We're only about 6 months into AI tools being openly available and this is what they are producing - and there is still a basic bar for using them.
What's interesting about the soldier image is it has the same emotional impact at first glance as if it were real, before your critical faculties engage to sort it, which means its effect has already occurred. If your feeds are full of indignation and outrage, it doesn't matter whether it's real or not, you're going to have a physical and uncritical association with the sensations it creates. It's straight Pavlovian response. Your perceptions literally come through a feed.
Maybe we recognize how thoroughly propagandized we are already, and these examples are a merciful uncanny valley that can let us step back and really question the shit we are letting pile up in our psyches. Even as a self check, do a word association exercise and then ask how closely your associations reflect objective or even an ideal reality. I do these occasionally to test the quality of my beliefs, the results are reliably poor. Apprehending anything close to reality at all requires constant vigilance and asking how you know the things you know, and we're just at t=6mos, what does t=36 look like?
What's interesting about the soldier image is it has the same emotional impact at first glance as if it were real, before your critical faculties engage to sort it, which means its effect has already occurred. If your feeds are full of indignation and outrage, it doesn't matter whether it's real or not, you're going to have a physical and uncritical association with the sensations it creates. It's straight Pavlovian response. Your perceptions literally come through a feed.
Maybe we recognize how thoroughly propagandized we are already, and these examples are a merciful uncanny valley that can let us step back and really question the shit we are letting pile up in our psyches. Even as a self check, do a word association exercise and then ask how closely your associations reflect objective or even an ideal reality. I do these occasionally to test the quality of my beliefs, the results are reliably poor. Apprehending anything close to reality at all requires constant vigilance and asking how you know the things you know, and we're just at t=6mos, what does t=36 look like?