Virtual Camera

Racist AI fakes are now a business — and a political tool. You don't say...

At the end of the article, Axios quotes organizational psychologist Janice Gassam Asare as saying: "I would just encourage people to be a little bit more cautious when they see something on social media, and ask yourself, 'how do I know that this is actually real?'"

I felt that it was missing the "pretty please with sugar on top." This is, after all, an article that notes: "One user ID'd a video they shared as fake, but still encouraged others to share it because it justified their viewpoints about alleged SNAP fraud." If people care more about whether information validates their worldview than whether it's real, what good does it do to "encourage people to be a little bit more cautious?" That lack of "caution" is getting them precisely what they're looking for.

I wonder if Axios had informed Ms. Asare, when they asked her for her comments, that they already believed that people were deliberately sharing fictitious video narratives. Maybe they did, and maybe it wouldn't (or didn't) make any difference, but the general tenor of her comments, and the article as a whole, put the cart in front of the horse, as I see it.

Because the thing about "framing a guilty person," as the saying goes, is that it presupposes that the person is guilty. The only point behind framing them is that there otherwise isn't enough evidence to connect them to the crimes one believes that they're guilty of. When someone fakes and shares a "video [that] shows multiple Black women screaming and pounding on a door with the caption 'store under attack'," they're not doing so out a desire to tar innocent people; they're engaging in using fiction to tell what they understand is a truth, and the people they're likely to share it with already agree with their viewpoint. Because to do otherwise would be to invite pushback.

Racism is a fairly popular pastime in the United States, because at the base of it is a hierarchy of deserving. That existed long before generative automation. Faked video may facilitate its spread, but it was spreading just fine previously.