“2017 was a year which saw the truth – objective, empirical, evidence-based truth – more battered and abused than any other in the history of our country.” So declared Senator Jeff Flake, the latest Republican to speak his mind about Trump only after euthanizing his political career, on the Senate floor a few weeks ago.
Senator Flake and I have no disagreements about 2017. But the decline of truth began before we elected a president who lies like a four year old, and it will continue long after he has retired to the big golf course in the sky. By empowering anyone to create, copy, and transmit text instantly and at massive scale, technology has made truth harder to distinguish from falsehood. As the power to fabricate extends beyond written information, telling what’s real from what isn’t will become even more difficult.
We’re supposed to evaluate truth based on standards of objectivity. We trust the New York Times, so we way, because we know they corroborate information from multiple sources, check every fact before publishing, and adhere to other practices constituting the standards of professional journalism.
But standards of objectivity or empiricism aren’t the only way people judge whether information is trustworthy. When it comes to text, aesthetic presentation matters too. If I receive a cease-and-desist letter from an attorney because I’ve been torrenting too much without a VPN, I’m much more likely to comply if it’s printed on fancy letterhead than if it’s scrawled on the back of a ketchupy napkin. Information printed on nice paper under gothic font has a lot more truthiness than a pamphlet of grainy photos on cheap newsprint handed out by a gaggle of Lyndon Larouche devotees.
Before digital platforms became a dominant source of information, the only institutions that could afford wide distribution were ones with high standards of ethics and objectivity. These were also the only institutions that could afford to print on nice paper under gothic font. The objective standards and aesthetic presentation, the intellectual and visceral truth signals, were in alignment. But today, a headline on Facebook from the San Francisco Chronicle looks the same as a headline written by two guys in a basement in Long Beach. The aesthetic signal is obsolete. Our truth radar has been scrambled.
OK, sure: for a given news item, it’s not that hard to look at it for two seconds, apply some additional standards beyond the aesthetics (does the headline utilize correct spelling?), and make a determination as to its trustworthiness that has a high probability of being correct. It’s deeply sad that many people around the world cannot or will not do this.
On the other hand, losing our visceral truth standard makes things a little harder, and in aggregate, a little is a lot. Using the intellectual standard for everything is like flying manual when we’ve been on autopilot for our whole lives. Looking into each source of information and independently verifying that it was collected in a trustworthy way takes more time than people will give, especially when they are under the avalanche of information that is a social feed.
Soon, even those of us willing to spell check a Facebook headline may find fact hard to distinguish from fiction. Algorithms won’t stop with text; in the future, it may very well be possible to fabricate photographs, too. A November study from Nvidia Research used generative adversarial networks (GANs) to fabricate shockingly real images of everyday scenes and objects – a bedroom interior, a cell phone, several churches, a few buses, and other stuff. The study also fabricated images designed to look like photographs of celebrities; the people in the images aren’t real, but they certainly look it. Have a look for yourself. It freaked me out to consider the lifelike images I was looking at are of things that don’t exist anywhere in the world.
Human recollections of events usually differ, and some people have always been comfortable lying on paper, but since their invention photographs have been recognized as definitive proof of what actually went down. Reading those studies, it’s easy to imagine reputations of celebrities being ruined after images them doing things they never did blow up on Twitter. In criminal proceedings, the credibility of photographs could be undermined as easily as a shaky witness. It’s hard to imagine a world where a photograph of something happening isn’t proof that it really happened, but it may be on the horizon.
How do we have a political discourse, criminal accountability, or shared culture without shared facts? And if there is no answer to that question, how do we maintain truths that are accepted across all cultural, social, and political divides when any kind of electronic information can be fabricated?
Good luck with that, Senator Flake.