Tbf, a lot of versions of Windows sucked.

(I wonder if anyone wrote up one of these for MS-DOS back in the pre Win9X era. That'd be interesting just to see the roots of the copypasta, lol.)

The tech could represent the end of visual fact — the idea that video could serve as an objective record of reality — as we know it.

We already declared that with the advent of photoshop.

I think that this is "video" as in "moving images". Photoshop isn't a fantastic tool for fabricating video (though, given enough time and expense, I suppose that it'd be theoretically possible to do it, frame-by-frame). In the past, the limitations of software have made it much harder to doctor up --- not impossible, as Hollywood creates imaginary worlds, but much harder, more expensive, and requiring more expertise --- to falsify a video of someone than a single still image of them.

I don't think that this is the "end of truth". There was a world before photography and audio recordings. We had ways of dealing with that. Like, we'd have reputable organizations whose role it was to send someone to various events to attest to them, and place their reputation at stake. We can, if need be, return to that.

And it may very well be that we can create new forms of recording that are more-difficult to falsify. A while back, to help deal with widespread printing technology making counterfeiting easier, we rolled out holographic images, for example.

I can imagine an Internet-connected camera --- as on a cell phone --- that sends a hash of the image to a trusted server and obtains a timestamped, cryptographic signature. That doesn't stop before-the-fact forgeries, but it does deal with things that are fabricated after-the-fact, stuff like this:

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tourist_…

hoax image related to the September 11th attacks on the World Trade Center

^{Contributors to Wikimedia projects (Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.)}

The real danger is the failing trust in traditional news sources and the attack on the truth from the right.

People have been believing what they want regardless of if they see it for a long time and AI will fuel that but is not the root of the problem.

Traditional news sources became aggregators of actual news sources and open source Intel, and have made "embellishing" the norm. Stock/reused visuals, speculating minutes into events, etc etc

It is increasingly faked. The right just pretends that means they're lies that feel "good" are the truth

And that's perfect, that's the world that made all the due process and similar things evolve.

There's never been such a thing as independent evidence. The medium has always mattered. And when people started believing this is no more true, we've almost gotten ourselves a new planetary fascist empire, I hope we're still in time to stop that.

Videos are now basically have the same weights as words...

We live in a post-truth world now.

It's interesting that you start with a bold statement that is IMHO correct, namely that namely what was once taken as unquestionable truth now isn't, but also it's not new, just yet another media, but still conclude that it's different.

Arguably we were already in a post-truth World, always have been, it only extends to a medium we considered too costly to fake until now. The principle is still the same.

In the Middle Ages people believed in creatures nobody had ever seen. And the legal systems and the concepts of knowledge were not very good.

And still the latter evolved to become better long before people started recording sounds to wax cylinders and shooting photos.

In the Middle Ages people believed in creatures nobody had ever seen

FWIW even centuries later, during Linneaus time, people were actually looking for unicorns.

That’s not really feasible without phones doing this automatically.

Even then didn’t the first Trump admin already argue iPhone video can’t be trusted because it’s modified with AI filters?