Thresholds

It’s suddenly fashionable to say that AI now makes all truth impossible.

ABSOLUTE RAW STINKING BULLSHIT.

Visual “news” has ALWAYS been fake because “NEWS” HAS ALWAYS BEEN FAKE. The whole purpose of adding photos and engravings to “news” was to make fakery more credible. The first movie newsreel by Pathe in 1895 was faked in a studio.

AI only makes faking cheaper than photo retouching or photoshop work or studio work. Retouching and photoshop are skills that need practice. Studios are expensive. AI is cheap because Altman’s machine does all the work and steals the ideas.

Suckers have always been taken in by fake visuals, no matter how crude. Cultists specialize in believing the OPPOSITE of what their senses tell them. Cognitive dissonance creates cults. Cultists wake from the spell sooner or later, and a higher dose of fakery tends to wake them faster. That’s what happened to my Bush neocon spell induced by 9/11. The harder I worked to fight my senses, the stronger the belief grew …. until the 2008 Bush economic shock finally rose above the threshold and popped the spell. The pop was painful but lasting.

So we should be glad that AI brings fakery into everyone’s hands. Digital pictures will soon be totally useless, and many people will ABANDON them as I did with TV in 2010. Plain unmediated reality, alidades instead of lenses, will win. It always does sooner or later.

Mental or physical poisons always work that way. Hormesis. The body adapts to small doses until suddenly the load reaches the threshold, then a strong immune reaction arises. My body hit the threshold on Lisinopril (basically synthetic snake venom) a couple months ago leading to a crisis. The good HUMAN doctor told me to stop the Lisinopril without any substitute, and prescribed some steroids to bring down the reaction. The halt worked, and the steroids are starting to work.