12/10/2024
-Visual Story Telling, A.I. Narratives and Fact-Checking in a post-fact-society-
Getting the right images and inside reportage for a story can be challenging. There are often not enough time or resources at hand to investigate a story properly. Instead images, that might not even exactly cover what they are supposed to picture, are being bought at an affordable price online.
Eventually an opinion is stated as a fact without fact-checking. AI is used to fill in the blancs and then a few strong arguments may be added to transform the reportage and make It more catchy. Then the whole thing is scrambled together and uploaded to various platforms (probably financed to achieve maximum range).
There’s plenty of such stories out there and it becomes harder and harder to fact-check every one of them. That’s why an objective and well payed, independent press is so important to maintain peace in a society. A press, that is accessible for every member of society without extra-charge. In Germany everyone can access such media and it is free of charge for those, who couldn't afford it otherwise.
The images, that I found here simply to shock you, could be used for a terrible story on Japanese food-culture. But the images have no other connection than being captured around the same place on the same day. Any narrative turning it into a horror-story would be completely fictional.
In times of A.I. even facial expressions could be altered to make the images more effective for the narrative...
Be careful what you are consuming and don't believe everything that is out there. Do as much fact-checking as possible! For our democracies and for as much freedom on the world as possible.
Thanx for reading this. It crossed my mind, since Germany is starting to cut back on open media for budget reasons. For me that is saving at the wrong end...
