Trust and Truth

It turns out people have been both uploading photos they do not own to creative commons photo sharing sites such as Pexels and Unsplash, and removing photos from such sites before pursuing those using them and demanding royalties.

The obvious solution is to avoid using stock photos.

While it’s going to take some time to walk backwards through blog posts swapping the photos out, it’s better than the prospect of dealing with the photographic equivalent of a patent troll.

People ruin everything, don’t they.

In other news, I’m still watching the news – or rather, watching a number of news streams and trying to balance the various versions of stories being reported. It’s incredibly frustrating that journalists are paid to write with bias, and will often distort, fabricate and manufacture “truth” to suit their own narrative.

Don’t even get me started about social media – where you can trust very little at all. I found myself wondering this morning if the world might not be a much better place if artificial intelligence was brought to bear on the content people share – to check the veracity of claims and score them accordingly.

How would an artificial intelligence determine truth though? We live in a world where millions of people disagree entirely about the most basic tenets that society rests upon – a world where the vast majority accept the concordant news stream generated by algorithmic timelines as truth and fact.