Escaped monkeys and the post truth era
Its 2am and I should be asleep so I'm sorry if this is maybe just a weird midnight rant.
Today I saw a news article on the other site about aggressive monkeys with covid and herpes escaping a crashed semi truck.
My first reaction was "is this headline a joke" and I couldn't tell. Then I looked at the source (action news 5 or channel 5 action news, or... something) and even opened the page to have a look for clues of it being fake and without digging deeper I just couldn't tell if it was a legitimate news site or not. So I read the (short) article and looked for clues and it sounded probably legitimate. There was a photo of the scene with a monkey at the rear of a trailer but af this point I can't instantly spot AI images and who knows if it isn't just an old photo. Then I go to the reddit comment and they're parroting additional "facts" but nothing that felt substantial.
I felt very struck by the feeling that I don't know if I can trust any information online unless it's REALLY from a trusted source, and I'm not really sure what sources I can trust anymore.
Is this just me? Have you felt a significant change in the last few months? AI is playing a big part in my distrust, but Im also seeing echo chambers somehow get even worse.
Also, it found out later that the monkeys weren't knfected with a bunch of viruses, it was some sort of miss-communication.
I do think you didn't see more explicit pictures because they killed the monkeys and no news org wants to show Rhesus monkey corpses. (And personally I think the sheriff's dept just were dumb in interpreting "they're dangerous" + "use gloves" + "research animals" as "riddled with dangerous plague!")
There is reporting on CNN and Fox and such now too.
But yes I try to double check things all the time and I still get caught sometimes. I don't think it's inherently an echo chamber problem though, the monkeys weren't particular echo chamber issue and plenty of misinformation is spread across demographics, but on certain topics echo chambers can definitely make misinfo worse.
(I don't think that's equally distributed by any means. Especially when the government is declaring cities war zones and blaming Tylenol for autism and just aggressively lying all the time; there's just no "both sides" strong enough for that.)
It's not just you.
I tend to think though that the change is more subjective than objective, that the experience you had is closer to pulling off a veil than it is an observation of material conditions shifting. Material conditions have been shifting but the moment you had could have happened at any point with other forms/sources of information. Truth is not quite as solid as we want it to be, or are led to believe. In the end, we have to function as the arbiter of it - one way or another, your own mind ultimately decides what sticks and what doesn't, with or without you being aware of the exact process. What I think you have experienced is the breakdown of a part of the process of justification.
Epistemology tries to understand that, through what observation we can manage of how people come to believe things and what they actually do in their minds when they accept something as true. I won't go too far into that because I'd like to spare you some (intensely) dense reading, but if you're curious, there's the word to start with if you're inclined toward an analytical approach to learning about the experience you have had. I think being more skeptical of the internet as a source of information is a good thing. We should be more wary, not just because a lot is easier to do today but because it always was a kinda flimsy thing to be relying upon.
What I think AI has done has been to take apart at large scale folks' epistemic processes. It doesn't mean truth is impossible to determine, or has no value, but it does shift around a bit what we need to do to reach the determination, and I think "value" is where focus should shift toward. We may need to abandon the search, or as I will try to lay out, put some conditions upon when we go about doing it.
We can't use things like the trivial nature of the story or difficulty producing doctored content to justify belief in what we see. Anyone can do it, anywhere, and networks of machinery can do the distribution without a human touching it. So, at least personally I have made it a habit to ask some different questions. Using the monkey story as an example - if I come across something like that, my first question after reading it isn't "is this true?". It's "OK, so what?". Does it matter in any way, whether this event actually happened, for me? Does anyone I know live there, or know folks there? Does it mean anything where I am, if it is true? If I don't have obvious answers, or even just some speculative answers, 99% of the time I'm moving on. Literally it is time I could use on something else and there's plenty else I'd rather be doing than figuring out the monkey story (like discussing it with you, perhaps ironically). If it comes up some time later I might be inclined to rethink that, but for now, no. I am intentionally abandoning thoughts about anyone other than myself in this moment, because my time is mine and I'd like to spend it on other stuff.
It probably comes off closed minded to think that way, but I would challenge that a bit. Why should I be open to believing this specific story about this specific incident? Why should I consider what the story means for anyone else? Does the truth matter, in this instance? The open mindedness I try to practice is of being open to someone's answers to those kinds of questions. If someone explained, I might reengage and investigate further. That way, my time remains optimized in my favor, but I can still reach for the truth of the story if it turns out relevant/necessary.
I wanna emphasize this isn't some elaborate dismissal of your experience and concern. I think you're pointing out something important about our information environment and your experience is something just about everyone will eventually share. Some won't. I guess they'll end up in machine cults or something, but I like to think most will, and if we can all do some amateur epistemological work it's not as difficult to deal with as it might seem. Nobody needs to do what I'm saying but my hope is that sharing it will be helpful for somebody. Gotta put the degree to work some way or other right?