This is a hyperbolic article to be sure. But many in this thread are missing the point. It’s not that photo manipulation is new.
It’s the volume and quality of photo manipulation that’s new. “Flooding the zone with bullshit,” i.e. decreasing the signal-to-noise ratio, can have a demonstrable social effect.
It seems like the only defense against this would be something along the lines of FUTO’s Harbor, or maybe Ghost Keys. I’m not gonna pretend to know enough about them technically or practically, but a system that can anonymously prove that you’re you across websites could potentially de-fuel that fire.
Them - and F2F.
Awful title.
It’s the verge, after all. Nobody should read their slop
Clickbait 101
This reaffirms my wish to go back to monkey.
No sweat since i am eschewing most things google related.
The majority of others aren’t. The technology also isn’t exclusive to Google, or won’t be for long. Forget placing drugs on a person to have an excuse to arrest them, there will be photographic evidence, completely fake, of anyone counter to the system doing whatever crime they want to pin on us.
Look at the good side of this - now nobody has any reason to trust central authorities or any kind of official organization.
Previously it required enormous power to do such things. Now it’s a given that if there’s no chain of trust from the object to the spectator, any information is noise.
It all looks dark everywhere, but what if we will finally have that anarchist future, made by the hands of our enemies?
I think this is a good thing.
Pictures/video without verified provenance have not constituted legitimate evidence for anything with meaningful stakes for several years. Perfect fakes have been possible at the level of serious actors already.
Putting it in the hands of everyone brings awareness that pictures aren’t evidence, lowering their impact over time. Not being possible for anyone would be great, but that isn’t and hasn’t been reality for a while.
I completely agree. This is going to free kids from someone taking a picture of them doing something relatively harmless and extorting them. “That was AI, I wasn’t even at that party 🤷”
I can’t wait for childhood and teenage life to being a bit more free and a bit less constantly recorded.
yeah, every time you go to a party, and fun happens, somebody pulls out their smartphone and starts filming. it’s really bad. people can only relax when there’s privacy, and smartphones have stolen privacy from society for over 10 years now. we need to either ban filming in general (which is not doable) or discredit photographs - which we’re doing right now.
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.
You already can’t. You can’t close Pandora’s box.
Adding labels just creates a false sense of security.
it wouldnt be label, that wouldnt do anything since it could just be erased. It should be something like invisible set of pixels on pictures or some inaudible soundpattern on sounds that can be detected in some way.
But it’s irrelevant. You can watermark all you want in the algorithms you control, but it doesn’t change the underlying fact that pictures have been capable of lying for years.
People just recognizing that a picture is not evidence of anything is better.
Yes, but reason why people dont already consider pictures irrelevant is that it takes time and effort to manipulate a picture. With ai not only is it fast it can be automated. Of course you shouldnt accept something so unreliable as legal evidence but this will spill over to everything else too
It doesn’t matter. Any time there are any stakes at all (and plenty of times there aren’t), there’s someone who will do the work.
It doesnt matter if you cant trust anything you see? What if you couldn’t be sure if you weren’t talking to bot right now?
I wish tools to detect if an image is real or not become as easy to use and good as these AI tools bullshit.
Any tool someone invents will be used to train an AI to circumvent that tool.
In fact that’s how a lot of AI training is done in the first place.
We need to bring back people who can identify shops from some of the pixels and having seen quite a few shops in their time.
Captain Disillusion vs. The Artificer
It’s fundamentally not possible.
At some point fakes will be pixel perfect indistinguishable.
I’ve just tried to upload the picture of the girl with fake drugs on the floor in a AI detection tool and it told me it was 0,2% likely to have AI generated content. This does not look good.
It’s a shitty toy that’ll make some people sorry when they don’t have any photos from their night out without tiny godzilla dancing on their table. It won’t have the staying power Google wishes it to, since it’s useless except for gags.
