From Mimic Environment to Multiple Virtual Worlds: The Predicament and Breakage of News Reality in AIGC Era

From the era of mass communication to the era of generative artificial intelligence, under the construction of big data, algorithms and computing power, the mimicry environment has gradually evolved into multiple virtual dreamland: digital replication technology builds the first long-distance online news, and strong editing and weak mining aggravate the alienation of news production and practice; the algorithm model generated randomly by probability creates the second news illusion, and the exhaustibility of calculation makes AIGC completely divorced from reality. Man-machine speech cuts off the rational and open dialogue in the public sphere, and interpersonal relationship falls into the social division woven by man-machine relationship. In this process, the authenticity of news has suffered a fierce impact. From the perspective of the development history of media technology, based on the theory of “mimetic environment” put forward by Lippmann, taking ChatGPT as a concrete case, this paper reveals the current situation of the continuous separation between the public and the real and objective environment by analyzing the evolution logic from mimetic environment to multiple virtual worlds, and puts forward some ways to break the ice, such as collaboration between eyewitness evidence and intelligent technology, cooperation between generative AI and journalists, collusion between recommendation algorithm and value orientation, so as to seek an effective path to protect the truth of news and bridge the gap between the virtual and the real world.

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