/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/25584373/247226_AI_Pixel_Reality_CVirginia_3.jpg){kind=tracking}
Damn, those are pretty damn good!
Photography manipulation existed almost since the invention of photography. It was only much harder see the famous photo edition https://www.history.com/news/josef-stalin-great-purge-photo-retouching
Great point. But tools that make it so a 10 year old can manipulate photos even better than your example in several minutes, are in fact fairly new.
Hell they can generate photos that fool 70% of people on Facebook, though now that I say that, maybe that bar isn’t too high…
Even a few months ago it was hard for people with the knowledge to use AI on photos. I don’t like the idea of this but its unavoidable. There is already so much misinformation and this will make it so much worse.
Meh, those edited photos could have been created in Photoshop as well.
This makes editing and retouching photos easier, and that’s a concern, but it’s not new.
Something I heard in the photoshop VS ai argument is it makes an already existing process much faster and almost anyone can do it which increases the shear amount that one person or a group could make almost how a printing press made the production of books so much faster (if you’re in to history)
I’m too tired to take a stance so I’m just sharing some arguments I’ve heard
Making creating fake images even easier definitely isn’t great, I agree with you there, but it’s nothing that couldn’t already be done with Photoshop.
I definitely don’t like the idea you can do this on your phone.
Exactly, it was already established that pictures from untrusted sources are to be disregarded unless they can be verified by trusted sources.
It is basically how it has been forever with the written press: Just like everyone now has the capability to manipulate a picture. Everyone can write we are being invaded by aliens, but whether we should believe it is another thing.
It might take some time for the general public to learn this, but it should be a focus area of general schooling within the area of source criticism.
almost how a printing press made the production of books so much faster
… and we all know that lead to 30 years of bloody war, btw
Image manipulation has always been a thing, and there are ways to counter it…
But we already know that a shocking amount of people will simply take what they see at face value, even if it does look suspicious. The volume of AI generated misinformation online is already too damn high, without it getting more new strings in it’s bow.
Governments don’t seem to be anywhere near on top of keeping up with these AI developments either, so by the law starts accounting for all of this, the damage will be far done already.
Honestly yeah I agree. Many mainstream social media platforms are infested with shitty generated content to the point of being insanity.
On our vacation 2 weeks ago my wife made an awesome picture just with one guy annoyingly in the background. She just tucked him and clicked the button… poof gone, perfect photo.
But it’s never been this absolutely trivial to generate and distribute completely synthetic media. THAT is the real problem here.
Yep, this is a problem of volume of misinformation, the truth can just get buried by one single person generating thousands of fake photos, it’s really easy to lie, it’s really time consuming to fact check.
That’s precisely what I mean.
The effort ratio between generating synthetic visual media and corroborating or disproving a given piece of visual media has literally inverted and then grown by an order of magnitude in the last 3-5 years. That is fucking WILD. And more than a bit scary, when you really start to consider the potential malicious implications. Which you can see being employed all over the place today.
Awful title.
Clickbait 101
It’s the verge, after all. Nobody should read their slop
This is a hyperbolic article to be sure. But many in this thread are missing the point. It’s not that photo manipulation is new.
It’s the volume and quality of photo manipulation that’s new. “Flooding the zone with bullshit,” i.e. decreasing the signal-to-noise ratio, has demonstrable social effect.
It seems like the only defense against this would be something along the lines of FUTO’s Harbor, or maybe Ghost Keys. I’m not gonna pretend to know enough about them technically or practically, but a system that can anonymously prove that you’re you across websites could potentially de-fuel that fire.
The world’s billionaires probably know there’s lots of photographic evidence of stuff they did at Epstien island floating around out there. This is why they’re trying to make ai produce art so realistic that photographs are no longer considered evidence so they can just claim its ai generated if any of that stuff ever gets out.
Wont work against any good digital forensics.
It’s a shitty toy that’ll make some people sorry when they don’t have any photos from their night out without tiny godzilla dancing on their table. It won’t have the staying power Google wishes it to, since it’s useless except for gags.
But, please, Verge,
It took specialized knowledge and specialized tools to sabotage the intuitive trust in a photograph.
get fucked
I wish tools to detect if an image is real or not become as easy to use and good as these AI tools bullshit.
We need to bring back people who can identify shops from some of the pixels and having seen quite a few shops in their time.
Captain Disillusion vs. The Artificer
Any tool someone invents will be used to train an AI to circumvent that tool.
In fact that’s how a lot of AI training is done in the first place.
It’s fundamentally not possible.
At some point fakes will be picture perfect indistinguishable.
TL;DR: The new Reimage feature on the Google Pixel 9 phones is really good at AI manipulation, while being very easy to use. This is bad.
This is bad
Some serious old-man-yelling-at-cloud energy
It’ll sink in for you when photographic evidence is no longer admissible in court
Photoshop has existed for a bit now. So incredibly shocking it was only going to get better and easier to do, move along with the times oldtimer.
Well yeah, I’m not concerned with its ease of use nowadays. I’m more concerned with the computer forensics experts not being able to detect a fake for which Photoshop has always been detectable.
As the cat and mouse game continues, we ask ourselves, is water still wet?
Just wait, image manipulation will happen at image creation and there will be no “original”. Proving an image is unmanipulated will be a landmark legal precedent and set the standard for being able to introduce photographic evidence. It is already a problem for audio recordings and will be eventually for video.
