Seeing is Not Believing

By Darren Katz, Partner

Photo by Christian Fregnan on Unsplash

One of the many casualties left in the wake of the 2016 US presidential election was the notion of objective truth. Essentially polarized Americans are choosing to believe their own curated reality fed to them by their curated news and information content.  While this issue is certainly more prevalent among Republicans, Democrats are creating and fostering their own ecosystems, particular on social media.

Countless think pieces have been written about the implications of this. My biggest fear is related to the Mueller investigation.  I’m fairly convinced that no matter what Mueller concludes, the Republican Congress, the Fox/Breibart propaganda wing, and thus half the country, will cry foul, and then just shrug. This will be only the most current nadir of subjective reality.

But it gets worse.  Think back to the Trump Access Hollywood video where Trump essentially copped to multiple sexual assaults. While the Republican talking points were that it was just “locker room talk”, they at least had to address it as real. Now, with advances in AI, there are what are called “deepfake” videos which essentially allow manipulation of video to create fake faces on different bodies. The implications of this technology are horrifying. Not only will lives be ruined, but the limited objective reality that we all share will be even further degraded when people literally cannot believe their own eyes.