Can you prove it's not true?

'Here's a picture with you and her. That proves you know eachother! So why did you lie when I said her name yesterday and you claimed you never heard of her?'

Easy. This picture was taken a long time ago. At one of a few hundred parties I worked at as entertainer. With two of several thousand people that share a picture frame with me. So no, I don't know who all those people are. Not even when one of them turns out to be a female 'Tinder Swindler', a famous politician, friends with a dictator or an unknown fashion designer.

Besides that: it has gotten very easy to change things in pictures. Here's a famous example out of the Ukraine/Russia war:

And if I can easily turn this

into this

in just a few minutes with a free app on my smartphone, just imagine what a professional editor can do with actual professional editing equipment.

We are constantly bombarded with extremely manipulitive words and pictures. Usually used as 'clickbait', just so an information channel can make more money by selling advertising space. Hidden between the highly suggestive editorials and ads, it's hard to find actual data. 

'Doing your own research' becomes increasingly difficult because most articles are written by people. And every single one of us is prejudiced. Or lying when they state they are not.

Perhaps we should have computer programs write every (news) article. Before you ask if A.I. can write articles without the reader knowing it's not a human: chances are you have already read several hundred articles that were written by bots. Computer code (click) takes factual data and gets increasingly better at forming whole sentences based on that data.

It's true. Bigly. My friend John can testify. Great guy. 

But wait! What if one day we won't read any articles anymore that outline the dangers of A.I....will that be the day that the robots have taken over?

=============================

Want to read (more of) my short stories? My author page: Terrence Weijnschenk at Amazon

I just lost my part time job and am not making ends meet via entertainment because of covid, so a donation (click) is much appreciated:

She made (a poem. Now as picvoice)

Understanding came before the vision
So when she said 'It's just like I remember',
he replied 'I remember it differently
but I know what you mean.'

And so they sat in silence,
each in their own thoughts.
Just like she remembered.

While he smiled,
recollecting the sounds she made.

============================

Now also available as picvoice:

Want to read (more of) my short stories? My author page: Terrence Weijnschenk at Amazon

I just lost my part time job and am not making ends meet via entertainment because of covid, so a donation (click) is much appreciated:

Fake news! Propaganda!

“In war, truth is the first casualty.” is a quote that had been attributed to several people. The oldest source dates back to around 500BC, when the Greek tragedian Aeschylus added more people as well as more conflict to plays and is therefore known as 'the father of Tragedy'. 

==========================================================

Want to read (more of) my short stories? My author page: Terrence Weijnschenk at Amazon

I just lost my part time job and am not making ends meet via entertainment because of covid, so a donation (click) is much appreciated:

=========================================================

He was right of course. I only have to point you towards the many reports that turned out to be fake news in the recent Ukraine/Russia war: clips from a fighter jet taking down a Russian counterpart turned out to be taken from a videogame. Here are a few examples of clips that were shared as 'real': 

and a picture of president Zelenskyy proudly showing a t-shirt with a swastika quickly turned out to be photoshopped.

The Russian government even paid several online influencers to read the same script, claiming Russia was a victim and Ukraine was the agressor:

Only in a dictatorship the ruling elite would lie to its people, right? And bombard them with fake news and propaganda? Not quit. Not so long ago the exact same thing happened in America. When anchors of local TV stations, all owned by the Sinclair Broadcasting Group were forced by the group owners to tell a certain narrative. That was automatically believed by at least 70 percent of the viewers of local TV-stations. Sinclair has be known to be one of the most faithful donors of the Republican Party and the 'news' segment was scripted to make Donald Trump look good and every news station that made him look like he actually is like fake news. But it was Sinclair itself that made up fake news. 

But when people believe something, it's nearly impossible to change their minds. They simply dismiss facts. So the damage is done. And sometimes it's hard to blame them because 'deep fake' is getting increasingly harder to distinguish from 'the real thing'. 

Countering American senator's Marco Rubio's 'mistake' in which he - against the wishes of the Ukranian consulat - 'accidentally' took a screenshot (and posted it!)

of his talk with Zelensky in which he may have given Russian intelligence some valuable information regarding the man they have high on their kill list, someone created this fake video: we see 'Zelensky' getting back at the US Senator:

There's only one kind of 'good' propaganda. And that's this: