Seeing is no longer believing

VIEWPOINT

By RALPH HARDIN

Evening Times Editor A bout 30 years ago, the movie “Jurassic Park” came out. If you’ve somehow missed out on the movie and its many sequels, it’s about a group of scientists who use fossilized dinosaur DNA to bring the mighty T-Rex, pterodactyls, velociraptors and other giant beasts from 65 million years ago back to life to put in a theme park that they hope will make their corporate benefactors multimillionaires.

Now, the movie does delve into all sorts of themes, such as the ethics of cloning, playing God, greed and hubris, but the main thing when watching the movie, especially for the first time, is, “Holy crap … dinosaurs!”

Yes, even for a movie made in 1993, when you see the dinosaurs on the screen, they are so realistic, you really don’t even doubt that the professor, the doctor, the greedy park stooge and the kids (yes, there’s always kids in these kinds of movies to up the peril factor) are all being pursued by a pack of raptors or being chomped by a tyrannosaur. The special effect are just that good. And not by 30-years-ago standards. They still hold up.

But we do know that it’s all CGI studio magic. Just like when we see Superman fly or Harry Potter cast a spell. After all, it’s movies. It’s not real life. But …

We have seemingly reached the point where “real life” is being thrown into question, thanks to advances in technology that blur the lines between what is real and what is not. Computer-based imaging, artificial intelligence and people with their own agendas have combined into a trifecta of falsehoods, fake news and misinformation.

Some of it is clearly AI-generated silliness, like a video I saw recently of Donald Trump and Elon Musk on TikTok dancing to the Bee Gee’s disco hit “Stayin’ Alive.” But some of it is not so innocent, such as web sites and phone apps that let you put someone’s face on another person’s body depicting them doing whatever you want, most infamously the “deepfake” videos of famous people digitally inserted into pornography. AI can take it a step further by simply generating such a video from scratch with just a few simple prompts.

But it’s not just making fake Taylor Swift do a striptease or making “Naked Star Wars” videos. This technology is being used to manipulate real video footage that is then being presented as “what really happened” to an unsuspecting public.

For example, both the Democrats and the Republicans have gotten into a “my crowd is bigger than your crowd” contest for whatever reason. A couple of weeks ago, there was footage of Kamala Harris and Tim Walz getting off of an airplane in Pennsylvania. A staffer for their campaign took some footage of their arrival, with thousands of screaming, cheering supporters on hand welcoming the pair.

Immediately, some GOP pundits cried foul, claiming the footage of the crowd was generated through AI video, either by adding digital people or sweetening the crowd noise or both. But it turned out to be authentic, as there was video and audio evidence from other people at the rally who also shot video from other angles.

But … someone who clearly has too much time on his or her hands actually took the footage and ran it through an AI video generator that had the ability to digitally remove the people and the noise of the crowd so that it looked like Harris and Walz were arriving at the airport to less enthusiasm than the proverbial crickets and tumbleweeds.

Now, what should have been a simple matter of a “Harris and Walz arrive in Pennsylvania” news blurb, it throws the very nature of our reality into question. Each side now has “proof” that there was/wasn’t a huge crowd at the airport. And while that really doesn’t matter one way or another in the grand scheme of things, what’s to say any video footage you see is real or isn’t real? Did Trump really get shot? Did Harris really ramp up her “Detroit” accent to appeal to a rally of auto workers? Are we sure they didn’t really just clone a bunch of dinosaurs for that movie?

Online right now is a video of a speech given by President Richard Nixon explaining to the nation how the 1969 Apollo Moon Landing was a failure where he said, “Fate has ordained that the men who went to the Moon to explore in peace will remain on the Moon to rest in peace.”

Except that, of course, the Moon Landing was a success, but someone was able to create an AI Nixon giving a speech that was never given that looks straight out of 1969. If you didn’t know, you would not be able to tell that it was computer generated.

Maybe we could bring back an AI Ronald Reagan to run for president?