Tale of cats v tigers that should worry us all
Normally, these days, when Instagram wants to hook me in it offers me DIY tips and hot brunettes in slinky dresses. Not at the same time, you understand. That would be impractical. Still, the algorithm on this social media network has peered deep into my probably quite textbook middle-aged soul and has decided that this is the way.
A female friend of a similar age, meanwhile, mainly gets lumberjacks. Each one will first cleave a log with his axe. So far, so lumberjack vanilla. Then, though, they’ll get down on their hands and knees, stick their muscular, lumberjack fingers into the, um, crevice and rip the log apart. She says she’s seen hundreds like this. Right to the end.
Look, I’m not a mug. I see what’s going on here. Get thee behind me, hot brunette Satans and ingenious ways of fitting shelving; I see your game. Recently, though, a video caught me off guard. This one, shot as if it were grainy CCTV, showed a tiger entering a backyard where a dog was sleeping. Tiger attacks dog, dog prepares to die. Then, from off-screen, appears a high-velocity house cat, which flies at the tiger’s face and causes it to flee. “Brave kitty,” I thought, quite moved.
Then I kept seeing more of them. Different videos, different backyards, different big cats, same scenario. “How remarkable,” I found myself thinking, “that this is such a commonplace occurrence!” Before realising, of course, that it was AI. Suddenly, everything is. Probably even the lumberjacks. Out there on social media, quite abruptly, more things are AI than are not.
This week, speaking to mark the centenary of the Treaty of Locarno, the foreign secretary, Yvette Cooper, warned of the threat to our democracy posed by AI misinformation, chiefly from Russia. Seeking examples, she was spoilt for choice. Last month, as Russian forces laid siege to Pokrovsk in eastern Ukraine, social media users found their feeds flooded with videos of Ukrainian soldiers weeping and surrendering. All fake. Last year, also, just before Volodymyr Zelensky’s visit to South Africa, fake news videos circulated claiming he’d bought a platinum mine.
This is disinformation in its purest form. And yet, in highlighting it, Cooper was met, as ever, with a sort of shrug. “This isn’t about me,” people just seem to think. “It’s about other people. I would never be fooled.”
In fact, it’s not so simple. Last week in The New York Times, a report made two key observations. The first was that AI videos have swiftly become ubiquitous and that none of the tech-led safeguards against them seem to be working. That deluge people used to warn about? It’s here.
The second point was that even when you do tell people they’re watching AI, it doesn’t make much difference. The paper cited a supposed news report circulated on TikTok during the recent US shutdown, in which a woman, who didn’t exist, boasted of selling food stamps to an interviewer, who didn’t exist either. Visibly flagged as fake, it still attracted thousands of comments from people who didn’t seem to care.
It staggers me how many people manage not to care about this
Probably that one wasn’t Putin’s fault. For the record, I’m not suggesting he’s sending me cat videos either. All sorts of people are doing this stuff. Last month, for reasons best known to itself, Elon Musk’s X platform started revealing location data for all accounts, leading to a flood of hardcore Maga activists suddenly being exposed as posting from Iran, or Nigeria, or India.
Most, rather than being state-sponsored, will have been doing it to make money through amassing audiences, as was the case even back in 2016 when lots of Trump-favouring Facebook fake news was shown to have come from places like Moldova and Macedonia. Yet it should remind us, all the same, that the political space in which we live is not a merely organic one, shaped only by real people, who think real things. It is manipulated, chivvied, faked and steered, a thousand times a day.
It staggers me, endlessly, how many people manage not to care about any of this. Not even now that it has moved from an alarmed hypothesis shared by internet Cassandras (such as me) and is now verifiable fact.
“I’m not on these platforms,” people still say. “They’re for mugs.” But your friends are and your families are. So are your politicians and the journalists who cover them, and both of these groups have learnt what goes viral, what spreads, what attracts worship and adulation, what attracts hatred and contempt. You, too, exist in this ecosystem, whether you want to or not.
Disinformation doesn’t exist only to fool you. It also exists to bore you, to confuse you, to befuddle you, to make you doubt yourself and everyone else. It exists to detach you from reality. And so we now live in a world in which, after working hard for well over a decade to destabilise western politics, the Kremlin gets to say that the latest US national security strategy is “largely consistent with our vision”. And in which the US right can say Europe is a violent hellscape, and in which a decent number of British pundits will affect to agree with them, no matter that they actually live here and can look out of a window.
Look, I get it. Most AI slop isn’t even political. Those brunettes are really hot and so are those lumberjacks. Those kitties could not be more brave. I also get the note of hysteria that seems to be creeping in towards the end of this column.
Believe me, I’m working hard to rein it in. But does nobody care how all of this has happened? Is nobody even interested? With the tools now at our disposal, God knows, we’d have been more than capable of going at least this mad all by ourselves. But we haven’t done it by ourselves, have we? How long until we wake the hell up?
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