In recent years, prevalent global societal issues related to fake news, fakery, misinformation, and disinformation were brought to the fore, leading to the construction of descriptive labels such as “post-truth” to refer to the supposedly new emerging era. Thereby, the (mis-)use of technologies such as AI and VR has been argued to potentially fuel this new loss of “ground-truth”, for instance, via the ethically relevant deepfakes phenomena and the creation of realistic fake worlds, presumably undermining experiential veracity. Indeed, unethical and malicious actors could harness tools at the intersection of AI and VR (AIVR) to craft what we call immersive falsehood, fake immersive reality landscapes deliberately constructed for malicious ends. This short paper analyzes the ethically relevant nature of the background against which such malicious designs in AIVR could exacerbate the intentional proliferation of deceptions and falsities. We offer a reappraisal expounding that while immersive falsehood could manipulate and severely jeopardize the inherently affective constructions of social reality and considerably complicate falsification processes, humans may neither inhabit a post-truth nor a post-falsification age. Finally, we provide incentives for future AIVR safety work, ideally contributing to a future era of technology-augmented critical thinking.

中文翻译：

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面对AIVR中身临其境的“后真理”？

近年来，与假新闻，假货，错误信息和虚假信息相关的全球性社会问题日益凸显，导致了诸如“后真相”之类的描述性标签的构建，以指称新的新兴时代。因此，有人争辩说，人工智能和虚拟现实等技术的（滥用）使用有可能助长这种新的“地面真相”损失，例如，通过与道德相关的深层造假现象和创建现实的假世界，可能破坏体验的准确性。确实，不道德和恶意的行为者可以利用AI与VR（AIVR）交汇处的工具来制造我们所谓的沉浸式虚假，它们是故意为恶意目的构建的伪造的沉浸式现实景观。这篇简短的文章分析了背景的伦理相关性，在这种背景下，AIVR中的此类恶意设计可能会加剧欺骗和虚假的故意扩散。我们提供了一个重新评估的解释，即浸入式谎言可能操纵和严重危害社会现实的内在情感建构，并使证伪程序大大复杂化，而人类可能既不居住在真相之后，也不在后证伪时代。最后，我们为将来的AIVR安全工作提供激励，理想地为技术增强型批判性思维的未来时代做出了贡献。