A clean up on two fronts.
There was always that one kid in class who was utterly obsessed with LiveLeak.
Showing you the most grotesque footage in homeroom while you’re just barely ready to start the day on four hours sleep.
Now that same archetype of human has access to AI systems, making their own horrifying clips to share and reap the likes.
And it seems China is currently getting the worst of it.
Two major events are crossing over in a bizarre and unhinged way:
Typhoon Noul.
And China’s AI boom.
While officials clear rubble and debris from the streets, they also have to clear misleading AI videos from the web.
While many people in the West are shown falling scaffolding, toppled motorcycles and flooded southern China streets; the internet has been getting a different story.
Videos of dead bodies floating in the water, false information on unaffected areas and even a fake crocodile swarm trend.
While a lot of the videos have now been taken down, some content creators from India have taken on the crocodile trend.
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The AI cleanup has also led to a number of arrests, detentions and fines.
Zhejiang’s Deputy Chief of Online Public Security stated that “Many of these content creators use disaster news to try to gain followers, knowing that more sensational or exaggerated content will garner more likes and more views”.
Experts warn that as China continues to push AI as its “main driving force”, the stream of fake content will only continue to grow.
Efforts to identify fake content and specifically verify geographical locations and timestamps of content are still running behind.
Professor Xu Xiaoke from Beijing Normal University stated that “We’re in a constant cat-and-mouse game” when it comes to identification technology.
While cleanup continues on the two fronts, the threat of Mother Nature and artificial intelligence combined still lingers.
