John Schrag

As 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.

#ai #photography #epistemolgy

Nov 1 at 8:19pmWeb
Show threadCM HarringtonNov 1

@jvschrag I am not so worried about ‘will we be able to distinguish…’, but rather ‘will things become good enough and plausible enough to cause widespread panic via social and traditional media before it can be appropriately refuted’. — we’re kinda there, now.

Again, as you say, this is a cultural problem. But this is also short-circuiting some foundational survival instincts. Changing this is going to be, like, NP hard.

Show threadJohn SchragNov 1
@octothorpe NP Hard is still solvable, at least. Just not in polynomial time.
Show threadCM HarringtonNov 1
@jvschrag exactly.
Show threadAHNov 1
@jvschrag I think we’re already at a place where we by default don’t think anything is real anymore. My kids are all like: surely it’s AI
Show threadJohn SchragNov 1
@mindfulzombie If people start demanding better proof rather than believing the photos and videos they see on social media, maybe that's a good thing. It's a shame that the institutions that might help with that are being attacked at the same time.
Show threadAHNov 1
@jvschrag Perhaps. I don’t have any answers but it seems to me that there will be a cultural shift how we perceive digital media. It may no longer be able to serve the same purpose as before. Good or bad, I don’t know. It’s different. But it’s definitively going to be harder to say something for sure is real. It will take something extra. Like trust maybe.