by Joseph P. Farrell, Giza Death Star:
If you read last Monday’s blog about all the carney going on in Mr. Carnage’s New People’s Republic of Canada and the fact that some in that country are seriously considering a home equity tax as the “fair solution” to “Canada’s housing crisis”, then do not for a moment think that political and financial lunacy are confined to people north of the international border, nor, for that matter, to American states run by the Looneycratic party, like Nuttyfornia or the two states to the north of it whose names I always forget. No, thanks to this article shared by M.A., rest assured they’re putting the same additives into the water supply in Austin, TX, where there is a bill before the Texas house of (mis)representatives that aims to regulate the use of artificial intelligence in… well, you be the judge:
TRUTH LIVES on at https://sgtreport.tv/
With AI on the rise, Texas House passes bill requiring more transparency in political ads
I suppose this is understandable. After all, Texas is the home to some of the less intelligent elements of the Bush famdamnly, and was home base of operations for one of the biggest and most corrupt criminals ever to reach the oval office, Lyndon Baines Johnson. Ostensibly, the bill is designed simply to require a disclosure to any advertisement or broadcast message that used artificial intelligence to generate any of its contents, and thus is ostensibly designed to disclose which broadcasts are “deep fakes” and which are the genuine article:
The Texas House of Representatives approved a bill Wednesday requiring political advertisements to include disclosures if the image, audio, or video recording used were substantially altered.
Former House Speaker Dade Phelan — who endured a barrage of political attacks last year during his reelection and speaker campaigns— said he authoredHB 366 to ensure voters understand when materials used in ads had been faked, as the use of generative artificial intelligence makes it easier to manipulate media that could use falsely represent a candidate’s conduct or speech.
“This is the beginning of a new era in ethics where the voters need to know what is real and what is not,” the Beaumont Republican said on the House floor. “This AI technology gets better every single day. It gets more inexpensive every single day, it’s going to become the norm.”
The bill would require the disclosure by officeholders, candidates or political committees who used altered media in ads and spend more than $100 for political advertising. It would task the Texas Ethics Commission with determining what the disclosure would look like, including font, size and color. Violators would be charged with a Class A misdemeanor.
Sounds good so far, doesn’t it?
But there’s a catch:
The bill faced fierce opposition from hardline conservatives who say it is policing speech and could allow the state to jail people over silly political memes.
“We have an electorate that is informed and we already have platforms where people can talk,” said Rep. Andy Hopper, R-Decatur. “It is not the role of government to sit there and be a nanny state police force to decide.”
Now, don’t get me wrong. In my opinion, requiring a disclosure for artificial intelligence-generated video material is not such a bad idea. But by the same token, I do take the point of these Texas conservatives that where such regulations are in play, they usually and almost always are abused by people in positions of power in government. Just look at the out of control “lawfare” of recent years.
But I have another suspicion of what this bill really represents, and herewith my high octane speculation of the day. What it really represents is not so much an attempt to restore trust to the video and audio media, but rather, an admission that such trust has already all but evaporated. It represents a new, jaundiced, and well-deserved and earned cynicism toward the major broadcast media in this country, though one must also imagine that such a bill would perforce have to include written content generated by artificial intelligence as well. It is rather like the attitude that Pravda inside the old Soviet Union generated: everyone read it (because it was the only source of the news) but no one trusted it. And in that lack of trust, we obtain the important lesson: mass media – whether written, audio, or visual – can only go so far in the manipulations of reality, because sooner or later, the manipulations clash dramatically with that reality because the ideology driving the manipulations clash with it: men are not women nor women men, no matter what linguistic or surgical manipulations one performs on either. When the trust in those organs of information dissemination collapses, it collapses more or less for good, never able to regain its former luster or influence as people seek out alternative sources of information, or generate their own, or both. In the latter circumstance, the local networks of personal trust, and not the government regulation or regional commissar, are the real information movers and shakers. Just look at the explosive growth of the alternative media in recent years: why the explosive growth? Because people naturally seek sources of information that are more or less in line with their own personal cosmologies, because those sources are naturally trusted, and even more so when the official or semi-official information streams are polluted, caught deliberately lying, or believed to be so.
The Texas bill thus may or may not be a good thing. It may have a good purpose – and I think it does – and it may also lead to very bad abuses (as I think it will). But it is a sure sign that there is a much larger looming issue, and that is the collapse in trust in the mass media, and that will take a long time to sort out, and recover, if indeed it ever happens. The problem with that mass media is not its use of artificial intelligence. The problem is much deeper, and is to be found in the willingness to lie and deceive to the extent that it attempted to manipulate reality itself. What we’ve been witnessing, and living in, is the old children’s “fairy tale” of the Emperor’s “new clothes”. We know the story. The Emperor was prancing around starkly naked, but everyone pretended it wasn’t so, until a child broke the spell and noticed that the Emperor wasn’t wearing anything at all, and had the temerity to point it out to all the experts and artificial intelligences. The spell was broken, and no amount of artificially generated media propatainment or cleverly edited footage could cover it up.