Photoshop requires time and talent to make a believable image.
This requires neither.
But it has been possible, for more than a decade
You said “but” like it invalidated what I said, instead of being a true statement and a non sequitur.
You aren’t wrong, and I don’t think that changes what I said either.
Lmao, “but” means your statement can be true and irrelevant at the same time. From the day photoshop could fool people lawyers have been trying to mark any image as faked, misplaced or out of context.
When you just now realise it’s an issue, that’s your problem. People can’t stop these tools from existing, so like, go yell at a cloud or something.
I really don’t have much knowledge on it but it sound like it’s would be an actual good application of blockchain.
Couldn’t a blockchain be used to certify that pictures are original and have not been tampered with ?
On the other hand if it was possible I’m certain someone either have already started it, it is the prefect investor magnet “Using blockchain to counter AI”
How would that work?
I am being serious, I am an IT and can’t see how that would work in any realistic way.
And even if we had a working system to track all changes made to a photo, it would only work if the author submitted the original image before any change haf been made, but how would you verify that the original copy of a photo submitted to the system has not been tempered with?
Sure, you could be required to submit the raw file from the camera, but it is only a matter of time untill AI can perfectly simulate an optical sensor to take a simulated raw of a simulated scene.
Nope, we simply have to fall back on building trust with photo journalists, and trust digital signatures to tell us when we are seeing a photograph modified outsided of the journalist’s agency.
Yep, I think we pictures are becoming a valuable as text and it is fine, we just need to get used to it.
Before photography became mainstream the only source of information was written, it is extremely simple to make a fake story so people had to rely on trusted sources. Then for a short period of history photography became a (kinda) reliable sources of information by itself and this trust system lost its importance.
In most cases seeing a photo means that we were seeing a true reflection of what happened, especially if we were song multiple photos of the same event.
Now we are arriving at the end of this period, we cannot trust a photo by itself anymore, tampering a photo is becoming as easy as writing a fake story. This is a great opportunity for journalists I believe.
It’s always been about context and provenance. Who took the image? Are there supporting accounts?
But also, it has always been about the knowlege that no one… Absolutely no one… Does lines of coke from a woven mat floor covering.
Here is a famous faked photo of fairies from 1917 -> https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cottingley_Fairies
Nope it must be real because everyone knows fake photographs only became possible in 2022 with AI otherwise all these articles would be stupid.
Lots of obviously fake tipoffs in this one. The overall scrawny bitch aesthetic, the fact she is wearing a club/bar wrist band, the bottle of Mom Party Select™ wine, and the persons thumb/knee in the frame… All those details are initially plausible until you see the shitty AI artifacts.
Em what. The drug power finale is what has been added in by the AI what are you talking about.
All the details you just mentioned are also present in the unaltered photo though. Only the “drugs” are edited in.
Didn’t read the article, did you?
Lots of obviously fake tipoffs in this one. The overall scrawny bitch aesthetic, the fact she is wearing a club/bar wrist band, the bottle of Mom Party Select™ wine, and the persons thumb/knee in the frame… All those details are initially plausible until you see the shitty AI artifacts.
This is an AI-edited photo, and literally every “artifact” you pointed out is present in the original except for the wine bottle. You’re not nearly as good as spotting fakes as you think you are - nobody is
This comment is pure gold, you are already fooled but think you have a discerning eye, you are not immune to propaganda.
This is one of the required steps on the way to holodecks. I’ve been ready for it for 30 years.
It’s going to be used prolifically for something much more boring. Embellished product listings and fake reviews. If online shopping is frustrating now. It’s probably going to get a lot worse trying to weed out good quality things to buy as photographs are no longer reliable.
Well, one may hope for a “worse is better” scenario. As in Star Wars EU, where people generally do shopping as they still do in less developed areas of our planet - asking people they trust, which ask other people they trust, and so on.
This is going to make centralized media a hellscape of fakery.
It’s like with viruses - if a virus kills people too fast, it’ll kill itself.
Maybe cypherpunk-style “public web” technologies will finally become mainstream, because the rest simply won’t be usable.
We literally lived for thousands of years without photos. And we’ve lived for 30 years with Photoshop.
The article takes a doomed tone for sure but the reality is we know how dangerous and prolific misinformation is.
The Nazis based their entire philosophy on misinformation, and they did this in a world that predated computers. I don’t actually think there’s going to be a problem here all of the issues that the people are claiming exist have always been possible and not only possible but actually done in many cases.
AI is just the tool by which misinformation will now be spread but if AI didn’t exist the misinformation would just find another path.
I disagree with your point that it wouldn’t get worse. The Nazi example was in fact much worse for it’s time because of a new tool they called the “eighth great power”.
Goebbels used radio, which was new at the time, and subsidized radios for German citizens. AI is new, faster and more compelling than radio, not limited to a specific media type, and everyone already has receivers.
Except it was way harder to do.
Now call me a “ableist, technophobic, luddite”, that wants to ruin the chance of other people making GTA-like VRMMORPGs from a single line of prompt!
You know that’s not possible right?
if I as an anti-AI person said that, I’d be called out for posting FUD…
What are you talking about lol
have you considered just not listening to AI bros and not letting their opinions upset you
