Good Catholics that we Filipinos are, striking images of a supposedly vigorous Pope Francis stepping out stylishly clad in an immaculate-white puffer winter jacket certainly turned our heads.
The images went viral on social media the other week and are now considered by social media watchers among the year’s best memes.
There’s just one problem: we had been fooled.
The pictures weren’t real.
In fact, a Web culture expert calls the pope images “the first real mass-level AI (artificial intelligence) misinformation case.”
The pictures were generated by the generative AI program Midjourney, which produces images based on text prompts. Midjourney is but one creation of the ongoing worldwide generative AI arms race which has prompted frantic calls to stop its further development.
Should we Filipinos be worried by the pope’s images?
Up to now, I have not felt a true sense of alarm over the risks inherent in digital technologies. But the dizzying speed by which generative AI has taken off is something else.
Take for instance the generative AI program ChatGPT. Newsworthy ChatGPT started slow last November. But by January, ChatGPT had registered 100 million users. Social media wonder TikTok, despite its alleged privacy lapses, took nine months to hit the same numbers.
ChatGPT, as described by one expert, “is a bot that engages in conversational dialogue — you feel like you’re literally chatting with it.”
A complex language-model software technology, ChatGPT, once prompted, literally mines the internet and dishes out answers in respectable English.
Enterprising students have turned ChatGPT into a handy tool and, in the process, unleashed stormy debates — still ongoing — among educators worldwide.
(In case you’re wondering what a bot is, it is a software application that is programmed to do certain tasks, typically boring repetitive tasks. Bots are automated.)
Anyway, these generative AI vanguard tools are increasingly vital in our digital era and we need to keep up with them.
The possibilities of what AI can achieve or how much further it will transform our screen-tapping consciousness we can’t foretell, however. But we are at a crossroads.
As one technology expert puts it, “That is where we stand now, at a crossroads, and many of us — dare I say most of us, and especially those of us who dwell in the margins of society — will fall victim to more intelligently designed schemes, from email fraud and identity theft to online harassment.”
For us Filipinos, that’s no idle threat.
Given that we Filipinos are one of the heaviest users of social media in the world — Filipino internet users spend 3 hours and 43 minutes on social media daily — we have cause for more worry once newer sophisticated fakery schemes are unleashed on our already disinformation-damaged society.
Not believing that we don’t have a disinformation-damaged society is delusional. It is not for nothing that the country was once described by a Facebook executive as “patient zero” in the global disinformation epidemic.
A recent study showed that we Filipinos top the world in consuming daily vlogs from YouTube hustlers and playing video games — stark evidence that Filipino culture is oriented towards the visual rather than text.
At any rate, advanced manipulated images from Midjourney and others give us a sense of where manipulated generative AI pictures and videos are heading — straining further our abilities to distinguish real pictures and video clips from fake ones.
Bad actors have already deployed fake videos and pictures now running riot in our weaponized social media ecosystem that is, more than anything else, a propagandist’s playground.
Yet, as algorithmic knobs and levers behind these new image generators are tweaked, these new tools will be incredibly adept at further remaking Filipinos with fakeries.
The past six years have conclusively shown the Filipino has been remade after unbridled fakeries uncaged the barbaric, inhumane horrors lurking in the dark depths of the Filipino psyche and soul.
Are we all ready and prepared against more fakery horrors coming our way, threatening to remake us even more?
Email: nevqjr@yahoo.com.ph