Writing is my artistic expression. My keyboard is my brush. Words are my medium. My blog is my canvas. And committing to writing daily makes me feel like an artist.
This is a simple, but potent message. Before hitting the ‘Like’ or ‘Share’ button, before telling someone about the interesting fact you heard online, verify it in some way. Is it true?
Do some Ground Truthing. Can you verify the claim? Is it real or AI? Is it worthy of your amplification or are you just contributing to the spread of something unworthy to be shared.
How much better would the internet be if everyone paused and verified what they were sharing before amplifying misinformation, disinformation, fake news, and AI deep fakes?
The term ‘ground truthing’ was shared with me last night by a friend, Neil. I had never heard the term before so did a quick MS365 Copilot request to learn more.
Ground truthing is the process of collecting data on-site (in the real world) to validate and calibrate information obtained from remote sensing technologies, models, or other indirect methods… It’s essentially a reality check to ensure that what the data suggests matches what’s actually happening on the ground.
While it is primarily used in Geography & Remote Sensing, Environmental Science, Agriculture, and Machine Learning & AI, I think it’s a term (or at least a practice) we are going to see a lot more use of in the future. More and more, when I receive information I’m immediately questioning if it’s real. Anything remotely controversial, or surprising, easily falls into a category of doubt… ‘I wonder if this is real or AI?’ But more recently, almost every video and article I see seems to sit in an uncanny valley of almost true or almost real. Before I accept new information, I have to ask myself, ‘Where can I verify this?’ In other words, ‘How can I ground truth this?’
Here is a simple example, in that the information is obviously false, but the deep fake is impressively realistic.
I also saw a video of Physicist Brian Cox saying that comet ATLAS 3i was definitely a spaceship. I didn’t bother fact checking it, I new it was fake, but enough of his followers questioned these kinds of videos that Brain came out on social media to say this:
“I keep seeing AI shite of me popping up on YouTube. The general rule is that if I appear to say something that you agree with and you are a UFO nobber, flat earth bell end or think comet ATLAS 3i is a spaceship, it’s fake.”
Where it gets more complicated is where actual facts are taken and then exaggerated. On the same theme of science and space, I recently saw a video that was talking about the theory that our entire universe might be in a massive black hole. From Copilot:
Some physicists propose that our universe might exist inside a black hole. This idea stems from the observation that black holes warp space and time so intensely that they could create a new, self-contained universe within. The consistent spin direction of many galaxies could be a result of the angular momentum inherited from the parent black hole, influencing the structure and motion of matter in our universe.
This is indeed a theory that is being considered by some scientists and I find it very interesting. So when a video comes up on my social media stream about it, I watch it. But when 20 seconds in I hear the narrator say that this is now considered true, I can’t even get myself to watch to the end of the video. These kind of videos really piss me off. I am angered that someone would create a video based on factual, interesting and novel ideas, but exaggerate the information and outright lie about it for the sake of views, clicks, and likes.
All 3 of these examples are actually easy, because my BS detector goes off. Where I’m concerned now is where that detector does not go off. What happens when the lies are more subtle, when the information is more nuanced? For example, do I really understand the issues happening in one of the many global conflicts right now? What’s the bias of the news or broadcasting station sharing the information? Where do I get more authentic information? How do I go about ground truthing what I’ve heard? Can I even get access to information ‘from the ground’?
It’s getting to the point where I have to question almost everything I hear. Is it real, what is the source, and where can I verify this? I hadn’t heard the term ground truthing before last night, but I realize that I’ve already started doing it, and I’m going to be doing a whole lot more of it in the future.
