Media literacy just reached an all time low
New footage of Alex Pretti gets stuck in a spin cycle
The Recount shares a parent company with The News Movement, who conducted this reporting.
AI has hallucinations — but don’t forget humans do too.
It never occurred to me that we, as a culture, need to be prepared for the winds to suddenly change direction on AI awareness. Are we at all prepared for a situation where a real, legit video goes viral … and everyone thinks it’s fake?
I’ll tell you right now, the answer is no. See for yourself how half of this story played out yesterday, Jan. 28:
The News Movement posts a video of an altercation they recorded in Minneapolis on Jan. 13, between a man — who appears to be Alex Pretti — and Border Patrol agents. The caption and narration state that the BBC’s Verify team ran footage through their facial recognition software and confirmed his identity to a 97% degree of accuracy.
The comment section on TNM’s Instagram floods with thousands of comments raging over “this obviously fake AI generated hoax” reporting:
💭 “I think we know what AI looks like.” 💭 “lol this is literally AI” 💭 “I am proud of how many people can recognize AI generated content and fake news.” 💭 “This is not real at all. It’s obvious from the first frame to the last.” 💭 “The audacity to use AI on a murdered man” 💭 “Look at the movement of his jacket as he’s kicking the car. This is irrefutably AI.”
The fury expands to Reddit — but, to users’ credit — it’s dosed with the platform’s signature baseline of curiosity. It hit the r/IsThisAI subreddit like a freight train.
I don’t think it would be unfair to describe the reaction as the step-child of hysteria. There were sightings of extra limbs, disappearing limbs, unnatural jaw extension, license plate scrambling. Suddenly everyone was an expert in vehicle taillight anatomy and AI artifacts.
This went on for hours before confirmations started to roll in. Note: This is a good time for me to say, I did not have to do any confirming of my own. I have the good fortune of sitting one desk away from the very real, not digitally enhanced Dan Ming, reporter on this story. Who Broke It and The News Movement are both owned by Caliber.
Legacy media did their due diligence, then ran the video. Snopes published a fact-check. CNN reached the Pretti family, who confirmed that it was Alex. As did the Minnesota Star Tribune, who got alternate angles of the same confrontation. But that still wasn’t enough for some people.
If there’s one thing I know, it’s that news consumers with no trust in legacy media are not the least bit swayed by legacy media pinning a certificate of authenticity on a story. Their (in this case unfounded) skepticism is both sowed and reaped by creators in one ecosystem. This was a job for the most trusted voice on deepfake discernment: Jeremy Carrasco aka ShowToolsAI.1
His ruling on reality has more views on Instagram than the original, contested video. In an age where very valid paranoia about AI deception runs free — fast — building trust as an honest broker as viewers attempt to be more discerning? That’s the whole ball game.
And Deskmate Dan has just demonstrated his deep understanding of this principle in a new video addressing the reaction. He delivers on the core four tenets of successful audience dialogue: Take the response seriously, put your experience on display, back up your reporting, and just be a normal person about it.
Now, if you remember, I said this is only half the story.
IN AN ALTERNATE DIMENSION
We have a parallel universe to explore, built by GOP operative Steve Guest.
➡️ He ripped the video to share on his own feed. The tweet currently sits at 12.4M views. And he wrongly attributed the reporting only to the BBC, before correcting hours later.
➡️ This definitely helped spark some of the confusion on Instagram, after Don Jr. posted a lower quality clip from the original footage. That clip has 5.5M views, spurred on by a comment he left to “share this and get it out.”
➡️ Later that night, the president shared the video on Truth Social. Both he and Vance also shared an edit featuring Elizabeth Warren’s tribute speech to Alex Pretti over the footage.
The highest concentration of posts on the right focus on redefining Alex Pretti as violent and dangerous: Benny Johnson, CJ Pearson, Megyn Kelly, Jack Posobiec, etc.
One of the key narrative developments is taking place right here on Substack:
Michael Shellenberger: “... Democrats, influencers, and the media are getting leftists killed by encouraging them to interfere with law enforcement operations and telling them that they are fighting Nazis.”
Jeffery Mead: “... He was radicalized by Democrats’ ideology … He’s not some sweet, innocent, I’m just minding my own business individual.”
Clandestine: “But that’s what the Dems wanted. They wanted their mindless followers to obstruct federal law enforcement, knowing some would get shot on camera, which would give them the headlines needed to smear ICE and Trump…”
LEFT UNREAD
With the AI issue mostly sorted, the unifying message on the left mostly remains unchanged: you don’t deserve the death penalty for agitating law enforcement. In the spirit of the transparency we’re talking about, I’ll tell you I agree.
Zach Hunter went in on this today:
“MAGA’s message? Pretti deserved what he had coming to him. That is, being shot to death 11 days later by a pack of ICE agents. Was the totality of Pretti’s actions on the 13th protected under the First Amendment? No, kicking and damaging a government vehicle is not a “free speech” activity.
But there’s more: Some on the left are pushing the narrative further, floating the idea that the shooting could’ve been premeditated, insisting that Pretti must have been known to law enforcement.
LOOSE ENDS
📝 Word I learned today: caterwauling
2 : to protest or complain noisily — “The teary celebrities and caterwauling that “fascism is here” are the norm on the Left now.” (via Sasha Stone, Free Thinking Through the Fourth Turning)
📰 Something you should read today: AI videos of fake NYPD–ICE clashes spread in a ‘perfect storm’ for propaganda — Ben Feuerherd, Gothamist
🥹 Something to make you smile today: If you’re not following Adam Aleksic … wtf are you even doing with your life!!!
I’ve made so many people follow him but ESPECIALLY nudge your parents who are falling for AI videos to follow Jeremy.
