A Palestinian mother lies dead on the ground under a bomb attack, her bloodied son watching over her, his small face and arm raised to the sky. It is the heartbreaking image taken in Gaza – who knows whether by a rescue worker or a reporter – that the Hamas authorities tried to spread to scare the world at Israel’s brutality. In fact, the photo makes us think a lot, in the sense that we have been wondering for a long time, but not about the impact of the Israeli response, but rather about the fact that the hand of that little raised arm has six fingers. We counted and counted, zoomed in, turned and turned: Nothing to do, there are exactly six. It is clear that we are dealing with an unsuccessful attempt by the Palestinians to exploit the pain of children for propaganda purposes by reconstructing this pain in state-of-the-art computer graphics. According to experts, this photo was actually created by an artificial intelligence, which must not be very intelligent if it hasn’t yet learned that children have a maximum of five fingers.
However, this photo remains an important document because it shows the potential risk of the encounter between a human impostor and an artificial intelligence that, if not stupid – as in this case – can make us believe that what is not true , true is . One finger, one finger less would have been enough and the image we are talking about would, we bet, have been splashed across the front pages of newspapers around the world and straight into the files of the UN led by China and Iran, someone thinks is already considering taking action against Israel for war crimes. People, in their bias, have long ago abolished the line between true and false, to the point of passing off terrorists as heroes and those who try by all means to save the lives of over two hundred hostages as criminals, and that to this day We are used to it and the comparison doesn’t scare us.
But even if the most advanced technology is used to distort reality, there is no need to worry, we will find ourselves on the open sea without any certainty left. I fear we are entering a new Wild West, an era of lawlessness that, as I remember, ended only after a massacre.