Civilization and Its Distrusts

Quid ex Machina, Act II Scene 2. Theme song by Lin Manuel-Miranda.

New essay of the series Quid ex Machina, which examines the deep, under-explored, and Unseen impact of AI on humans and our societies. See here for the rest of the series.

Yes, the title is a riff on Freud’s (in)famous book, and I promise it’s relevant here.

Today’s theme song is The Schuyler Sisters by Lin Manuel-Miranda, from the 2015 hit musical Hamilton. 

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I believe this to be self-evident: one man’s AI-generated untruth, is another man’s  weapon. Employed by bad actors, generative AI tools could become armies to wage wars on our collective psyche, and break the foundations of our society: trust.    

I want to be clear: generative AIs spill untruths, but untruths have thrived long before generative AIs, so I will not lament how unreliable GPT-X is. Instead, I will focus on what AI-generated untruths do to our society, if we keep slumbering in our indifference to truth. 

Even before the internet, social media, and generative AIs, untruth campaigns have turned a rising nation into a banana republic — a poor, unstable country whose economy depends almost solely on fruit exports.

Now, imagine what untruth campaigns can do, with the internet, social media, generative AIs, and a few enterprising but malicious minds? 

If you think I’m spouting hyperbole, kindly allow me to tell you a true story. 

How Untruths Created a Banana Republic

In military tactics, untruth is a fair game. To gain advantages in wars, for millennia, military commanders have been tricking their enemies on the frontline, and tricking their own people back home. Whether it’s Odysseus faking a retreat from the walls of Troy, or public radios blasting about great victories of the Imperial Japanese Navy in May 1945, these war-time untruth campaigns share a name: psychological warfare. 

When Odysseus faked the retreat from Troy, he left a wooden horse there. A 1902 picture of the Trojan horse in Histoire des jouets. Public domain image.

But the first modern, peace-time untruth campaign happened in the 1950s. Planned by the CIA and codenamed “Operation PBSuccess,” this psychological warfare did succeed. It overthrew the democratically elected government of Guatemala, installed a military dictatorship, led to a 36-year civil war in this small central American nation, and its tragic fall into a banana republic.

The mastermind behind the master plan of Operation PBSuccess was Edward Bernays, chief advisor to the United Fruit Company (UFC, now called Chiquita Brands International), one of the largest banana traders in central America.  

In fact, if you have ever heard that eating bananas is healthy, or seen bananas placed in hotel lobbies, it is because of Mr. Bernays. In the 1940s, to help UFC boost banana sales in the US, he started linking bananas to good health, and placing them in visible public spaces.  

Edward Bernays, photographed in 1917. He’s the godfather of modern public relations, and convinced us of many things: bananas are good for health, disposable cups are sanitary, and ballet is fun to watch. Public domain image.

In early 1950s, UFC sought monopoly over Guatemala's banana trade. Guatemala’s democratically elected President Jacobo Árbenz would not let UFC have its way, so UFC wanted to find ways around him.  

McCarthyism was at its height in the 1950s, so Mr. Bernays devised a plan for UFC and its political connections: in the US, UFC started running press campaigns to brand President Árbenz as communist, and lobbying high officials to strike Guatemala as a preemptive measure¹. Outside the US, Spanish-language DJs and actors were hired to broadcast fabricated stories into Guatemala on radio. 

President Árbenz of Guatemala was never communist², but the untruth campaigns worked. In the US, newspapers from liberal (New York Times) to conservative (Chicago Tribune) printed false stories about Guatemala rapidly turning communist, and public sentiments started demanding US interventions. Within Guatemala, fabrications from Radio Liberación convinced many Guatemalan citizens about their president’s (non-existent) ties to the Soviet Union, and the promise of an upcoming “revolution” to depose their nation’s most popular political figure. 

Finally, in June 1954, a brigade of CIA-trained soldiers staged a coup d’etat, deposing the democratically elected Guatemalan president and congress. UFC got their banana trade monopoly; Guatemala got nearly 40 years of military dictatorship, brutal civil war, and down-spiral into more poverty. 

A New York Times article in Feb 1954 describing Guatemala’s non-existent communist regime. Source. .

So this is the story of the banana republic Guatemala, forged by the first modern, peace-time untruth campaigns. All done without the internet, social media, and generative AIs. 

Scars of this coup run deep. In 2021, Mario Llosa, Latin America’s most eminent novelist, wrote Harsh Times, a dramatized account of the 1954 coup to commemorate the event. In the novel, Llosa touched on a popular Latin American sentiment: the US cannot be trusted, the press cannot be trusted, and what’s real, anyway? Everything in life can be false or a fabrication. 

