I am still trying to wrap my head around the cognitive effort that we as readers are putting in when it comes to metarepresentation while we read. As Lisa Zunshine puts it:
"Our metarepresentational ability allows us to discriminate among the streams of information coming at us via all this mind-reading. It allows us to assign differently weighed truth-values to representations originating from different sources (that is, characters, including the narrator) under specific circumstances. The ability to keep track of who thought, wanted, and felt what, and when they thought it."
Readers are constantly tracking numerous things while reading, and some readers, like me, find that tracking these things in writing is also helpful for the brain workload. Zunshine notes there are certain books like crime or mystery novels where our brain works overtime specifically because of the cognitive effort required to constantly question what may or may not be true of what we are reading in the story all the time.
Another cognitive process that takes a ton of effort, according to Zunshine, is "our metarepresentational ability . . . to store certain information/representations 'under advisement.'" This process is basically a repository for certain "facts" or "truths" that may require us to change the source tagging on who and where it came from and whether it is actually true or false. It is essentially a stop-gap until our minds can determine the truth of the information intake.
Long explanation short, I'm focusing on this because Zunshine briefly touches on how much cognitive effort, energy, and cost goes into "reassessing [the] initial valuation" that was assigned to a source tag or story or 'truth' that then turns out to be false:
"Some readers may be more amenable to this kind of reassessment, which involves revising numerous knowledge databases affected by the initial processing of the story, whereas others may find this call for the extra expenditure of mental energy irksome."
I see this application of reassessment in reading fiction transferable in terms of reality and the real world now as the prominence in AI generated content soars. Society is having to spend more and more cognitive energy on assessing and reassessing if things they see, read, hear, or experience is artificially generated or 'truth' in the their eyes as they used to see it.
I take this in as being a specifically large issue with the news media (trained journalist at heart here) as we have been historically inclined to believe what we see, hear, or read in the news as truth/'truth'. If there is now an underlying requirement to put everything we experience in media "under advisement", then there is no wonder that certain demographics of the population are just giving up and accepting everything as is, or that some are checking out and not engaging. Then there are the public good/truth warriors out there who are cognitively putting in the work for the masses to go the extra mile to filter out and find the truth in an ever increasing reassessment of the AI slop world we are being fed.
There are other instances that I can point to as well in which the reassessment of the 'truth' is just too daunting for groups of people to deal with, but I am not going to point fingers. (I'm sure you could think of a few easily.)
Interestingly, I latched on to this thread in Zunshine because it connected to an experience I had a few weeks ago. I saw an image on Instagram that I was excited to forward to a friend; "ooo! look at this!". She pointed out that it was AI, and tagged so in the description. I was obviously disappointed because I didn't even look at the description for the AI flag. Upon further reflection, I think my brain didn't question the image because the people in it were participating in a photo shoot that I could plausibly see them doing regardless of the risqué-ness of it. I thought "I could absolutely see them doing this" so I didn't even think to source tag it as anything else than "this is awesome".
Looking back now, a few weeks later, I am frustrated about not catching the AI tag because of how vehemently I am against AI. But, then again, I have to acknowledge that my assumptions and perception of the people in the image is that of one where I didn't question that the image is something they would potentially participate in. Both sides of the coin... but also concerning that it comes so close to what is possibly participated in in reality for those people.
Food for thought . . .
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