Given Pretti’s past interactions with law enforcement, I found this blog post very interesting. I have never heard of this guy Hudson & cannot verify if he’s real. He makes a cogent argument for the tragedy that unfolded. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QePoawDA_48
Love your writing and explanations - joined Substack *just* to give you some props, and it shows a very interesting trend.
The really sad part is that only ~238k people have even *viewed* the directors-cut version of this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p2TRbFmutrw, much less watched the thing throughout. The key thing here is that *only* that one has requirements and licensing -- "To use this video in a commercial player or in broadcasts, please contact licensing@storyful.com."
People are so busy focusing on AI or not that they're missing the core question - who would say this and why? Your boy Dan was *absolutely* there, a journalist would actually ask the unidentified man "Sorry to bother you, but what's going through your mind?" at which point you'd have something *insanely* useful for a documentary, and meet the journalism criteria 100%. Also, this story conveniently drops right when the government is trapped in trying to convince people to disbelieve what multiple people saw from their own eyes and ears with *multiple unaffiliated* perspectives. It's another award if you get his mental state before his murder. That never happens.
I like how Dan goes on to explain why he's not AI, and has a really... odd shot in the first video. Where he's fully there and has a full face in-camera shot where nobody else has that. Fun fact: AI detectors are notoriously garbage. Humans have better vision for it because they can evaluate context *outside* of the shot. Nobody ever shows the full 19 minute video, because it's super weird and *100%* not AI and has a licensing fee. The context of the others gets cut every time.
Context:
- Storyful is "social news and *strategic intelligence*" - a News Corp shop to whitewash/obscure/"protect businesses" using AI and OSINT (hint, I love how all these investigative reporters claim to be OSINT specialists but can't even do the most basic checks) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Storyful - "define the news, not react to it" - the client list is hilarious "CNN, ABC, Fox News, NYT, WaPo, ABC, BBC, YouTube" etc. Also that neat little diddy about how Storyful actively compromised reporters to *watch what they were looking at*.
- "But Caliber isn't Storyful!" -- you're right, it's not on paper. It just so happens that The News Movement launched their own holding company. Only found out about you through their PR release - https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/caliber-launches-as-a-holding-company-for-the-news-movement-the-recount-capsule-and-the-caliber-collective-with-a-view-toward-global-expansion-302559868.html Dan (and you) better have gotten *paid* for that.
- "But they're still not us!" -- you're right. That's just a convenient second-source you can cross-reference when people press X to doubt. (Before the Shapiro footage "shows up"). It *might* be of importance that your present founder/CEO came straight from Storyful so he knows the game.
- It would be a shame if your CEO's stated objective was to "monetize" your followers. https://pressgazette.co.uk/news/the-news-movement-caliber-investment/. Hope you liked Substack, because "what if we could monetize people's trust in us and selectively 'enforce' those values" - plus that Qatari money hits different.
Video Highlights:
- There are ~5 people there at the start, the framing is pretty good. Note how nobody's really... doing anything?
- Dan shows up at 14 minutes (calibrates your cameraman at ~15:30) - probably does an interview at 16:40)
- Has *zero reaction* to someone coming up and yelling at ~17:00. Points straight at camera 2 *while it's zoomed in* at 17:16 (probably just coincidental - but the massive camper on top of that RAV4 is probably where the filming gear was stored)
- A total of *one* snowball was thrown. It wasn't 15-25 people pelting agents with snowballs. As claimed by Mr. Shapiro "Shapiro said he witnessed several in the crowd of 15 to 20 people lobbing snowballs at agents. Then, he said, a bearded man positioned in the street — wearing a brown coat, black hat and sunglasses — proceeded to kick out the taillight of an agent’s SUV." https://www.startribune.com/bystander-video-reveals-confrontation-between-alex-pretti-and-federal-agents-11-days-before-killing/601572009.
https://substack.com/home/post/p-184478672 - your previous post says it perfectly - "You can call it journalism, but if it lacks any of the defining features of the profession — you know, interviews, analysis, explanation, fact-checking, historical context, effort — does it really deliver on the fundamental promise to capture our life and times for your audience?" -- "Protest coverage with no interviews or insight, dreadful indeed." But hey, "creator economy" pays.
The news blowup isn't even worth mentioning. It's basically "anonymous sources" that report to an agency, who reports to another, who reports back to / cross references the other, with stories they dynamically update in the "new media!" format to make it retroactively coherent. I'd love the old TNM video before it was re-uploaded short-form on the 29th. The one that every "agency" ran with. That camper-top on the (RAV4? Maybe?) is camera crew 2. Photo gear is expensive. Lies can travel the world before the truth can get out of bed. Every other reported story gets something else wrong (did he stop his car? where was the family? where's the context?)
I wish you the best. Seriously. I'm not asking "Walter Cronkite" level stuff, because we're navigating a post-truth economy and he actually went out there and took truth to power. Media capture has been functionally completed (as well as regulatory capture, and executive capture).
What did the story functionally do?
- Brought a lot of focus to TNR to build the brand
- Kept the left on something they agreed on already "don't kill innocent people"
- Left the rabid members on both sides saying insane shit.
- Sparked an AI vs. non-AI thing which wasn't even the point (although it's funny that everyone's demanding AI regulation, but the powers that be refuse to implement it - more information asymmetry). If you could make an AI god you would make more money than Christianity and the Mormons and Musk ever did *combined*.
- Gave the current administration something to distract with, then have to further retract, so that one's kind of cool but idk.
Subversiveness and showing people how to think for *themselves* is really hard to do, and the "alternate universe" part of your writeup is the best.
One love. Keep at it :)