This is the damage of untruth campaigns on the collective psyche: trust collapses, a sense of resignation reigns, and concern for truth evaporates. 

I wondered what Mr. Bernays thought of the consequences of his untruth campaigns. He was the nephew of Freud, and deeply influenced by his uncle’s big idea: unconscious and repressed desires are reflected in people’s outward actions. Did he really see his campaigns and story spins as ways to let people act out their repressed desires? Did he himself have repressed desires, that he had to let out by running those campaigns and spins?     

In any case, from the tragedy of Guatemala 1954, we know that untruth breeds distrust, and with more untruth, comes greater distrust.

And with more distrust, comes the breakdown of the foundations of our civilization.

Trust is the Foundation of Our Society

If you have a dollar bill, now it’s time to take a good, close look. What do you see?

“This note is legal tender for all debts, public and private,” it says. Presumably, the speakers of this line are the ones who signed on the note. One is named Anna Escobedo Cabral, described as Treasurer of the United States. The other is named Henry Merritt Paulson, described as Secretary of the Treasury of the United States.  

But this is just a piece of paper! Ms. Cabral and Mr. Paulson – neither of whom I’ve met or personally known – promised this thin paper printed with Lincoln’s solemn look is a “legal tender”. Can I walk up to the US Treasury or the homes of Ms. Cabral and Mr. Paulson, and demand that they pay me 5 bucks, as they promised? No, because I’d be kicked out in no time. So again, this is just a pretty-printed piece of paper, and the signers made a promise they could not keep personally. Right? 

US $5 Series 2006 obverse side, public domain. Above “FIVE” is Cabral’s signature, above “DOLLARS” is Paulson’s signature.

I played the extreme skeptic here, and you know that I was wrong. I would need to think many times before tearing up this $5 bill. So what happened? What stopped me from tossing away a piece of paper that bears only an empty promise? 

It is trust. We trust this $5 bill. We’ve never met Ms. Cabral or Mr. Paulson or known their personal characters, yet we believe in the public institutions they represent, and believe in what these institutions tell us about the value of this $5 bill. The value of this piece of paper comes from trust and trust alone: we believe in it, and we believe that everyone else believes in it, too.

This amazes me. It’s a most remarkable accomplishment in our society. 

In our lives, public and private, trust goes far and deep. We place trust in others all the time: doctors, lawyers, accountants, journalists, and countless others.

In markets run by strangers, we buy food produced by farmers we’ve never met.
At home, we use water provided by water companies and utility workers that we never know personally.
On the road, we drive alongside complete strangers; in public transit, we ride on vehicles piloted by people unknown to us.  
From computers, newspapers, radios, and TVs, we read, watch, or listen to breaking news and stories, reported and produced by people we’ve never crossed paths with. 

“I have always depended on the kindness of strangers.”

(A Streetcar Named Desire, by Tennessee Williams)

In other words, it’s impossible to not trust. We have to assume that bus drivers and other road users are not trying to kill us, water companies are treating water properly, farmers and grocers are not trying to poison us, doctors are not trying to harm us, and journalists, media personalities, influencers are telling us facts not fabrications.

I say this again: unless we live on a deserted island or are secluded from society, it is impossible to not trust. Life is too short to constantly question the motives of other people that we deal with, whether they are visible to us or not. Of course, sometimes we’d find this presumption mistaken and our trust wrongly placed, but the flip side of this presumption – to never trust anyone – will be wrong a lot more often. Too trusting is a weakness, and so is too skeptical: for example, shredding a $5 bill because you don’t trust Ms. Cabral and Mr. Paulson’s persons, and the institutions they represent. So maybe trust is indeed the better presumption. 

On the foundation of trust, we build our society; and untruth is the mortal enemy of trust.

Untruths Break Trust

The 24/7 news cycle – viral videos, rolling reels, and Twitter doom scrolls – is where psychological warfare takes place now. But checking everything we hear and read is exhausting and impractical. Sure, we can observe from the telescope that the moon is not made of green cheese, and look up traffic laws to confirm that red light means “stop” for cars.

But if Mr. Bernays were to run untruth campaigns today, how can we tell fabrications from facts, reliable information from deception, and truth-tellers from story-spinners? How do we know that Guatemala was not a communist regime? That the UFC was interested in banana trade monopoly? That director of the CIA had financial incentives to overthrow Guatemala’s democratically elected government? 

