democracy is not ready for pope in a puffy coat

or, your parents will believe everything except the truth about the next election

leon @skyferrori

OKAAYYY

Along with almost everyone, I was fooled by this picture of the pope, which was made using Midjourney, which, for those not in the know, is an AI Art program.

I think there are several reasons why this fooled me and everyone, but most of it has to do with how weird Catholic shit is. It’s all baroque and ostentatious and sort of silly.

I have walked through the cavernous cathedrals filling every street in Europe, including the ones decorated with thousands of skulls. I have witnessed the religious chill of Notre Dame on a bright day when people rushed the plaza to protest Pope Benedict XVI’s stance on contraception only for a counterprotest of angry Catholics to immediately coalesce around me while I was just trying to walk off my hangover in one of the most beautifully constructed cities in the world.

This is, as far as I can tell, the first extremely successful AI hoax.

My stance on AI art has not changed, though it does seem like these art-bots are getting real good, but I also think Ryan Broderick at Garbage Day has the correct prediction about AI art from a few weeks ago. I can’t find it now and have already wasted ten minutes of my precious life trying to pull it up but the gist was that AI art has developed a distinct style and this will cause human artists to deliberately not make art in this style.

AI Art will never hang on a wall

Anyway, this isn’t really about AI Art or anything like that. It’s about this thing I buried in the footnotes of that previous essay, where I always put the funniest or truest parts of my essays:

The other biggest use for this is that it makes propaganda effectively free. Pumping out junk science or political screeds of dubious merit and antisocial intent will become so easy to make that it will likely flood every place where conversation through text routinely happens. This is not great.

While it’s pretty sad that puffy coat pope isn’t real because it allowed us all to believe in a slightly funnier world, it’s also pretty frightening.

During the last few elections, millennials and zoomers have been able to laugh at boomers for falling for every conceivable hoax that floods whatever glowing screen they waste their remaining life staring at, but we’re now at a point where the legibility of truth in our shared reality is breaking down even for those who consider themselves media savvy.

crazy ass moments in nu metal history @numetal_moment

Now, I don’t think I’m going to suddenly start falling for every Joe Biden deepfake¹, but I do think that this will be devastating for every democracy on earth.

AI has eliminated any barrier to producing propaganda or hoaxes. World leaders have already fallen for deepfakes where Joe Biden goes on a rant against trans people and this is really just the beginning, especially as the US gears up for the 2024 election, which is already determined to be contentious, cruel, and maybe kind of funny.

I don’t know how this will be employed but I know no one will know how to stop it. There’s no legislation proposed to deal with what is now possible with AI. There aren’t even societal norms to deal with it. And even if there was some form of legislation working its way up through Congress, the way they spoke to the Tiktok CEO was so embarrassing that it made a billionaire ghoul turn into the internet’s temporary boyfriend².

People are using deepfakes to turn famous women or even women they personally know into porn that they then distribute, watch, and do what people do when they watch porn. Deepfake audio has gotten so sophisticated that we can replicate the voices of famous performers to the extent that you can write a song, sing it into your microphone, and hear it come out with Kanye West or Taylor Swift’s voice.

Visual deepfakes have gotten good enough to make nearly everyone who saw it believe in Balenciaga Pope.

I try not to be alarmist around these parts, but this is real bad. It may not have any kind of devastating implications yet, but we’re not very far removed from a president convincing thousands of people to storm the Capitol by messaging through social media and right wing cranks.

How long until someone begins doing this for the lolz?

When will we experience the first riot caused by people using AI to invent a crises?

I don’t really have an answer, sadly. Probably no one does.

I mean, there are steps that could be taken, but no one is interested in them, and so we, the people, will be left to sort all this shit out on our own. Which may be all right!

But it also may be disastrous and end in literal bloodshed.

So, uh, stay safe and be more skeptical.

Oh, and happy Easter.

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1. Almost every single one is just so funny. Here’s another one of my favorites.

2. Tiktok has become a fandom to tiktok, which is maybe the weirdest way for a social media to develop