I think I would not like to live in a world in which democracy isn’t the predominant form of government. The ability of the typical person to understand and form their own opinions about the world is quite important to democracy, and journalism does help with that. But I guess the modern version of image and video heavy journalism wasn’t the only thing we had the whole time; even as recent as the 90’s (I’m pretty sure; I was just a kid), newspapers were a major source. And somehow America was invented before photojournalism, but of course that form of democracy would be hard for us to recognize nowadays…
It is only when we got these portable video screens that stuff like YouTube and TikTok became really important news sources (for better or worse; worse I would say). And anyway, people already manage to take misleading or out of context videos, so it isn’t like the situation is very good.
Maybe AI video will be a blessing in disguise. At some point we’ll have to give up on believe something just because we saw it. I guess we’ll have to rely on people attesting to information, that sort of thing. With modern cryptography I guess we could do that fairly well.
Edit: Another way of looking at it: basically no modern journalist or politician has a reputation better than an inanimate object, a photos or video. That’s a really bizarre situation! We’re used to consulting people on hard decisions, right? Not figuring out everything by direct observation.
I think I would not like to live in a world in which democracy isn’t the predominant form of government. The ability of the typical person to understand and form their own opinions about the world is quite important to democracy, and journalism does help with that. But I guess the modern version of image and video heavy journalism wasn’t the only thing we had the whole time; even as recent as the 90’s (I’m pretty sure; I was just a kid), newspapers were a major source. And somehow America was invented before photojournalism, but of course that form of democracy would be hard for us to recognize nowadays…
It is only when we got these portable video screens that stuff like YouTube and TikTok became really important news sources (for better or worse; worse I would say). And anyway, people already manage to take misleading or out of context videos, so it isn’t like the situation is very good.
Maybe AI video will be a blessing in disguise. At some point we’ll have to give up on believe something just because we saw it. I guess we’ll have to rely on people attesting to information, that sort of thing. With modern cryptography I guess we could do that fairly well.
Edit: Another way of looking at it: basically no modern journalist or politician has a reputation better than an inanimate object, a photos or video. That’s a really bizarre situation! We’re used to consulting people on hard decisions, right? Not figuring out everything by direct observation.