But, please, Verge,
It took specialized knowledge and specialized tools to sabotage the intuitive trust in a photograph.
get fucked
Even a few months ago it was hard for people with the knowledge to use AI on photos. I don’t like the idea of this but its unavoidable. There is already so much misinformation and this will make it so much worse.
I don’t believe there’s misinformation because we fail to discern the truth though. Misinformation exists because people believe what they want to believe.
This is one of the required steps on the way to holodecks. I’ve been ready for it for 30 years.
It’s always been about context and provenance. Who took the image? Are there supporting accounts?
But also, it has always been about the knowlege that no one… Absolutely no one… Does lines of coke from a woven mat floor covering.
Lots of obviously fake tipoffs in this one. The overall scrawny bitch aesthetic, the fact she is wearing a club/bar wrist band, the bottle of Mom Party Select™ wine, and the persons thumb/knee in the frame… All those details are initially plausible until you see the shitty AI artifacts.
This comment is pure gold, you are already fooled but think you have a discerning eye, you are not immune to propaganda.
All the details you just mentioned are also present in the unaltered photo though. Only the “drugs” are edited in.
Didn’t read the article, did you?
Em what. The drug power finale is what has been added in by the AI what are you talking about.
Lots of obviously fake tipoffs in this one. The overall scrawny bitch aesthetic, the fact she is wearing a club/bar wrist band, the bottle of Mom Party Select™ wine, and the persons thumb/knee in the frame… All those details are initially plausible until you see the shitty AI artifacts.
This is an AI-edited photo, and literally every “artifact” you pointed out is present in the original except for the wine bottle. You’re not nearly as good as spotting fakes as you think you are - nobody is
Here is a famous faked photo of fairies from 1917 -> https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cottingley_Fairies
Nope it must be real because everyone knows fake photographs only became possible in 2022 with AI otherwise all these articles would be stupid.
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Photography manipulation existed almost since the invention of photography. It was only much harder see the famous photo edition https://www.history.com/news/josef-stalin-great-purge-photo-retouching
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…
We literally lived for thousands of years without photos. And we’ve lived for 30 years with Photoshop.
The article takes a doomed tone for sure but the reality is we know how dangerous and prolific misinformation is.
So, shouldn’t the pretense that images are sources of truth evaporating, be a good thing?
The Nazis based their entire philosophy on misinformation, and they did this in a world that predated computers. I don’t actually think there’s going to be a problem here all of the issues that the people are claiming exist have always been possible and not only possible but actually done in many cases.
AI is just the tool by which misinformation will now be spread but if AI didn’t exist the misinformation would just find another path.
I disagree with your point that it wouldn’t get worse. The Nazi example was in fact much worse for it’s time because of a new tool they called the “eighth great power”.
Goebbels used radio, which was new at the time, and subsidized radios for German citizens. AI is new, faster and more compelling than radio, not limited to a specific media type, and everyone already has receivers.
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!
You know that’s not possible right?
if I as an anti-AI person said that, I’d be called out for posting FUD…
have you considered just not listening to AI bros and not letting their opinions upset you
What are you talking about lol
TL;DR: The new Reimage feature on the Google Pixel 9 phones is really good at AI manipulation, while being very easy to use. This is bad.
This is bad
Some serious old-man-yelling-at-cloud energy
It’ll sink in for you when photographic evidence is no longer admissible in court
Photoshop has existed for a bit now. So incredibly shocking it was only going to get better and easier to do, move along with the times oldtimer.
Well yeah, I’m not concerned with its ease of use nowadays. I’m more concerned with the computer forensics experts not being able to detect a fake for which Photoshop has always been detectable.
As the cat and mouse game continues, we ask ourselves, is water still wet?
Just wait, image manipulation will happen at image creation and there will be no “original”. Proving an image is unmanipulated will be a landmark legal precedent and set the standard for being able to introduce photographic evidence. It is already a problem for audio recordings and will be eventually for video.
Photoshop requires time and talent to make a believable image.
This requires neither.
