapable of lying), a confirmation of their spiritual (and often spiritualist) beliefs. A good friend of mine recently wrote an article for his Weird Wednesdays dealing with supposed pictures of fairies that illustrates precisely that.
In any case, the camera became the herald of factuality – truth anchored in more than just opinion, an unbiased fact-checker and presenter.
In many ways, it still is. Pictures of all kinds, be it ghosts or the Loch Ness monster, are what we depend on when we search for truth, as is film; regardless of how many times both are proven wrong.
Perhaps deep down, we need magic, miracles and monsters. Perhaps they give our world meaning; there is certainly evidence for this claim where conspiracy theories are concerned.
Thus far, I have spoken of the simple technology. But we live in a world where deepfakes are becoming a reality as well; in simple terms, that monster, that ghost, just became more real, and perhaps, it will become more and more difficult to tell the truth, including through technology itself, leaving us to fend for ourselves in a sense of having to establish our own perspectives on truth and fiction.
`This is, however, not that simple. Truth and Otherness walk hand in hand, and they are often shaped to fit agendas. These days, the vast amount of growing numbers of conspiracy theories, many of which not only perpetuate Othering but call for harm to what they perceive as Other, or cause panic and may cause violence (such as the WhatsApp messages that sparked violence in India (link 1, link 2)), often use some form of “physical proof” that seems to support them. Deepfakes could play a decisive role in these situations. And while this behaviour is certainly not new – witches, werewolves and many other forms of Other have been hunted and killed for centuries before we even invented photography, let alone deepfakes -, it may become increasingly difficult to separate fact for fiction, which can influence not only the legal system but also how easy it may be to convince someone not to follow a specific line of thought or, worse, action.
GPT-3, which is, to put really simply, a deep learning model that produces highly realistic text through deep learning, is an AI tool. There are many uses for it – and very likely, everyone can think of some for themselves – but, perhaps because we are becoming more and more aware of and plagued by not only all manners of scams, but also divisive social behaviours, the bad ones are likely to be obvious immediately to everyone. Indeed, the scams are just one part of it; imagine its use in conspiracy theory building, in smear campaigns, in forensics.
Then, of course, there is also the uncanny valley part of it. A machine producing a similar result to humans, be it in writing, speech or anything else imaginable, ends up producing a very similar effect to the imagined ghost encounters and other supernatural events. Even if we keep a very open mind, the vast majority of supernatural events have an explanation; that, however, is not easily conceived of by the witnesses – making a case for why witness memory can be so notoriously unreliable (link to Google Scholar search).
The key point is this – whatever uses and abuses we can imagine for any piece of technology (for example the utterly technologically primitive kitchen knife, which nevertheless features in a horrifying amount of crimes (link)), how we perceive it, how we use it and the beliefs we attach to it is up to us, and those beliefs are hardly new; they are the recycled, renewed perceptions handed down through generations.
Our world is always in motion. Change is constant. Our fears adapt while we do, however; so perhaps, if we want to tackle why we behave in a specific way and how we might abuse a piece of tech, we should be looking at behavioural sciences – anthropology, sociology, psychology, psychiatry… – and keep an open debate about our behaviours rather than worry about which piece of technology will end the world.