236
Facebook Is Being Overrun With Stolen, AI-Generated Images That People Think Are Real
(www.404media.co)
this post was submitted on 18 Dec 2023
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Technology
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This is going to get soooo much more treacherous as this becomes ubiquitous and harder to detect. Apply the same pattern, but instead of wood carvings, it's an election, or sexual misconduct trial, or war.
Our ability to make sense of things that we don't witness personally is already in bad shape, and it's about to get significantly worse. We aren't even sure how bad it is right now.
Imagine an image like Tank Man, or the running Vietnamese girl with napalm burns on her skin, but AI generated at the right moment.
It could change the course of nations.
As lies always could.
There were no WMDs in Iraq.
Sure, but now you can make a video of Saddam giving a tour of a nuclear enrichment facility.
Sure, but now you'll be able to sway all those people who were on the fence about believing the lie until they see the "evidence"
It's already happening to some extent (I think still a small extent). I'm reminded of this Ryan Long video making fun of people who follow wars on Twitter. I can say the people who he's making fun of are definitely real: I've met some of them. Their idea of figuring out a war or figuring out which side to support basically comes down to finding pictures of dead babies.
At 1:02 he specifically mentions people using AI for these images, which has definitely been cropping up here and there in Twitter discussions around Israel-Palestine.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
I'm reminded of this Ryan Long video making fun of people who follow wars on Twitter
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.
And it almost certainly will. Perhaps has already.
and the flipside is also a problem
Now legitimate evidence can be dismissed as "AI generated"
Exactly-- They're two sides of the same coin. Being convinced by something that isn't real is one type of error, but refusing to be convinced by something that is real is just as much of an error.
Some people are going to fall for just about everything. Others are going to be so apprehensive about falling for something that they never believe anything. I'm genuinely not sure which is worse.
We already saw that with nothing more than two words. Trump started the "fake news" craze, and now 33% of Americans dismiss anything that contradicts their views as fake news, without giving it any thought or evaluation. If a catch phrase is that powerful, imagine how much more powerful video and photography will be. Even in 2019 there was a deep fake floating around of Biden with a Gene Simmons tongue, licking his lips, and I personally know several people who thought it was real.
Great example. Yeah, I've had to educate family members about deepfakes because they didn't even know that they were possible. This was on the back of some statement like "the only way to know for sure is to see video." Uh... Sorry fam, I have some bad news...
Analog is the way to go now
It already happening. Adobe is selling them but even if they weren't it's not hard to do.
I think the worst of it is going to be places like Facebook where people already fall for terrible and obvious Photoshop images. They won't notice it there are mistakes, even as AI gets better and there are fewer mistakes (Dall-E used to be awful at hands, not so bad now). However even smart folks will fall for these.