/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/25584373/247226_AI_Pixel_Reality_CVirginia_3.jpg){kind=tracking}
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.
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…
As if photo manipulation hasn’t been around in better forms for decades…?
It is the quantity of fakes because of the easy process which is going to be the problem. Fake pictures will very soon outnumber real, and the amount of them will still kerp grjwing exponentially even after that.
Not as easy and accessible as now.
Before, I don’t even know how to erase a pimple on my selfies. Now I can easily generate picture of a photorealistic cat girl riding a bike naked on Time square that could fool any elders in my neighborhood.
Accessibility makes it the opposite of convincing.
And a skillfully modified photo is going to convince just about anyone.
There are some really subtle details experts can look at to detect Photoshop work, such as patterns in the JPEG artifacts than can indicate a photo was reocmpressed multiple times in some areas but not others.
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.
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.
Honestly yeah I agree. Many mainstream social media platforms are infested with shitty generated content to the point of being insanity.
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
These photoshop comments are missing the point that it’s just like art, a good edit that can fool everyone needs someone that practiced a lot and has lots of experience, now even the lazy asses on the right can fake it easily.
Yeah, it is going to be mainly a quantity issue rather than a quality one. The quality of faked photos has already been high since photoshop. Now a constant growing avalanche of high quality fakes (produced by all sorts of different vested interests with their own particular purposes) is going to barrage us on a daily basis, simply because it is cheap and easy
I think this comment misses the point that even one doctored photo created by a team of highly skilled individuals can change the course of history. And when that’s what it takes, it’s easier to sell it to the public.
What matters is the source. What we’re being forced to reckon with now is: the assumption that photos capture indisputable reality has never and will never be true. That’s why we invented journalism. Ethically driven people to investigate and be impartial sources of truth on what’s happening in the world. But we’ve neglected and abused the profession so much that it’s a shell of what we need it to be.
The thing is that in the future the mere quantity of fakes will make the careful vetting process you describe physically impossible. You will be bombarded with high quality fakes to such an extent that you will simply have to give up trying to keep up, so it will be a choice of either dropping the vetting process or dropping bringing any pictures altogether. For profit driven corporate jwbed media outlets, the choice unfortunately will be obvious.
I’m not talking about vetting pictures. I’m talking about journalists who investigate issues THEMSELVES and uncover the truth. They take their OWN pictures and post them on their website and accounts putting their credibility as collateral. We trust them, not because it’s a picture, but because of who took it.
This already happened with text, people learned “Don’t believe everything you read!” And invented the press to figure out the truth. It used to be a core part of our society. But people were tricked into thinking pictures and video were somehow mediums of empirical truth, just because it’s HARD to fake. But never impossible. Which is worse, actually. So we neglected the press and let it collapse into a shit show because we thought we could do it ourselves.
There was actually a user on Lemmy that asked if the original photo for the massacre was AI. It hadn’t occurred to me that people who never heard of the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests and massacre would find the image and question if it was real or not.
A very sad sight, a very sad future.
Were they from the .ml instances?
How is it sad? If they’re young and/or don’t have the best schooling, it’s not their fault they haven’t heard of it. And then they encounter an absurd picture and approach it with skepticism? That’s not sad at all. Healthy skepticism is good, especially with the influx of AI generated content
Photoshop has existed for years. It’s no different than a student in 2010 being shocked at the horrors of man and trying to figure out how it could be faked with a computer. People have denied the Holocaust for generations!
It is different. The old Photoshop process took a lot of time. Now an image can be manipulated incredibly quickly and spread almost as fast before anyone has time to do anything about it.
This argument keeps missing that it is not only the quality but mainly the quantity of fakes which is going to be the problem. The complete undermining of trust in photographic evidence is seen as a good thing for so many nefarious vested interests, that this is an aim they will actively strive for.
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.
It’s fundamentally not possible.
At some point fakes will be picture perfect indistinguishable.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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
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?
Em what. The drug power finale is what has been added in by the AI what are you talking about.
This comment is pure gold, you are already fooled but think you have a discerning eye, you are not immune to propaganda.
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.
we’ve been able to do this kinda shit since the days of film, it wasn’t hard, just required some clever stitching and blending.
It’s “more accessible” I’m more concerned about shit like AI generated videos though. Those are spooky. Or also just the general accessibility of “natural bot nets” now.
Damn, those are pretty damn good!
We literally lived for thousands of years without photos. And we’ve lived for 30 years with Photoshop.
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
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.
