The Vulnerability of Truth

“The challenge is discerning what truth is, because truth is easily skewed by perspective, and perspective isn’t simple.”

Like many in the U.S., especially on the east coast, I was struck this week by the images from the aftermath of hurricane Ian on the coast of Florida. As I looked at photo after photo, I often had tears in my eyes.

That was also true when I saw pictures of Puerto Rico after hurricane Fiona, and when I see photographs of violent conflict anywhere. Images make me care more, deepen my interest in and compassion for people and places far from me geographically and culturally.

There’s a reason that newspapers feature constantly updated, scrolling photographs. Images drive emotion, illustrate information, make it more possible to believe.

This is why so much research has focused on fake, or “doctored” photos. People have manipulated photographs almost as long as photos have existed. Journalist Rose Eveleth made this case for the BBC’s Future project, documenting examples of photographs changing, “what we eat, how we vote and even our childhood recollections” from as early as the 1860s.

So I took notice this week of a piece by Washington Post writer Nitasha Tiku about the artificial intelligence (AI) technology dubbed DALL-E, named as a mashup of the painter Salvador Dali and “WALL-E”, the robot main character of a 2008 Pixar movie.

DALL-E is a text-to-image generator developed by the research lab, Open AI. The images it created that are featured in Tiku’s piece are startling. There’s a close up of a dairy cow, a child’s school picture, a basketball headed into a hoop. Each looked like a photograph. None were.

Photographs are not the only things easily faked. When I searched the web to read about “fake news” this week, the first things that popped up were “fake news generators” -- lots of them. Curious, I clicked on one and in less than a minute generated a fake headline, description and image, apparently put out by “CBS News.US.”

Of course, many people are worried about all this. Tiku quotes University of California engineering professor Wael Abd-Almageed as saying, “Once the line between truth and fake is eroded, everything will become fake,” he said. “We will not be able to believe anything.” The danger to which Abd-Almageed alludes is well-documented; history is full of untruths paving the way for totalitarian regimes, repression, and genocide.

The challenge is discerning what truth is, because truth is easily skewed by perspective, and perspective isn’t simple. I perceive through the filter of my particular experience, through my sense of who I am, and how others respond to those things. My perspective is inevitably different than someone else’s, so no wonder I find myself, in conversations, stunned into silence by another’s perception of truth that is, for me, so clearly false. In that stunned difference, there’s little room for common ground.

NPR senior editor Ron Elving suggested this week that it may be time to leave off trying to find common ground in truth, and instead focus on fact. “In our time,” he suggests, “it can be argued that the burden long borne by the word truth has shifted to the word fact. Truth has come to be regarded as subjective – the realm of the personal – [but] we still see reasonable people of widely disparate backgrounds recognizing facts for what they are.”

As I understand Elving here, expecting to establish truth-in- common has become more of a burden than truth can bear. I stand in my truth, and from there make arguments and decide to act. But perspective makes truth a soggy ground, which is why Elving suggests standing on fact instead.

Perhaps it’s alright that truth be removed from the center of discourse. People are and always will be wildly different from one another, and truth will always be colored by those difference. People are also vulnerable to certainty, greed, fear, and self-righteousness, all of which make it tempting to twist truth to lies, the ends justifying the means.

So, Elving says, let’s switch to fact, which common thinking suggests is determined by evidence, by proof. But the nature of proof is in question too; clearly photographs and news headlines, at least, no longer suffice.

If I accept that truth is no longer (or never was) able to bear the burden of making common ground, and if I seek to switch to fact, how do I behave differently?

As a journalist, Elving, seeks an answer in his profession ,which he says is too often characterized by, “a continuing competition between narratives... Each side sees its narrative as factual. Each side sees the other's as an elaborate fiction, the product of corrupt spinners of fanciful falsehoods.” In the context of his work in the world, Elving sees hope in non-partisan fact checking organizations, like Politifact, which I learned from him has roots as far back as the 1940s.

It seems to me that if Elving can identify a way his field of action can focus on fact, there ought to be ways to behave in other fields of work as well. In fact, there are. Librarians champion digital literacy. Teachers advance critical thinking.

Not all professions offer direct paths to discerning facts, of course, but in the service of a more thriving and peaceful world, it seems to me that any action requires trying at least to recognize them.

As a professional learner, writer, and social innovator, I believe it’s incumbent on me to begin with honest self-critique, being honest about my own perspective, recognizing when that overshadows fact. Learning to recognize facts means schooling my own self-righteousness and certainty, respecting my fear but not letting it color what’s real. It means disciplining myself not to repeat as fact something I only believe is true.

I’ve written this piece four times this week, each time I come to this point: While I know for sure that I am alarmed by the increasing blur between truth and untruth, and believe firmly in the sharp danger in that, I don’t know yet what, exactly, I ought to do about it. I have no snappy conclusion to offer here.

What I have is a curious mind, a determination to be both humble and fierce as I figure my way forward, a requirement of myself to think, and to think out loud as I write. For now anyway, that may be enough.

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Read the full October 7, 2022 issue of Intersections, the ILI Newsletter.