See what you want to see
A video, visibly made with artificial intelligence, is circulating on the Internet, showing a series of Hollywood stars (directors such as Steven Spielberg or Woody Allen, actresses such as Scarlett Johansson, musicians such as Lenny Kravitz), who have in common the fact that they are Jewish. They are all dressed in a white T-shirt with a drawing of a closed fist with the middle finger raised, above the name Kanye. The message, therefore, would be "fuck you, Kanye", in reference to the rapper Kanye West, who has recently declared himself a Nazi again (he had done so on previous occasions) and has paid a large amount of millions of dollars to advertise during the Superbowl his latest fashion design: a T-shirt with the Nazi swastika printed on it. West, who lately also calls himself Ye, claims that this "is my best performance design", and has obsessively spread his admiration for Hitler and his anti-Semitism on the networks and in statements to the media. Also his machismo and his aporophobia: at the last Grammy Awards gala, Kanye West and his partner, the model Bianca Censori, appeared again as they usually do: without saying either donkey or beast, he fully clothed and she completely naked. West's statements on this controversy were: "I have control over my woman, this is not feminist shit." woke"She's with a billionaire, why should she listen to any of you poor fools?" All of it, a good MAGA Trumpist manual.
On the contrary, someone who was annoyed by the fascist rapper made the video we were talking about. With AI, as we have already seen on the networks, it is very easy to take images of whoever you want (real or fictional characters, also images of paintings) and manipulate them as you want: dress them, move them, even make them act out little scenes of whatever. It is also easy, at this point, to realize the trick: until AI has better features, the videos that are generated usually give their figures a fairly characteristic appearance and movements. On the other hand, it is highly doubtful that the artists mentioned at the beginning have the slightest interest in responding to the ravings of a caveman like West. Nor that they would quickly agree to appear together in a video wearing a t-shirt with an equally rude message, etc.
However, a very wide audience has believed that the video is real, including part of our right, convinced that it lives surrounded by furious anti-Semites (generally, people who are shocked by the genocide perpetrated in Gaza by the Israeli government and army). They have begun to applaud the video like creatures, convinced that Spielberg, Allen and company are with them in their crusade against the dangerous pro-Palestinian progressives. The lesson of all this is that the great danger of artificial intelligence is not only that it makes us see what does not exist: it is, above all, that it allows us to see only what we want to see.