Continuing onto the third skill highlighted in Robin Good’s article “What We Really Need to Learn to Be Successful in Life – Part 1″ is How to Distinguish Truth from Fiction.

Good question.

How do we?

Especially at an age where it may seem that everything we read and see online may be fake.

Going through the curated links that Robin provided here, many of which were Howard Rheingold’s Crap Detection links which have been heavily referenced over the years, I began to wonder if we need to hone in our crap detection MUCH more nowadays because some of these links are dated however, you can at least make a start with the resource that has over 100 crap detection links but I would hazard to guess that unless that resource has been manually updated, there should be more nowadays.

(For the record I asked ChatGPT this question and the result was far too generic for my liking so I ignored it. It offered some standard sites that are well known anyway Reuters etc…pfft. I’ll do my own research thanks ChatGPT, you can get back in your box now).

Well anyway, where were we?

Ah yes. Crap detection.

One of the big questions I had floating around in my head while checking all these curated links in the article was:

“How do I detect the Deep Fakes, the AI generated stuff that seems to be all the rage nowadays?”

Here’s my response:

Just assume everything is crap, wrong and fake – until proven otherwise.

Helen Blunden

via GIPHY

After all, I believe that there will be a time when we won’t even bother discerning either. That is, we won’t mind whether something was generated by AI or a Human.

Maybe the Baby Boomers and the Gen Xers like myself might arc up about it and rant some stories about “I remember in our day, we didn’t have <insert tech here>” but on the whole, the Gen Ys and Z’s and the young ones wouldn’t bat an eyelid.

Or maybe they’ve accepted the fact that everything is fake anyway so they shrug their shoulders and continue on. Why fight the inevitable anyway? (I’m making grand sweeping assumptions here).

I mean it took a while for me to realise that Keanu Reeves was a deep fake when he showed up in YouTube. My first thought was, “Oh, look how much of a good sport Keanu Reeves is! Oh he’s really creative to come up with this creative content!”

Yeah. Face palm. I was an idiot. It was fake wasn’t it?

@unreal_keanu

Life with a girlfriend. #keanureeves #relationship #girlfriend

♬ original sound – Unreal Keanu Reeves

I should have saved my time and done some kind of test. Like this one: Human vs AI Test, Can we tell the difference?

Or hang on, I should have just gone back to my own quote,

Assume everything is crap, fake and wrong until proven otherwise.

So from now on, thinking about my quote is my own crap detection. Bah.

I’ll leave you with this amusing article. Start hoarding your Britannicas and Funk & Wagnalls people. 🤣

futurism.com/physical-encyclopedia-information-doomsday