• Alicia Keys hit a sour note during her performance at the Superbowl halftime show, but when the NFL uploaded the performance to YouTube, the note had been corrected. Videos of the original performance are being scrubbed off YouTube.
  • The note isn’t a big deal, and I understand why they might want to correct it. But it isn’t an accurate record.
  • Some implications / concerns from T. Becket Adams:
    • In the future, people are going to argue about whether she flubbed the line at all. People will remember having heard it, but they won’t be able to point to any source.
    • Editing our reality is going to make it so people don’t trust anything they see online
 And, perhaps eventually, they won’t trust anything at all.
    • There are insane implications of a mega-corp being able to alter the factual record. As Becket says, if they’ll do it for something as trivial as this, they’ll do it for more consequential things too.
  • He summarizes:

Routine edits coupled with routine culling of authentic versions = normalizing conflict between “records” and collective experience.

  • On the one hand, I want to believe that his assertion that more consequential records will be mishandled is a bit paranoid; I want to say that there’s no way, say, the government would alter the historical record. On the other hand, they have already done this for the entire history of civilization! Of course they’re going to capitalize on tools that make it easier to control the narrative.
  • Meanwhile, with the preview of OpenAI’s Sora video model, uh, yeah, it’s going to be incredibly hard to trust anything you see online. AI video means that they don’t just get to edit records, but that anyone can create entirely new, fully falsified records.