The proliferation of AI tools has already started to affect the way the Indian population perceives reality.
For example, was edited a photo of detained Indian wrestlers Vinesh and Sangeeta Phogat to appear to be smiling in police custody. While this isn’t the first time people have been manipulated with edited images, the perceived difference between what is a real image and what is edited or simulated is blurring with new AI tools.
For decades, concepts like “posthumans” and virtual reality have led science fiction communities to imagine simulated worlds and philosophers to propose that we live in a simulation.
These debates have reached pop culture with movies like Star Trek and The Matrix, where questions about reality have permeated the masses. Silly as it may seem, with a cult following among a section of misinformed communities who love these ideas without rational debate, there is a need for this debate to understand technologically advanced cybernetic societies.
Debates around reality are no longer what-if scenarios. Now, many of us are unable to perceive what is real and what is simulated by AI. French sociologist and philosopher Jean Baudrillard’s Simulacrum and Simulation offers a postmodernist perspective on this debate.
Baudrillard’s work on our electronic media culture, dating back to the 1980s, provides us with a sociological theory for understanding these effects of electronic media. He points out the difference between pretense and pretense. In the case of simulation, the difference is that reality does not change. But in the case of simulation, it has much more to do with what is true, what is false, what is real and what is imagined.
What happened to the Indian wrestlers was a real event as it was arrested during a protest act. But in the minds of BJP supporters and activists there is an imagined version of reality in which the fighters rejoice at having been arrested, or having achieved an imagined goal of smearing the government. Baudrillard theorizes that “the real can be produced from miniaturized cells, matrices and memory banks, control models, and can be reproduced an indefinite number of times from them.”
In this case, the AI models are producing an imaginary reality that is true to the millions of consumers of the simulated image of the BJP computing cell.
The BJP’s computer cell has perfected the art of creating imaginary realities, in which the distortion of reality is distributed to millions of people via electronic media networks. Its ability to distort and promote new realities was amplified by the monopolistic networks of Facebook and WhatsApp.
For decades, concepts like “posthumans” and virtual reality have led science fiction communities to imagine simulated worlds and philosophers to propose that we live in a simulation.
Now, AI fuels this ability and makes it even more difficult for us to tell the difference between what is real and what is imagined. The proliferation and scale of these imaginary narratives will only increase from now on, as AI tools become better and more accessible.
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Beyond the idea of being true or false, people believe the simulations carried out by the BJP computer cell, which leads them to further distort reality.
With the recent Odisha train accident, many have started promoting alternative versions of the accident for which the Muslims, Pakistan and the opposition are responsible. Not all of these reports come from the computer cell, but from ordinary people who are already being incited to act in this way.
The use of AI tools to distort reality is only going to increase in the coming months as many states in India hold assembly elections. The increased proliferation of this manipulated content will be difficult for fact-checkers and the general public to detect, and it will affect the way we perceive reality. Several Internet media outlets promoted by political parties now use large AI tools based on linguistic models to automate some version of their news as well.
Its ability to distort and promote new realities was amplified by the monopolistic networks of Facebook and WhatsApp.
The result of these tools being used without any regulation in sight is that society’s ability to see reality will be hampered. In the words of Hyderabad MP Asaduddin Owaisi, “minds are being hacked”, and these “simulated” minds are dangerous both to themselves and to society.
In the Matrix, the people living inside the simulation aren’t entirely innocent either, having the ability to suddenly transform into agents that don’t allow others to see reality.
Article republished from The Wire as part of an agreement between both parties to share content. Link to the original article: https://thewire.in/tech/terminal-ai-tools-simulation-bjp-it-cell
He is a digitalization researcher and hacktivist.
