AI fakery in a ‘post truth’ era

Screengrab: Novara Media on fake, AI generated podcasts

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For several weeks I’ve been aware of fake videos purporting to be talking head podcasts from pundits who, while I have my differences with them, get my respect as useful contributors to our understanding – given the systemic inability of corporate media to speak truth, whole truth and nothing but on matters critical to power – of global events and processes.

Three to be so targeted are John Mearsheimer, Jeffrey Sachs and Yanis Varoufakis. I’ve now seen many such AI generated podcasts, and hosted some on this site. Why? Because even though the direction is deeply worrying, the fake offerings I’ve seen have been plausibly consistent with the putative speakers’ worldviews and analyses. Usually it’s the tone that alerted me to something amiss. One tell is thematic repetitiveness when none of these three, all skilled and succinct, are known for that.

Another is the unusually drawn out pause. We’re sensitive to gaps nanoseconds longer than the norm, and there’s only so many times we can hear “United ……….. States”, robotically intoned, without smelling a rat.

Polar bear in a bar. “I want a pint of Guinness ……………………….

…………………………….. and a medium Chardonnay”

Barman: “You got it, buddy – but why the huge paws?”

A third is the opposite, a delivery preternaturally smooth, devoid of the ‘ums and ers’, pauses and ‘you knows’  that mark even the most eloquent deliveries. One such, a December 12 post featuring Yanis, was picked up below the line by Dave Hansell who opened thus:

That would have aced the old Radio Four quiz ‘Just a minute’. Not a single hesitation, repetition, or deviation.

Dave’s comment is worth reading full. Meanwhile Novara Media picked up on the issue just yesterday. They seem not to have noticed YouTube’s many Mearsheimer and Sachs fakes but, perhaps because he’s closer to their left-liberal worldview, those of Yanis do not escape their attention in a useful if inconclusive discussion:

This being a Sunday, a day perhaps for favouring the reflective over the reactive, why not give this the thirteen minute once-over it asks of you?

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A few points before I move to a man who widens the focus on our ‘post truth’ age. First, the tells I’ve cited will be teething problems. As with scam calls from “Amanda at Microsoft technology department” – who still, though less often, gives herself away through iffy URLs, Indian accent and helpful requests for remote access to your computer – we can expect fake videos to grow more sophisticated; harder to tell from the real thing.

Second, a pal told me yesterday that police forensic cameras – bodycams for instance – house a chip to prevent image metadata manipulation, and so preserve evidential integrity. Could this be the basis for establishing authenticity online too? Just don’t hold your breath.

Third, I may be deceiving myself but I’ve so far found no cause for suspicion where the trio I’ve named have been in conversation as opposed to delivering monologues. Synthesising dialogue will pose more challenges, but do bear in mind my point on rapidly evolving fakery. For now I’ll say only that viewers need to be alert, and trust more to Mearsheimer, Sachs, Varoufakis et al  when with an interlocutor – a Judge Napolitano, say, or Glenn Diesen or Nima Alkhorshid – than in solo mode.

And as ever: triangulate, triangulate, triangulate – both with other sources and such snatches of emergent realities as can be glimpsed amid the fog. No one has all the answers and one reason I host, for now at least, podcasts I know to be AI generated is they make predictions likely to be upheld or refuted by conclusive events in the not too distant. Those on where the US-Venezuela stand-off will take us are a case in point.

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Moving on. The pal who told of that police bodycam chip made a second and more general point. One aspect of Mrs Thatcher’s self-fulfilling “no-such-thing-as-society ” remark is that ultimately, abetted on the one hand by postmodernist excess, on the other by seismic societal and technological change in the half century since she made it, there’s no such thing as reality either. We’ve sleep-walked into an era of staggeringly irrational egocentricity: “you got your truth, I got mine. Suck it up, buddy!”

Over to Simplicius, also yesterday. Here’s another pundit I don’t always see eye to eye with but here, on the wider implications of a post truth age – and on the mediocracy now governing the Western world on behalf of the criminal elites they answer to – you couldn’t slide a cigarette paper between us.

Our Modern Spectacle

Our modern world and its political ecosphere have seen deep underlying changes over the last couple decades and, in particular, the last few years. There have been many responsible factors, such as the well-known rise of social media, various cultural shifts, particularly amongst the youthful population, but other more sinister and hard-to-pin catalysts as well.

They have effected a world run by the superficial image and icon rather than the actual core manifest idea. It is a kind of Plato’s Cave brought to life as a minstrel show of political coquetry, where disguised marionettes go through the motions to deliver their prepared lines in such a way where emotive gestures and impressions are the essence of the message itself, rather than its accents. Words are concealed, contorted, misappropriated to entirely lose their meaning—and no one seems to care as long as the delivery features the appropriate performative elan.

Some have likened it to the idea of a ‘post-truth reality’ as a byproduct of our modern digital fragmentation, where “truth” exists merely as a matter of a million scattered perspectives, each with their own varied and endless representations, citations, ‘sources’, leading champions, and artificial boosting mechanisms.

It goes deeper than just that, boiling down to how the all-important newer generations process information—or in particular, what type of information and ‘presentation styles’ they favor, or which resonate best with them. The fractionalization process has turned the modern political ecosphere into a kind of ‘tabula rasa’ where all is equal, and where the past has no advantage of historical weight over the flamboyant influences and tantalizing allures of the present.

Today’s leaders disconnect themselves from historical record, and rely entirely on appeals to limbic instincts and knee jerk passions. Just observe the EU apparat’s current cast of uncharismatic minstrels, who brazenly dismiss objective historical realities in angling their cheap narratives. Coming to mind is Kaja Kallas’s recent affected disbelief at the idea that Russia defeated the Nazis in WWII in a lazy attempt to perpetuate the image of Russia as ancestral ‘Other’ to the West:

Her mistress von der Leyen likewise weaves historical incongruities into her statements with equal impunity because the content itself no longer rules the message, rather just the presentation, the spectacle of it all carries the essence: what matters is what kind of emotional charge the leading headline can drive in a nugget-sized PR blurb.

This simulation has generated the most bizarre political landscape yet witnessed. Leaders have lied since time immemorial, but at least in the past such leaders often possessed personal prestige, charismatic power and magnetism, the ability to actually inspire with their messages of—perhaps manipulative—hope. But the current era’s crop of ‘leaders’ has dropped all pretexts of charm and magnetism to become de facto cardboard cutouts for corporate interests and oligarchic influence—mouth pieces and empty voice boxes merely transcribing manifestos on behalf of their paymasters.

Why has that become the case? The answer is simple: In the past, leaders had to be forged through the fires of competition, pitted against objective reality itself. They distinguished themselves by contending against political adversaries armed with razor-sharp intellects and powers of persuasion undiluted by modern distractions and attention-span deficits.

Today, the hyper-connected financialized globalism of our age has created a vast matrix of manipulation that has normalized the dilution of both meritocracy and genuine political and democratic processes to the point where modern leaders are no longer elected by the dint of their personal courage, magnetism, or accomplishments, but rather selected by corporate special interests on the basis of their servility. It’s no surprise that an increasing share of today’s top leaders have backgrounds in banking and finance, like Germany’s Friedrich “BlackRock” Merz, Canada’s Mark “Goldman Sachs” Carney, France’s Emmanuel “Rothschild” Macron, and many others.

The way this web of capital has enswathed the world has created an endless supply of ‘special interest’ fiat for the purposes of influencing elections, particularly now that mainstream media corporations have merged entirely with their corporate sponsors to become one overlapping metastatic membrane, giving it limitless power to influence any political process as needed.