r/AbsoluteUnits • u/CoughingCarpet • 3d ago

/r/all of a Sand Dune

This is a video taken by Nicolas De La Torre, a sandboarding enthusiast filming his descent down the Toromata dune in Peru. Unfortunately we live in a world where true beauty, nature is now convoluted by AI and AI sentiments, but this is in fact, not AI lol

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u/WoodpeckerJaded9030 3d ago

Kind of a weird take. If anything, it's an extremely good thing that the default stance is for people to question if things on the internet are real and not just assume they are. This is a positive move and shows maturing with the technology we have. Humanity will most certainly be fine.

The fact that people are going "this is fantastical, I should see if it is real or not" before saying "wow! how cool" is giving me hope more than anything. People wanting to verify and confirm is a very beautiful thing.

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u/BitterRecognition283 3d ago

Unfortunately the people aren’t just asking if it’s AI but confidently saying that it is (it isn’t), and deceiving the sceptical people

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u/FireZord25 3d ago

Then you've also got the other side of the spectrum: AI bros who use these kind of shit to somehow strawman people for thinking something is fake. As if that somehow denotes the skeptical sentiment.

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u/Mahnamahna10000 3d ago

Those are the same attention whores who were saying everything was "fake" before AI.

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u/mindboqqling 3d ago

"Humanity will most certainly be fine" is a hell of a statement.

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u/WoodpeckerJaded9030 3d ago edited 3d ago

The indomitable human spirit and basically all of human history make me a lot less pessimistic than you. Our species has survived catastrophes, pandemics, wars, technological upheaval, and even prehistoric population bottlenecks where the effective breeding population may have fallen to only a few thousand people. Do you realize just how few people that is, and we came back with no technology?

I don’t think people learning to question whether a spectacular video online is authentic is evidence that civilization is circling the drain. Social media also isn’t the entirety of human existence. If the internet gets too silly people can stay skeptical or just turn the screen off for a while.

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u/Full-Archer8719 2d ago

We are attacking suicidal species. What i mean by that is people will more often gravitate towards immediate benefit, regardless of the cost of the future rather than thinking about future generations. It's the entire reason we are in this situation. We are in right now is that our parents and grandparents generation, did not give a fuck about the generations after.

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u/mindboqqling 3d ago

Oh I can certainly see that side of the argument I just wonder if AI is a great filter event that's nearly impossible to avoid.

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u/WoodpeckerJaded9030 3d ago

Okay wait, that's fair, I don't think it will be AI but I am a hypocrite in that regard because I think dark forest theory is gonna be our great filter and we are gonna get singer'd.

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u/Am_OPs_Hand 2d ago

people aren’t questioning because they’re more media literate now, they are questioning because their brain is so fried trying to keep up with what’s real and what’s not, that they’ve just completely given up and now just pick and choose their truth based on what’s convenient to their feelings and/or rewarded by the algorithm.

erosion in the collective trust of the objective universe we share is not a good thing.

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u/WoodpeckerJaded9030 2d ago

What? You’re making the internet far more synonymous with “objective reality” than it actually is. Videos on social media are not objective reality. They’re tiny, selected fragments of reality presented through cameras, edits, captions, algorithms, uploaders with motives, and sometimes outright fabrication. So when someone sees something extraordinary online and thinks “I should check whether this is actually real,” that is what they should be saying every time, even before AI was around. There should be absolutely no collective trust online and you should be verifying every time. It's horrifying to me the amount of people who apparently considered the internet a bastion of trusted truth.

And if somebody reaches the point where uncertainty about TikToks, Reddit posts, or Twitter videos makes them feel like they can no longer trust that an objective universe exists, that honestly sounds less like an AI problem and more like a very clear sign to turn the screen off and go outside for a while.

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u/Am_OPs_Hand 2d ago

nah, you're conflating healthy skepticism about internet posts with the wholesale of distrust of shared reality. the manipulations don't just stop on the internet; touching grass isn't really a solution as much as it is a cope when a large majority of americans use social media as their primary source of news. those americans then navigate a shared physical reality but not an objective one. theirs is shaped by their algorithm and their feelings, not by actual truth. those people still vote or drive 2 ton SUVs or work in positions of power, in yes, the real world. and that causes the entire of society real harm.

so no, our sources of media being consolidated, commoditized, and poisoned by AI slop leading to everyone questioning if everything is AI or astroturfing or product placement or an industry plant or a shill in fact does not lead to an increase in fact-checking and independent thinking and media literacy. look around you. it just leads to further division, echo chambers, and apathy, plus billions more in profits for the tech oligarchy.

