Zero Trust Environment

Humanity's inflection point

Oct 13, 2023

Don’t worry this very real image of Big Foot with a camera is only 19.5% AI

We’re at an inflection point where AI content is hard to distinguish from real world. It is insulting to visit an AI site and prove to an AI we’re human via a captcha. These AI bots can be used to generate fake accounts and drive hysteria, whether in pandemics or other manufactured ‘disasters’.
These forgeries will only get more convincing as time goes on, we may even face a ‘crisis in truth’ as we become unable to distinguish what is and is not real online.
Interactive: AI Generated Hysteria — The Daily Beagle

We are at the point in the tale of the ‘Boy Who Cried Wolf’ when, the boy, having cried wolf falsely many times before, suddenly finds themselves face to face with a wolf, and now finds nobody believes them.

Governments have monumentally lied with such frequency and with such bold faced lies — Iraq WMDs, Kuwait incubator bayoneting baby hoax, Syrian chemical weapons hoax, blaming Russia for bombing their own pipeline, “safe and effective”, to name a few — they have destroyed all trust and all credibility…

…and to top it off, a rampant combination of misattribution, inconsistent statements and a sprinkling of AI generated imagery topped off with error-prone AI recognition tools means we are all here, in our Zero Trust Environment.

So is it at all surprising we’re at a point where the public cannot believe a government’s — or indeed, anybody’s — claims?

One example of many on Twitter where they express various possibilities of what could be manipulated

The struggle to determine real images from fake is a proveable phenomena. Contrary to what some people think, they’re not writing this to offend you.

The Daily Beagle conducted a test with readers months back asking them to distinguish real images from AI generated ones, and most people failed. For example, in our first image test, most people (39%) voted for Image A as being real (it was actually AI generated).

You should try out the article when you get a chance, and the follow up that gives evidence of the answers.

This wasn’t even a meaningful attempt to trick with a big government budget behind it, but a simple test. This demonstrates the Zero Trust Environment of which we reside.

(Ir)responsible Parties

But let us assume the attacks are real. Some might remark ‘of course they are’— but can we really assume any and all attacks, always claimed, will always be real, every single time? Going to war to attack millions of people without basic validation of images or videos is a huge risk, especially in light of perpetually dishonest governments.

Could Israel, like so many other countries, have financed terrorists? Do Twitter users have a valid basis to be distrusting? Well, yes. Even Israeli media reports Israeli government involvement:

Another outlet, in-case you feel it is an isolated view:

The Israeli government is no exception to financing terrorists. It should not be offensive nor surprising to suggest a government could be aiding terrorists. No-one is bothered by the accusations of US government involvement.

But what we’re looking at here is a much bigger crisis, one with far more disastrous consequences.

A Crisis In Truth

The suspicion governments fuel terrorism is not a new one, nor is the concept of proxy wars given how old it is, and no doubt terrorists can and do attack people.

But what is a ‘real’ attack? What is realness? This isn’t asked as a first year philosophy student, but as a ‘how do we determine this moving forward?’ query.

If a government financed terror org attacks the government’s “own” people, is that a real attack?

Yes — it physically happened even if misattributed
No — it was artificially caused by a government in a scenario where it would not have naturally occurred, even if it happened physically

In the sense that artificial sugar sweeteners physically exist but aren’t real sugar. Is it real sugar? No? It is physically real, is it a real sugar?

Is realness now a weight of probability, of how likely we are to believe something, rather than an absolute, verifable fact we can objectively confirm?

Three Men Don’t Make A Tiger

There is a Chinese proverb, three men make a tiger (三人成虎), where a man runs up to an emperor, and he says to the emperor:

I have seen a tiger in the crowd, over there!

And the emperor says:

I do not believe you! No-one else is panicking.

So the man says:

This man next to me, he also says he saw a tiger in the crowd.

The second man nods.

So the emperor strokes his chin and remarks:

Well, it could be possible there is a tiger, but I still don’t see it!

So the two men say there is a third man, and the third man remarks:

It is true, I have seen a tiger in the crowd, over there!

The emperor, to much alarm, jumps up on both feet and barks to his guards:

Clear the crowds, there is a tiger among them, they are in danger!

At which point the crowds start panicking over a tiger that isn’t actually there, injuring themselves in the process of fleeing because ‘three men make a tiger’.

Whether or not this proverb actually happened is ironically up for debate, but it typifies reasoning people still use.

People were claiming reports were true because CNN and Joe Biden had “confirmed” them simply via the act of repetition without presenting evidence (White House had to later retract Joe Biden’s statement saying they hadn’t actually seen evidence).

And before one gets too snooty and think 'thats the domain of dullards’, the legal system also uses it as well, in the form of eyewitnesses.

Evidence Isn’t Believeable Anyway (For Some Reason)

No doubt, a great many of you have found even having a landslide of evidence, say, 960+ studies showing the harms of the shots in convenient datasheet format, will invite a perpetual wheel spin.

One of ever increasing burdens of standard, goalpost shifting, people inventing more bizarre and arbitrary excuses to ignore, downplay or dismiss harms without forming coherent rebuttals.

I will never accept any evidence, I am never refutable!

Meanwhile, on the other side of the fence, people who fail to present evidence scream anyone who doesn’t believe them is worse than Hitler, a conspiracy theorist, a far-right far-left MAGA BLM extremist who hates babies, women and minorities and is guilty of harbouring sinister intents to flag wave.

In response to browbeating, other people spinelessly grovel how they don’t mean to offend asking questions and how they hate this week’s designated Bad Guy but (‘I’m not anti-vax but…’) pretty please could you answer their mildly skeptical questions?

So, if we can’t trust eyewitness reports, nor images, nor video footage, nor the claims about when, where, who, what and why of images and video, as governments are thoroughly corrupt and dishonest, all the media and experts are bought out and paid for… where does that leave us?

Let The Daily Beagle know your thoughts dear reader.