John SchragAs AI image generation quality improves, I’m hearing more and more people bemoan that “we’ll never know if anything is real anymore”. It’s a statement I’ve heard before, in the early days of Photoshop, and occasionally in my career building high-end 3d modelling and rendering software. While I agree this tech will be used by bad actors to cause short-term havoc, I’m not long-term worried about it for two reasons.
1. I remember when Jurassic Park came out. When I saw it I thought CGI had been perfected — it looked absolutely real to young me. But with older and more experienced eyes, it’s obviously (really good) CGI. As time goes on, what seems indistinguishable from reality now will have its own tells that will seem obvious.
2. The ability to directly record what is visible without human mediation is a tiny blip in human history. We’ve only had it since Nicéphore Niépce made the first permanent photo etching in 1822. Before that, news was communicated via stories, testimony and drawings — all mediated by humans. The mechanisms for determining truth were cultural.
And even with no-AI photography, that’s still true. Photography not a neutral medium, as any photographer can tell you. Composition and image selection can completely change the story being told. Media has been manipulated long before AI.
I don’t know what the long term cultural response will be to everyone being able to make images of anything. I can imagine some possibilities, though. I hope we do better than we have been with a lot of things in this timeline.