Posted by sandebert 7 days ago
https://www.npr.org/2008/07/11/92442928/photo-of-irans-missi...
Though there is this:
https://civitai.com/models/877883/soviet-era-ussr-retro-futu...
Photos, Videos, and Audio are longer "proof" of anything. Any 10 year old kid can generate basically anything he wants. I love AI, but it's sad to be living in a world where now 'Authenticity' itself is permanently dead.
And the ones that aren't AI generated are badly clipped scenes from movies / TV shows with the same 5 royalty-free songs playing over them, which might as well have been produced by AI.
It was used as a demonstration photo in a famous photo-editing program which was used to fool the world, but the image is ostensibly a real photo, not a fake image.
Or take this description of the edited image of Elvis:
> the United Press agency decided to create a mock-up of what the king of rock’n’roll might look like with the typical GI hairstyle, retouching a photo of the singer to remove his quiff (and leaving him with a somewhat disfigured head). “Not all manipulated photographs are intended to deceive,” notes Mia Fineman, a curator at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art
Only the headline says "images that fooled the world"; the article is about something different.
I'm a scholar in this area, and that article is shit.
Photoshop is such a popular tool for image manipulation that it is a verb "to digitally alter (a photograph or other graphic) using image-editing software such as Photoshop".
Inclusion of one of the first ever photoshopped images in a list of famous fake images, even if just a tech demo, seems entirely reasonable.
I'd argue that the inclusion of one of the first ever photoshopped images which was specifically never intended to fool anyone, and in fact never did fool anyone, doesn't belong in a list of famous fake images that "fooled the world". It would have been far more reasonably presented outside of the list, maybe as a part of the article talking about the history of photo manipulation more generally, but presenting it as one of "28 fake images that fooled the world" doesn't really make much sense.
I suppose the real difference is that before it took a more artisanal, time-consuming process, and now -- increasingly -- it takes far less time to create something convincing enough. Same with video: you could fake a video, do editing, etc, but it took time, skill, a location where to shoot, etc. Now it's becoming easier to do for everyone. And it's not perfect yet, but are we sure it won't get there? And it doesn't have to be perfect anyway, it just has to fool most people in a given window of time.
Fake pics have existed since pics existed pretty much.
Kids have been looking for ways to cheat on tests since tests began. If you're a teacher, you're gonna have to test in person.
Fake phone calls, fake other things... yea they're of a different/better quality as the technology has gotten better. Is it so fundamental a shift that nothing can be done? I'm not convinced.
If at some point the cheats/fakes will be cheaper and easier than the real thing, you can bet that will be a fundamental shift in how we approach the world.
Is there any evidence this is going to ever happen? The evidence I see points in opposite direction - everyone has so many sensors and data being recorded about the real world that it is actually harder to fake things.
For example, there used to be a widespread belief in aliens and animal cryptids in the 70s. Today, less so, because people capture everyday reality on much bigger scale than they used to.
I looked it up and belief in aliens has actually been slowly creeping up since the 70's where it hovered around 29%. The belief spiked in the late 90's and is now around 40%. My guess is the internet played a role.
I fear the same would be true for high-quality (real or otherwise) nude images and I’d wager this would still draw unwanted attention towards the subject. Hopefully there wouldn’t be negative consequences from employers and schools since the assumption is the image was fake.
The article also seems to take the relativist stance: nothing new to see here, move along now. Why? For the clicks? Just being contrarian?
In information economy jobs, translating thoughts and ideas into better formal communications more efficiently is valuable. Be it pictures or text.
For just the domain of image generation there's still a lot of useful things. Want to do any upscaling? The processes can help there as you're learning a more complex transform than something like a bicubic interpolation (yeah, there are more advanced algorithms, this is just an example). Same is actually true for downsampling. We can even talk about rotating images, which is a classic problem in old videogames. There's also typical photo editing. This is done widely, most notably by Hollywood. Even if your AI only gets you 70% of the way there it can still be helpful (if the first 70% isn't trivial). It is also directly used in compression algorithms. It is much cheaper to share an encoder and decoder structure which can be computed locally and then transmit a smaller signal. The transmission is not only typically the more expensive part but usually also the bottleneck and has the largest chance of data corruption.
Yeah, I agree, most people are using the tech in weird ways and there's a lot of weird hype around malformed images that are obviously malformed if you looked at it with more than a passing glance (or not through rose colored glasses). But there are a lot of useful applications to this stuff. Ones that could far more benefit the world and personally I'm left wondering "why isn't even a small fraction of the investment that's going into status quo image generators and LLMs going into these other domains?" I'm guessing because image generators and LLms are easier to understand? But it is a shame.
I'm not sure we understand yet how much positive and how much negative potential there is in AI.
Not arguing, just saying.
A fundamental shift in our complete trust of technology is good. It encourages ignorance and obedience, and alienates people from each other.
And the fact that AI can be used to fake pictures of your neighbors having sex is nothing but good. No one will be able to say whether any picture is real, so the public won't be able to destroy another young girl's life over it. I also think that arguing about the distribution of pretend movies of your neighbors having sex will have to lead to clear legislation regarding the distribution and sale of personal data.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/apr/27/elon-musk...
You can literally produce fake information at an industrial scale, distribute it in real time, and see what sticks at virtually no cost.
How do you think we're at the point of breaking the world?
Access is important. Yes you could hire a scholar to write for you, but that's far more expensive, and detectible by your parents, than asking ChatGPT. Now every student has access to some of the best cheat software on the planet.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raising_a_Flag_over_the_Reic...
To quote sesame street: "One of These Things Is Not Like the Others".
We're whalers on the Moon, we carry a harpoon! But there ain't no whales so we tell tall tales and sing a whaling tune!