"Mass propaganda discovered that its audience was ready at all times to believe the worst, no matter how absurd, and did not particularly object to being deceived because it held every statement to be a lie anyhow." As Dangerous A Use Of "AI" Generated Imagery As I've Seen

IN THE AFTERNOON HEAT YESTERDAY, as it was too hot to work in the garden and I needed to rest my eyes, I clicked on an image of the great philosopher who warned against totalitarian propaganda and its potency, Hannah Arendt.   Only it wasn't a film clip of her, it was an "AI" generated image of her and an "AI" generated voice that could have been mistaken for her speaking lines that, I suspect, were not her exact words.   And when it is someone as precise as she was, exactness is a major issue.   The sentiments of the video weren't particularly objectionable, though in the "AI" phenomenon as it means to most Americans nearly 100% of the time, the generation of fake images, videos, voices and information, it most certainly could have presented information that was 100% the opposite of what she did say or any percentage between that number and 0.   And Americans and certainly most other People in the English speaking world or somewhat understanding who could understand what was presented, almost the same percentage would have believed whatever that "AI" video presented because, like most, they've never read anything by her or bother themselves to fact check it.

What struck me, as soon as I realized it was "AI" and not Hannah Arendt, was that of all the philosophers and political thinkers of the 20th century, that use of her is probably the most ironic.   Of all of them she was one of the earliest and most insightful as to the use of false information as producing fascism, Nazism and totalitarian governance and regimes.  

The creation of false "quotes" from famous and not so famous People has always been a thing and with the invention of the internet and search engines that mine words in combination to present "top" search results, based on clicks, such quotes, often invented for ideological reasons, to appeal to the prejudices and hates and fears of large numbers of People, will become what most People believe was said by those People.   

You might think that's generally innocuous though that would necessarily lead to the complication of trying to determine which are harmless and which are dangerous and that's something that the laziness and insouciance of modern culture, academia and, most of all, the legal profession isn't going to get done.   

I will point out in passing that that is, at least to some extent, a product of the poorly drafted First Amendment which didn't specify that the only right of free speech and, especially, "press" that was a necessity for democratic rule WAS THE RIGHT TO TELL THE TRUTH and that any daffy idea that there could be such a thing as a "right to lie" was guaranteed to destroy democracy.   I'm not sure Hannah Arendt ever got to that point,  I'm only a casual reader of her, not a specialist. 

If you want to get what she actually said, the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Culture at Bard College published a far more than excellent article by Roger Berkowitz on Fake Hannah Arendt Quotations,  two years ago. 

The closest in spirit and content [to the fake quote], and also the most easily available, is from an interview with Roger Errera in 1973, what turned out to be Hannah Arendt’s last public interview. Arendt spoke about the importance of a free press in an era of mass manipulation of truth and public lying: She said:

 

"The moment we no longer have a free press, anything can happen. What makes it possible for a totalitarian or any other dictatorship to rule is that people are not informed; how can you have an opinion if you are not informed? If everybody always lies to you, the consequence is not that you believe the lies, but rather that nobody believes anything any longer. This is because lies, by their very nature, have to be changed, and a lying government has constantly to rewrite its own history. On the receiving end you get not only one lie—a lie which you could go on for the rest of your days—but you get a great number of lies, depending on how the political wind blows. And a people that no longer can believe anything cannot make up its mind. It is deprived not only of its capacity to act but also of its capacity to think and to judge. And with such a people you can then do what you please."

I will interject here because a "free press" is only a good for real democracy, egalitarian democracy, WHEN IT TELLS THE TRUTH.   We have the freest of all free presses in the history of the world in the United States and it has brought us to Trump and Republican-fascism and the New Taney Roberts Court by using that freedom to lie and to appeal to exactly the kind of easily sold sensational lies that she went on to warn about as the very raw material with which totalitarians destroy democracy and the freedom to tell the truth.   They never interfere with the freedom to lie in support of THEIR totalitarianism and, as the American "free press" has proved over and over again, it is more than willing to do that on behalf of the totalitarian regime and the oligarchs who fund it. 

 

The key point in Arendt’s statement is that as lies multiply, the result is not that the lie is believed but that people lose faith in the truth and are increasingly susceptible to believe anything. When cynicism about truth reigns, lies operate not because they replace reality but because they make reality wobble–a phrase Arendt employs in her essay Truth and Politics. In that essay, Arendt argued that mass lying undermines our sense of reality by which we find our bearings in the real world: 

 

The result of a consistent and total substitution of lies for factual truth is not that the lie will now be accepted as truth and truth be defamed as a lie, but that the sense by which we take our bearings in the real world—and the category of truth versus falsehood is among the mental means to this end—is being destroyed.

The Arendtian point is that constant lying by a propaganda machine does not lead to the lie being believed but leads, instead, to cynicism. This is an argument that Arendt made, already, in her first published book The Origins of Totalitarianism. In that book, Arendt writes:

"Mass propaganda discovered that its audience was ready at all times to believe the worst, no matter how absurd, and did not particularly object to being deceived because it held every statement to be a lie anyhow. The totalitarian mass leaders based their propaganda on the correct psychological assumption that, under such conditions, one could make people believe the most fantastic statements one day, and trust that if the next day they were given irrefutable proof of their falsehood, they would take refuge in cynicism; instead of deserting the leaders who had lied to them, they would protest that they had known all along that the statement was a lie and would admire the leaders for their superior tactical cleverness."

So why, given the surfeit of similar quotations, does the anonymous influencer responsible for the viral Arendt quotation change the quotation? On one level, who can know? But there is something to be said for the simplicity of language and clarity of purpose in the fabricated quotation. Arendt herself is profoundly quotable, but her sentences tend to be long and at times follow a meandering course. The impulse to clarify, simplify, and “market” Arendt to a public trained on easy social media quotations is real. 

Which raises a second question: does the alteration matter? And here, the answer is yes. And it turns out that this is hardly the first time that Hannah Arendt’s words have been altered and simplified to ease their public consumption. One of the most notorious cases is in the documentary about Arendt Vita Activa by Ada Ushpiz. Ushpiz uses over 30 block quotations that she projects on the screen in her documentary. Shockingly, nearly every one of these quotations is altered. Some of Ushpiz’s changes were major and deeply deceptive. But many were simply stylistic, as in the fake quotation floating around social media today. In writing about this documentary, I explained why such seemingly innocuous changes matter: 

I will ask you to read the rest of the article,  I'd love to post it if it were not for reluctance to risk violating fair use because I know how few People online follow up links - though, of course, my regular readers, apart from my regular trolls, probably do that, maybe even more than I try to. 

There is far more than enough in both what Arendt and Mr. Berkowitz said to inspire a month of posts on the topic, but it's the height of summer and I will have to get back to the garden because we are in a depression.