But it has been possible, for more than a decade
You said “but” like it invalidated what I said, instead of being a true statement and a non sequitur.
You aren’t wrong, and I don’t think that changes what I said either.
Lmao, “but” means your statement can be true and irrelevant at the same time. From the day photoshop could fool people lawyers have been trying to mark any image as faked, misplaced or out of context.
When you just now realise it’s an issue, that’s your problem. People can’t stop these tools from existing, so like, go yell at a cloud or something.
I really don’t have much knowledge on it but it sound like it’s would be an actual good application of blockchain.
Couldn’t a blockchain be used to certify that pictures are original and have not been tampered with ?
On the other hand if it was possible I’m certain someone either have already started it, it is the prefect investor magnet “Using blockchain to counter AI”
How would that work?
I am being serious, I am an IT and can’t see how that would work in any realistic way.
And even if we had a working system to track all changes made to a photo, it would only work if the author submitted the original image before any change haf been made, but how would you verify that the original copy of a photo submitted to the system has not been tempered with?
Sure, you could be required to submit the raw file from the camera, but it is only a matter of time untill AI can perfectly simulate an optical sensor to take a simulated raw of a simulated scene.
Nope, we simply have to fall back on building trust with photo journalists, and trust digital signatures to tell us when we are seeing a photograph modified outsided of the journalist’s agency.
Yep, I think we pictures are becoming a valuable as text and it is fine, we just need to get used to it.
Before photography became mainstream the only source of information was written, it is extremely simple to make a fake story so people had to rely on trusted sources. Then for a short period of history photography became a (kinda) reliable sources of information by itself and this trust system lost its importance.
In most cases seeing a photo means that we were seeing a true reflection of what happened, especially if we were song multiple photos of the same event.
Now we are arriving at the end of this period, we cannot trust a photo by itself anymore, tampering a photo is becoming as easy as writing a fake story. This is a great opportunity for journalists I believe.
There has never not been a time when photography was not manipulated in some way, be it as simple as picking a subject and framing it in a specific way can completely change the story.
I really enjoy photography as a hobby, however I find it a bit embarrasing and intrusive to take photos of other people, so my photos tend to look empty of people.
I will allways frame a picture to have no or as a very few people in it as possible.
In general I don’t edit my photos on the computer, I just let them speak for themselves, even if that story is a half truth.
We have never been able to trust photographs completely, though you make a good point about truth in numbers, that won’t go way just because of AI.
The big issue now is how easiy it is to make a completely believably faked photo out of an existing photo, we have been able to do this for decades, but is has been way, way harder to do.
As for the blockchain making photos valuable, we tried that, NFTs as a concept is dumb and has failed, I don’t believe that NFTs will be the future of ownership.
This is only a threat to people that took random picture at face value. Which should not have been a thing for a long while, generative AI or not.
The source of an information/picture, as well as how it was checked has been the most important part of handling online content for decades. The fact that it is now easier for some people to make edits does not change that.
Your comment somehow just made me realize something: When we see/read news, we have to trust the one who’s telling them to us. Since we weren’t there in person to see it with our own eyes. Therefore, it’s always about a “chain of trust”.
This is true no matter whether photos can be manipulated or not. People have been able to lie since humanity exists. Nothing has really changed. Photography, just like globalization, has only brought everything closer together, making it easier to have a more direct, straightforward relationship to other people and events. With the beginning of AI, this distance between you and an event is going to increase a bit, but the core mechanics are still similar.
I kind of wonder, how do we really know that something is true? Do atoms actually exist? What if we’re being lied to by our authorities. You say “of course not”. But what if? I mean, if we blindly trust authorities, we end up like the republicans, who believe everything that fox news tells them. How, then, do we discern truth?
How, then, do we discern truth? I guess we have to give “proof” for everything, in the sense of mathematical proof. Something that everybody can follow, using only their fundamental assumptions and deduction. I guess that is what science is all about.
