But it’s never been this absolutely trivial to generate and distribute completely synthetic media. THAT is the real problem here.

It used to take professionals or serious hobbyists to make something fake look believable. Now it’s at the tip of everyone’s fingers. Fake photos were already a smaller issue, but this very well could become a tidal wave of fakes trying to grab attention.

Think about how many scammers there are. Think about how many horny boys there are. Think about how much online political fuckery goes around these days. When believable photographs of whatever you want people to believe are at the tips of anyone’s fingers, it’s very, very easy to start a wildfire of misinformation. And think about the young girls being tormented in middle school and high school. And all the scammable old people. And all the fascists willing to use any tool at their disposal to sow discord and hatred.

It’s not a nothing problem. It could very well become a torrent of lies.

If a bunch of people photographed that same incident from different angles, clearly it’s real.

I don't think you can assume this anymore.

Personally I think this kind of response shows how not ready we are, because it is grounded in the antiquated assumption that it is just more of the same old instead of a complete revolution in both the quality and quantity of fakery going to happen.

Photo manipulation has been around as long as the medium itself. And throughout the decades, people have worried about the veracity of images. When PhotoShop became popular, some decried it as the end of truthful photography. And now here’s AI, making things up entirely.

I actually think it isn't the AI photo or video manipulation part that makes it a bigger issue nowadays (at least not primarily), but the way in which they are consumed. AI making things easier is just another puzzle piece in this trend.

Information volume and speed has increased dramatically, resulting in an overflow that significantly shortens the timespan that is dedicated to each piece of content. If i slowly read my sunday newspaper during breakfast, then i'll give it much more attention, compared to scrolling through my social media feed. That lack of engagement makes it much easier for missinformation to have the desired effect.

There's also the increased complexity of the world. Things can on the surface seem reasonable and true, but have knock on consequences that aren't immediately apparent or only hold true within a narrow picture, but fall appart once viewed from a wider perspective. This just gets worse combined with the point above.

Then there's the downfall of high profile leading newsoutlets in relevance and the increased fragmentation of the information landscape. Instead of carefully curated and verified content, immediacy and clickbait take priority. And this imo also has a negative effect on those more classical outlets, which have to compete with it.

You also have increased populism especially in politics and many more trends, all compounding on the same issue of missinformation.

And even if caught and corrected, usually the damage is done and the correction reaches far fewer people.

Unfortunately, newspapers and news sources like it that verify information reasonably well aren't where most people get their info from anymore, and IMO, are unlikely to be around in a decade. It's become pretty easy to get known misinformation widely distributed and refuting it does virtually nothing to change popular opinion on these stories anymore. This is only going to get worse with tools like this.

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!

Were they from the .ml instances?

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!

Regarding that last panel, why would multiple people go through the trouble of carving lies about Ea-Nasir's shitty copper? And even if they did, why would he keep them? No, his copper definitely sucked.

Clickbait 101

I am very opposed to this. It means surrendering all trust in pictures to Big Tech. If at some time only photos signed by Sony, Samsung, etc. are considered genuine, then photos taken with other equipment, e.g., independently manufactured cameras or image sensors, will be dismissed out of hand. If, however, you were to accept photos signed by the operating system on those devices regardless of who is the vendor, that would invalidate the entire purpose because everyone could just self-sign their pictures. This means that the only way to effectively enforce your approach is to surrender user freedom, and that runs contrary to the Free Software Movement and the many people around the world aligned with it. It would be a very dystopian world.

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

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...

Here is a famous faked photo of fairies from 1917 -> https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cottingley_Fairies

...did you just post 6 completely random articles as if there was some sort of point other than "news sites report lots of different news?"

While this is good thing, not being able to tell what is real and what is not would be disaster. What if every comment here but you were generated by some really advanced ai? What they can do now will be laughable compared to what they can do many years from now. And at that point it will be too late to demand anything to be done about it.

Ai generated content should have somekind of tag or mark that is inherently tied to it that can be used to identify it as ai generated, even if only part is used. No idea how that would work though if its even possible.