The Other Camera

I like a second witness. He takes some weight off the first man’s story, and some off me. I don’t have to stand there alone, deciding whether the whole damned thing happened. Somebody else was there. Somebody else saw it. I can get on with the next paragraph.

This is a pleasure I would rather keep. I have no wish to become a man who believes nothing. Those men are exhausting. You could hand one his own birth certificate and he would ask who benefits from the baby.

But I have been reading about a second camera with nobody behind it.

Joe Wilkins reports in Futurism on Facebook accounts posting AI-generated American soldiers and war scenes. One account, Warfare NextGen, posts synthetic planes bombing Iranian infrastructure, particularly dams, with location markers and timestamps that dress the clips as news footage. Wilkins describes one showing an F-15 destroying a dam near Bandar Abbas, followed by a wave wiping out a village. He is describing a fabricated scene, not reporting that this attack occurred.

Under this material he found a comment: “It maybe true [sic] because I saw it at another angle.”

There is an effort to check the thing inside that sentence. Not a very thorough effort, perhaps, but I recognize the wish. Don’t accept the first view. Look for another one. The next picture seems to say the first picture had company.

I want that comfort too.

A second angle used to involve certain inconveniences. For two cameras to record an event, two cameras had to be there. They could belong to the same liar. Their footage could be edited. Neither camera was a priest. Still, somebody had to put equipment in another place, and that place had to exist.

A generated viewpoint needn’t have made the journey. I don’t know how these accounts produced their particular clips. The possibility is enough to upset the little arrangement I had with a second picture: a different view can now be made by the same person, from the same fiction, without another act of witnessing.

The extra view may be another sentence in the story. I have been treating it as somebody else agreeing that the story happened.

I know how to do the first part. Give me a village and I can put you on three different sides of it before I finish my coffee. A novelist does not need to hire three witnesses. He needs to change the paragraph.

Here, let me supply a shot of my own. This is invented, not footage I have watched: a low road below the dam, a white car stopped across it, water reaching the wheels. From the hillside you see the road vanish. From inside the car you hear something strike the door. From the far end of the village you see nothing yet. Somebody is still trying to start an engine.

Three views. The same unpaid bastard made all of them.

I enjoyed the one inside the car. A noise against a door does more for me than a distant wave. Already I am thinking about how long to hold the shot. I am not finding out whether anything happened. I am improving what didn’t.

That is legitimate work for fiction. It is also an uncomfortable skill to bring to the job of judging a convincing picture. I know how easily a change of position can feel like a new source of knowledge. The car has given the water a weight that my first sentence didn’t have. Nothing has given the car existence.

And I am in no hurry to lose the noise at the door. It is the best part.

Wilkins also describes a synthetic soldier who asks viewers not to scroll. The soldier speaks about being somebody’s son, about the mother who might lose him, and ends by asking people who support veterans to follow the account.

There is a whole human history implied behind that face. A boy grew up. A mother knew him before the uniform. Someone waits for his return. The generated figure doesn’t have to tell much of this story. I bring most of it myself, just as I supplied the road.

The instruction is to follow. The family is there to make leaving feel like a decision about the family.

I have had enough of people telling me that I ought to feel less because a machine can abuse a feeling. I don’t want to become proud of watching a frightened face without responding. I want to know who put it in front of me and what they are asking me to do. Those are harder questions than whether the face looks frightened.

They are harder than counting the views, too.

A false picture from one place and a false picture from another can make a little world I am able to move around in. This is impressive. I can admit that without granting the world a date in history. But the location stamp and the second angle offer an easier admission: yes, this must be the place; yes, this must have happened. My ability to imagine my way around it starts doing work that belongs to evidence.

I would love to assign that work to somebody else. The second camera is an attractive candidate. It appears to have arrived early, taken a useful position, and done the looking for me.

What I need from another account isn’t just another patch of scenery. It is some independence from the first account: a person, a recording, a route back to the event that doesn’t begin and end with the same invention. An ugly picture with that connection could tell me more than a magnificent second view without it. This is a lousy bargain for someone who likes magnificent pictures.

I am not conducting a forensic examination of the Facebook posts. I have Wilkins’s reporting and the comment he quotes. I cannot tell you who typed it, what else they checked, or whether they were even a person. But the reason offered is worth taking seriously. Another angle. A small, sensible-looking improvement on believing the first thing you see.

The machine doesn’t need to abolish that habit. It can furnish it.

And I can help. I have just put a car beneath a dam because I wanted something nearer than a village seen from a distance. The invented view has a door, a sound, somebody trying to get an engine started. It is becoming easier for me to remember than the bare description in the reporting.

I go back to the article. Wilkins didn’t give me a low road or a white car. Those are mine.

The noise at the door is mine too. I can still hear it.

Source: Facebook Is Letting Accounts Commit Stolen Valor Using AI Slop of Troops in Warzones