Context
In modern times, one of the greatest threats to democracy, the rule of law, civil liberties, truth, the environment, human well-being, and modern civilization is the dark arts. That includes divisive demagoguery, propaganda, lies, slanders, bigotry, racism, crackpot reasoning (often nutty conspiracy theories), and irrational emotional manipulation to foment reason killing emotions such as unwarranted fear, anger, hate, distrust and moral outrage. Decades of radical right American demagoguery, have successfully led tens of millions of Americans to believe all kinds of lies, slanders, fake threats, crackpot conspiracy theories, etc.
Three things stand about about the dark arts in recent US history. First, it is constitutionally protected free speech. Second, the irrational deceit, distrust, divisiveness and bigotry it fomented was necessary for the rise of American MAGA authoritarianism and kleptocracy to gain major power and mostly keep at least since Jan. 2017. That’s when Trump was first sworn into office. Third, most of this is not new. Tyrants, thieves, liars, demagogues and mass murderers have been heavily reliant on the dark arts for millennia. Plato and Aristotle recognized the toxic power of demagoguery. What’s new now is technology that dark arts practitioners now have to bamboozle and manipulate people with their cynical lies, hate-filled bigotry, etc.
Teaching dark arts defenses to citizens
A NYT article, Finland Tries to Protect Children Against Deepfakes, With Russia in Mind, discusses current efforts in Finland to fight off the onslaught of powerful Russian dark arts attacks that are now more deadly due to the rise of AI. For years, the government in Finland has been sophisticated and dedicated about trying to protect its people against Russian propaganda attacks. Now those attacks include AI-generated content that take the Russian authoritarian’s propaganda war to a new level of sophistication and aggression.
In it’s self-defense efforts, Finland is expanding its long‑running media‑literacy work to include “AI literacy”. That includes teaching students from early grades how to recognize and evaluate AI‑generated images, audio and video so they’re less vulnerable to deceit and manipulation by AI deepfakes. Researchers and defense efforts in Finland are developing technical countermeasures such as speech/deepfake detection and source‑tracing, but detecting increasingly realistic synthetic audio and video is getting technically harder. AI in the hands of professional propagandists is learning to do better at deceiving and manipulating people.
Journalists and investigators have found nonconsensual sexually explicit deepfake images of Finnish public figures and celebrities circulating online. That increased public concern and pressure for stronger protections. Finland’s education‑first approach builds attack resilience but that will need to be combined with better technical detection, more legal protections (especially for nonconsensual sexual content), and platform‑level measures to manage rising deepfake risks.
In the US few or none of those measures is possible with MAGA in power. Any US effort to censor lies, or at least flag them, is immediately attacked by MAGA and MAGA-aligned demagogues and liars as socialist tyranny censoring “truth”. American social media platforms have been cowed into getting rid of meaningful content moderation, so for honest news social media tends to be cesspits of lies and other dark arts poisons. That is a major source of MAGA authoritarian and kleptocratic power.
Q1: Given the increasing power of dark arts to deceive and manipulate people, it is time to get rid of anonymity on the internet, which would go a long way to reduce dark art’s destructive, mind poisoning power?
Q2: Is Finland simply imposing socialist tyranny by censoring “truth”, as MAGA demagogues would describe it?
Info sources:
After decades of teaching media literacy, Finland equips students with skills to spot AI deepfakes — As deepfakes proliferate online, Finland adds AI literacy to its school curriculum to help children as young as 3 to recognize AI-generated fake news.
Speech deepfakes continue to challenge researchers – …. deepfake research is like playing cat and mouse. Recent years have seen significant advances in the accuracy of detection methods and countermeasures, but model generalization remains a major challenge.
Explicit Finnish celebrity deepfakes hiding in plain sight, Yle finds – Yle anonymously contacted the website’s contributing users who post images there. They replied using pseudonyms and their identities are not known. ….. The people that posted the deepfakes who spoke with Yle said that it is becoming easier to generate the images. One user admitted making nearly 200 images in a single day.
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