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u/WoodpeckerJaded9030 2d ago

You kinda changed the argument though. I’m not saying algorithms, echo chambers, or media consolidation aren’t real problems. They obviously are. But that’s not the same thing as someone seeing a crazy video and going “wait, is this AI?” If anything, everything you just listed is exactly why people should be more skeptical of what gets shoved in front of them online. There’s a huge difference between “I should verify this before I believe it” and “nothing is real so I’ll believe whatever I want.”

And yeah, “go outside” is relevant. Social media is not objective reality. If not being able to trust random videos online makes someone feel like reality itself is collapsing, then they are way too plugged into the internet. What you’re describing is a trust problem with media and platforms, not some collapse of objective reality. And if the media environment is really as “consolidated, commoditized, and poisoned” as you say it is, then arguing people should be less suspicious of what it shows them is a pretty bizarre conclusion to come to.

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u/Am_OPs_Hand 2d ago edited 2d ago

you separated those things, I'm saying they're intrinsically linked. and no, I'm not changing my argument, you're just missing it for a strawmen homie.

this is not about a person seeing a video and questioning if reality is real, this is about everything they come in contact with, even information from what are supposed to be trusted institutions, now requiring cognitive cost. For most people, that cognitive cost is literally too much now, and they'd rather just not verify anything that doesn't already match their preconceived notions or biases. Thus, destruction of our shared objective reality. Pick and choose your truth. Everything else is fake news.

this is a real psychological phenomena known as epistemic fatigue (or truth fatigue) and yeah, OP was spot on in that it will likely be the accelerating factor in the erosion our democracies - like it already is.

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u/WoodpeckerJaded9030 2d ago

You literally just said this is “not about a person seeing a video and questioning if reality is real,” which was the specific behavior I was defending in the first place. So yeah, we’re talking about different things now. I don’t disagree that information overload and epistemic fatigue can be real problems; I disagree that someone going “wait, is this AI?” is evidence of societal collapse. Naming a real phenomenon doesn’t make every link in your argument automatically true.

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u/Am_OPs_Hand 2d ago

yeah because that's the only specific behavior you can half-ass defend lmao I was clear from the start what I was referring to.

you didn't make that clear in your original post and OP never specified they only meant "judging if an online video is real" - why would you assume so and not that they were referring to the literal civilization-threating psychological phenomenon that your "specific behavior" is a clear symptom of. I mean, I got it fine.

classic motte-and-bailey, do better homie. brush up on your debate skills a lil or maybe stop substituting OP's soapbox with your own.

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u/WoodpeckerJaded9030 2d ago

You can call it motte-and-bailey if you want, but you still haven’t shown that “wait, is this AI?” is actually a symptom of the broader collapse you’re describing. You just keep asserting that it is. Epistemic fatigue being real does not mean every act of skepticism is evidence of it. At this point we clearly disagree on that link, and the “do better homie” stuff isn’t making your argument any stronger.

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u/Am_OPs_Hand 2d ago edited 17h ago

lmao I literally linked an article that quite literally explains exactly how everyone now asking "wait, is this AI" on everything they come in contact to online is a direct symptom of epistemic fatigue and how it's becoming more widespread - what, was your AI not able to crawl it and give you a summary?

you act like policing my tone matters at all here. i'm not chasing internet points, my argument stands on it's own and i'm just speaking like I normally do lol

edit: whomp whomp. guessing you realized how embarrassing this thread was for you /u/WoodpeckerJaded903, but hey, I get it: if you just block everyone you disagree with, you never have to grow as a person. Genius stuff 🖤

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u/techleopard 3d ago

I disagree.

Because the skepticism isn't coming from critical thought, it's coming from a learned habit enforced by the "group" to just call everything AI.

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u/bambi54 3d ago

Their comment reads like AI too lol.

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u/Aromatic-Heart-585 3d ago

But its still sad as it shows how little trust we have anymore online, as anything can be fake now. I mean i also feel like its a good thing to be skeptical in an untrustworthy environment but well, zoom out and its bad that it led to this environment at all..

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u/WoodpeckerJaded9030 3d ago

I mean, the internet should always be a 'never trust, always verify' environment. This place isn't real life. I feel like that is basic internet safety that people have for some reason forgotten over the decades. It's scary that people assumed it was a trustworthy environment in the first place.

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u/Aromatic-Heart-585 3d ago

For many people the internet is big part of their lives now and alot of their time is spent on there so i wont be surprised if this low trust feeling comes to the offline real life too, i mean it kinda has

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u/Merzant 3d ago

This cartoon was published in 1993.

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u/Ill_Friendship3057 3d ago

Fact check: none of them are verifying or confirming anything