This is when generative AIs can be the most dangerous: producing untruths at a scale so massive that we could no longer find the needle of facts in the haystack of fiction.
In the 1950s, the CIA hired a big crew of DJs, actors, local rumor-mongers, painters, and writers to run untruth campaigns.
In 2023, one conspiracy theorist in his parents’ basement could run the same campaigns, with only a laptop, internet access to language AIs and image-generator AIs, and social media. Throwing in some voice- and video-generator AIs to imitate interview tapes, this conspiracy theorist just raised an army, an army that fights 24/7 without fatigue or rest, to wage psychological warfare against his chosen enemy.  

If one conspiracy theorist can do it with ease, imagine what the really motivated or ill-intended can do.

I’m speaking of the UFCs, the Bernays, and the CIAs of today. 

Actually, you can have innocuous intentions with generative AIs, but still dump crud into our fountains of information. Among them are clickbaity articles from Buzzfeed, and error-ridden reports from CNET. My favorite is AI-generated realistic photos of Pope Francis’ puffer jacket. Even the Midjourney sub-reddit was concerned: the rest of the internet thought those images were real? That’s bonkers!

AI-generated images of Pope Francis wearing a white parka. Source.

Think about it: if trivial matters like the Pope’s attire are worthy of fabrication, there must be higher-stake issues worthy of more convincing fabrications. As long as generative AIs can make untruths look, sound, and read like truth, it’s all that matters.

What happens when we can no longer discern truth from untruth? A safe default would be to halt the presumption of trust: become an aggressive skeptic, and constantly question if every picture is a real-life shot, if every story has a factual basis, and if anyone ever has any decent intentions. No individual or institution would be spared from our scrutiny and distrust: we’d be ready to tear up that $5 bill, because we no longer believe that any signer or institution could guarantee the value of the note. 

What’s worse, we would not be the only ones halting the presumption of trust. Many others would do the same, becoming skeptical of everything and suspicious of everyone. Then our societies would descend into “the state of nature,” as Thomas Hobbes put it. It is a state of perpetual war, no one trusts anyone, everyone against everyone, with an always-on readiness to fight, attack, and return hostility.

I don’t know about you, but this Hobbesian state of nature where no one trusts anyone, is not a state of the world I want to live in.

What Can We Do

Psychological warfare is just that – a war. And in war, when there is attack, there is defense, and there are strategies and tactics for defense. Untruths attack our trust in our fellow humans and public institutions, so we will defend trust, and I think there are some practical defense strategies:       

• To get by in life, we need to trust strangers and institutions, but that does not mean we should trust all of them. We should exercise good judgement on what and who to trust.  

• Be vigilant about what we see and hear online, always remind ourselves that AI-generated untruths are a possibility. 

• Remember to ask “why” certain stories and claims – those things that we are invited to trust – are being circulated in the first place. Something being in the spotlight doesn’t make it true or trustworthy.

• Remember to ask “who” put forward these stories and claims. Are the “whos” worthy of our trust? Can we reasonably presume their intentions are decent and benign?

Frontispiece of Hobbes’ Leviathan, 1651, public domain. Hobbes’ solution to the “state of nature” where no one trusts anyone, and everyone fights with everyone else, is to have a sovereign (an absolute one, preferably) in place to enforce rules, and create an environment where we can behave well and trust each other.

These may sound mentally taxing – they are, and they are supposed to be. After all, we are defending trust, the foundation of our civilization. Defending a civilization is never easy, even in Steam games; and we are doing the defense in real life. 

To me, the fateful question for our society seems to be whether, and how much our collective defense will succeed in subduing the psychological warfare that blur the lines between truth and untruth, the warfare devised by vicious human minds and powered by their AI tools.

Our tools have become very proficient in imitating what we do – so proficient that with their help, we humans would have no problem waging wars to destroy the trust we hold for one another, and by extension, our civilization. We know this, and so comes a large part of our anxiety, our uneasiness, and our sense of either impending doom or exuberant hope.    

What a time to live in. What a time to be alive.      

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1. UFC had financial ties with the US secretary of State, John Dulles, and his brother Allen, director of the CIA.

2. Even Bernays and CIA officials acknowledged that Guatemala had only very remote chances of turning communist. Árbenz was elected as a moderate, and had friends in both communist and right-wing parties. No one in his cabinet or congress was a member of Guatemala’s Communist Party. In fact, Árbenz looked to the US as a role model for him to build Guatemala.