Reading Group Week 25
Hello. If you don't recall, starting next week, we're going to read Frantz Fanon's A Dying Colonialism (and, if you're in our Signal group chat, then we'll also be reading and talking about Capital: Vol 1 by Karl Marx.
Last week, I asked for people to share articles and fundraisers, by Palestinians. I want to revisit that at some point, but I want to bring our collective attention squarely upon one article. If you have time, please read this one article. If you're on bluesky or twitter or mastodon, I'd like to hear from you about this article. I'd greatly appreciate people sharing and reflecting on it. And, if you're available this Saturday at the usual time, I'd be grateful to hear from you about any thoughts it brought up.
This is not reporting or writing by a Palestinian, as originally planned; but I felt it important to share and discuss this piece by Matt Novak (a journalist at Gizmodo), who investigated a growing phenomenon of internet sleuths questioning and interrogating Palestinians in Gaza, based on patterns of when people post online, based on physical features, based on unexpected textile patterns, etc...
The Rise of AI Is Making Life Even Harder for Real People in Gaza
Gizmodo spoke with desperate Palestinians who were accused of being AI creations.
Unlike the internet sleuths, Novak actually chose to speak with Palestinians in Gaza to investigate this phenomenon. Saeed Ismail is one of the main subjects of the story, and Novak offers considerable evidence demonstrating that Saeed is real, Saeed is in Gaza, and Saeed is who he says he is. There are numerous Palestinian sources in the article, and I would encourage you to read it.
I mention Saeed Ismail because he's been hounded for months by an individual who uses a pseudonym, and is known as "rev.howard arson" (@theophite.bsky.social on bluesky). Novak spoke with Arson, showed arson the considerable evidence that the people Arson accused of fraud were in fact genuine, and even got Arson to acknowledge that "his perspective could be warped by seeing so many fake images created with AI.".
For reasons that are unknown, after Gizmodo published Novak's article, Arson began producing AI-generated videos of Saeed, using videos from over the past several months that Saeed recorded and provided publicly to address Arson's previous allegations that Saeed was a fraud.
Earlier this year I dealt with another self-described trust & safety expert who made similar allegations along the lines that most of the Palestinian accounts on bluesky were fraudulent, principally on the basis of evidence ascertained from scraping data from logs, rather than - say, for instance - asking people for confirmation, for video verification, to call, interact in any way, etc...
I'm not saying that it's impossible to make AI-generated videos of people. But you can literally ask people who are begging for help if they can get on video with you to validate things. You can literally ask people for evidence of any reasonable nature and, overwhelmingly, people are desperate to accommodate those requests.
At this time, it is beyond what we know is possible for AI to make consistent AI-generated videos of realistic-looking people, in real-time, without discrepancies and other weird artifacts, with corroborating evidence across different mediums, formats, and platforms.
"Arson" is trying to cast doubt on the individual details of the genocide Israel is committing, because the totality is impossible to deny and ignore. But they're desperately latching onto anything - or in Arson's case, fabricating whatever he can - because he's been exposed as having completely lost whatever sense of perspective he ever might have had.
we're at the part of history where people can't deny the program to annihilate an ethnic group in polite company, so ashamed zionists and their sympathizers will instead try to cast doubt on the specific details and the individual stories. this isn't remarkable at all; holocaust deniers did the same
— ali alkhatib (@ali-alkhatib.com) 2025-05-18T16:58:33.150Z
This is Saeed's gofundme account. If you can donate, I'm sure he would be grateful. He's gone through hell several times over by now - no small part of it due to Schou's AI-generated videos and "investigations", and now-ongoing harassment facilitated by Bluesky's trust & safety team's indifference, and Schou's considerable resources and skills as a privacy engineer at a major tech company.
