IMG source - Anonymous Memester
Recently our enemies have inundated us with a lot of lies loosely linked to facts to keep us hope-deprived. Nothing new, really. However, it is extremely important to keep in mind that CNN, Fox, and all media corporations are today literally intent on our destruction, death, and dishonor. Too often I am dismissive of their terrible threat, should I note the smug tenor of their reporting an item of fake news, or mischaracterization of people or events. I forget the army of psychologists behind their choices in personnel, backdrop, color, pitch, tone, and every facet of the reports we are exposed to they publish. The serial attacks on our sovereignty, felicity, and prosperity are designed in light of the data on public perception of their integrity.
They aren't surprised by our lack of belief. The extraordinary complexity of their intellectual pogroms don't just take into account our perception of their abysmal integrity, they inculcate my dismissal, my fleeting feeling of superiority when I detect some attack vector. There is so much behind their disinformation it is actually impossible for me to conceive of how many different vectors of attack on my mind, how many different knives they're plunging into my grasp of reality, that there are surely a great many I am unaware of, that sink deeply and successfully into the back of my mind, and become a part of my world view.
I am not only not immune to propaganda, if I had to guess (and I do), it is likely that most of the way in which I think, how I view the world itself, has been crafted by my enemies. That being so, the provision of attitudes, information, or topics I am expected to dismiss takes on the nature of feints, head fakes, and these are an integral aspect of battle. I feel that I cannot be humble enough faced with this immense competence and savage malice. Comparatively, I have hardly given the issue a thought. A hundred books could probably be written on all the separate angles and vectors of attack on my mind every 10 second clip I am exposed to draws on to do me harm. The smug dismissiveness with which I responded to detecting one feint takes my breath away with it's vapidity, the utterly misplaced arrogance I feel regarding the enemedia.
So when some item or another clearly and obviously is false, yet so widely reported by these fiends as to be practically ubiquitous, I am stumped. I just don't have the competence to assign to it the relevance it has, what demographic has been fooled, or why so much has been spent to broadcast it. Biden's recent Executive Order on AI is a good example.
"Soheil Feizi, at the University of Maryland, has conducted two studies of watermarking technologies and found them “unreliable.” He says the risk of false positives and negatives is so extensive that watermarks provide “basically zero information.”
“Imagine if there is a tweet or a text with a hidden official White House watermark, but that tweet was actually written by adversaries,” Feizi warns. “That can cause more problems than solving any of the current problems.”
"What’s more, his research found that invisible and tamper-proof watermarking technologies are theoretically “impossible,” though he has not studied the efficacy of content authentication techniques."
The Technocrat, one of my email subscriptions, points out that it is not just impossible in practice, but actually inconceivable of success to watermark AI deep fakes. When I set to and try to rationally consider why it has been published, why the Biden Administration even incorporated this policy, I am quickly overwhelmed by variables and potential harms such misinformation could effect. I can be sure of one thing, at least, that the dismissal of the EO as impossible and the entire story as pointless is wrong. In fact, that dismissiveness could well be the primary achievement of the mission. Since I'm simply making assumptions based on breathtaking ignorance, no inconsidered, contemporaneous speculation I might propose is likely to be right, particularly when the majority of my views and understanding has been inculcated in me by my enemies. More has been spent on this EO than I will probably earn in my lifetime.
Given the import of deception, that it is the foundation of warfare, and an essential component of successful attacks on the vanquished, and the complete lack of information beyond a few vague names, like Bellingcat, the Atlantic Council, and etc., I know almost nothing about how the mission to deceive me and my people is conducted, by whom, and how many, and with what tools. I just have no capacity to grasp what has been achieved by such reports.
That is surely all but proof the attack on my mind was successful. My vanity regarding my resistance to disinformation is based on detecting and dismissing uncountable attacks on my understanding. It is quite natural to feel competent, even superlative, intellectually compared to massively funded networks of professionally trained enemies when I feel I have defeated an attack on my understanding. But the EO is an obvious feint. The people that wrote it conceived of it knowing full well such watermarking was literally impossible. My utter incapacity to even propose some reason so many resources were expended to create that EO, and then so widely report it, to make it such an ubiquitous failure, is an appropriate acknowledgement of my true competence in the contest with my foes. They clearly didn't fail to achieve the impossible. There isn't some doomed program to implement such watermarks on AI content staffed with true believers dreaming the impossible dream, intent on making us all safe from deep fakes.
Whatever there actually is, whatever actual purpose is behind the EO, then, is likely to be achieved, in terms of my intellectual manipulation. I clearly just can't be humble enough faced with such a foe. Since IME the worst thing that can happen to me is to have my fervent hope crushed, because nothing so impairs my performance as utter dispair, I strongly feel that my best defense against that weapon is humility. It is extremely important to realize I have not defeated the malevolent liars intent on destroying my mind, my understanding of the world, and my competence to meet them on the field of battle is almost non-existent, because then I am not lured into false and fervent hope that I can only suffer being dashed. Nothing more impedes my competence than such despair, when I have been utterly deceived, and grasp just as I am dealt the killing blow that my hope is crushed.
Humility is the best defense against despair. It is the only solid foundation of wisdom. Hubris is the curse of genius, and it is a cliche that absent-minded professors can't manage their households for very good reason. All I can take from this EO and the massive spending on publicizing it, is that I have no idea what has been accomplished, and that is the best evidence that my enemies have succeeded by this ploy in whatever purpose they had in it. My incomprehension but humbles me, and whatever grants me greater humility has strengthened my armor against despair.