4 ms·

Photoshop has existed for decades. Is it really that big of a problem for photo news?

technocratius 6y ago
The difference between Photoshop and generative models is not in what it can technically achieve, but the cost of achieving the desired result. Fake news photo or text generation is possible by humans, but scales poorly compared (more humans) to a algorithmically automated process (some more compute).
draugadrotten 6y ago
Yes! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adnan_Hajj_photographs_controversy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adnan_Hajj_photographs_controv... https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-55140848 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-55140848 and many more
- Agentlien 6y ago
  Wow, that first Adnan Hajj photograph looks absolutely terrible.
danielscrubs 6y ago
Touch ups where done before photoshop but now it’s ALWAYS done. The issues this has created in society might have a bigger emotional impact than we give it credit for. Regarding photo news there has been quite a lot of scandals to the point that I’d guess the touchups is more or less accepted.
- Pyramus 6y ago
  I conducted a workshop in media compentency for teenage girls and one of the key learnings was that every image of a female subject they encounter in printed media (this was before Instagram) has been retouched. To hammer the point home I let them retouch a picture by themselves to see what is possible even for a completely untrained manipulator. It was eye-opening - one of the things that should absolutely be taught in school but isn't.
  - IndySun 6y ago
    "one of the things that should absolutely be taught in school but isn't." Namely, critical thinking?
    - darkwater 6y ago
      I don't think "critical thinking" is the point here. Because first you need to know that such modifications CAN be done. And not everybody knows what can be retouched with PS or programs. So yeah, if you see some super-model on a magazine cover, and you don't know PS can edit photos easily, it would be not that immediate to think "hey maybe that's not real!". As an extreme example: would you ever checked 20 years ago a newspaper text to know if it was generated by an AI or by a human? Obviously no, because you didn't know of any AI that could do that.
      - Pyramus 6y ago
        Exactly this. There is a secondary aspect of becoming aware that society has agreed on beauty standards (different for different societies) and PS being used as a means to adhere to these standards.
      - IndySun 6y ago
        I think I made my point badly because I also agree. I am lamenting that teenagers were, in this day and age, surprised at what can be done with Photoshop. And that let loose on the appropriate software were surprised at what can be altered and how easily. My point is suggesting this may be so because people have not been taught how to think for themselves and accept things (in this case female images) 'as is', without a hint of curiosity. It is also a problem but at the other end of the stick, with many young people I work with considering Wikipedia to be 100% full of misinformation and fake news.
Rastonbury 6y ago
The concern is not so much AI generated news, but malicious actors misleading, influencing or scamming people online at scale with realistic conversations. Today we already have large scale automated scams via email and robo call. Less scalable scams like Tinder love catfish scams or Russian/China trolls on reddit are now run by real people, imagine it being automated. If human moderators cannot distinguish these bots from real humans, that is a scary thought, imagine not being able to tell if this comment was written by a human or robot.
- hooande 6y ago
  why does this matter? the internet is filled with millions of very low quality human generated discussions right now. There might not be much of a difference between thousands of humans generating comment spam and thousands of gpt-3 instances doing the same
  - mekkkkkk 6y ago
    It does matter. The nice feeling of being one of many is a feature of echo chambers. If you can create that artificially for anything with a push of a button, it's a powerful tool to edit discourse or radicalize people. Have a look at Russias interference in the previous US election. This is what they did, but manually. To be able to scale and automate it is huge.
    - ccozan 6y ago
      But careful, the human psyche has some kind of tipping point. Too much fake news, and it will flip. Too less, no real influence is made. The exact balance must be orchestrated by a human.
- visarga 6y ago
  > imagine not being able to tell if this comment was written by a human or robot I think neural nets could help finding fake news and factual mistakes. Then it wouldn't matter who wrote it if it is helpful and true.
Yetanfou 6y ago
That is like saying "black powder has existed for centuries, are nuclear weapons really that big a problem?". The difference between an image editor like Photoshop and an automated image generation program is the far greater production capacity, speed, the lower cost and the fact that anyone with the right equipment can use it whereas the end result of of an image editor only is as good as the person using it,

The difference between Photoshop and generative models is not in what it can technically achieve, but the cost of achieving the desired result. Fake news photo or text generation is possible by humans, but scales poorly compared (more humans) to a algorithmically automated process (some more compute).

draugadrotten 6y ago

Yes! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adnan_Hajj_photographs_controversy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adnan_Hajj_photographs_controv... https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-55140848 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-55140848 and many more

Agentlien 6y ago
Wow, that first Adnan Hajj photograph looks absolutely terrible.

danielscrubs 6y ago

Touch ups where done before photoshop but now it’s ALWAYS done. The issues this has created in society might have a bigger emotional impact than we give it credit for. Regarding photo news there has been quite a lot of scandals to the point that I’d guess the touchups is more or less accepted.

Pyramus 6y ago
I conducted a workshop in media compentency for teenage girls and one of the key learnings was that every image of a female subject they encounter in printed media (this was before Instagram) has been retouched. To hammer the point home I let them retouch a picture by themselves to see what is possible even for a completely untrained manipulator. It was eye-opening - one of the things that should absolutely be taught in school but isn't.
- IndySun 6y ago
  "one of the things that should absolutely be taught in school but isn't." Namely, critical thinking?
  - darkwater 6y ago
    I don't think "critical thinking" is the point here. Because first you need to know that such modifications CAN be done. And not everybody knows what can be retouched with PS or programs. So yeah, if you see some super-model on a magazine cover, and you don't know PS can edit photos easily, it would be not that immediate to think "hey maybe that's not real!". As an extreme example: would you ever checked 20 years ago a newspaper text to know if it was generated by an AI or by a human? Obviously no, because you didn't know of any AI that could do that.
    - Pyramus 6y ago
      Exactly this. There is a secondary aspect of becoming aware that society has agreed on beauty standards (different for different societies) and PS being used as a means to adhere to these standards.
    - IndySun 6y ago
      I think I made my point badly because I also agree. I am lamenting that teenagers were, in this day and age, surprised at what can be done with Photoshop. And that let loose on the appropriate software were surprised at what can be altered and how easily. My point is suggesting this may be so because people have not been taught how to think for themselves and accept things (in this case female images) 'as is', without a hint of curiosity. It is also a problem but at the other end of the stick, with many young people I work with considering Wikipedia to be 100% full of misinformation and fake news.

Rastonbury 6y ago

The concern is not so much AI generated news, but malicious actors misleading, influencing or scamming people online at scale with realistic conversations. Today we already have large scale automated scams via email and robo call. Less scalable scams like Tinder love catfish scams or Russian/China trolls on reddit are now run by real people, imagine it being automated. If human moderators cannot distinguish these bots from real humans, that is a scary thought, imagine not being able to tell if this comment was written by a human or robot.

hooande 6y ago
why does this matter? the internet is filled with millions of very low quality human generated discussions right now. There might not be much of a difference between thousands of humans generating comment spam and thousands of gpt-3 instances doing the same
- mekkkkkk 6y ago
  It does matter. The nice feeling of being one of many is a feature of echo chambers. If you can create that artificially for anything with a push of a button, it's a powerful tool to edit discourse or radicalize people. Have a look at Russias interference in the previous US election. This is what they did, but manually. To be able to scale and automate it is huge.
  - ccozan 6y ago
    But careful, the human psyche has some kind of tipping point. Too much fake news, and it will flip. Too less, no real influence is made. The exact balance must be orchestrated by a human.
visarga 6y ago
> imagine not being able to tell if this comment was written by a human or robot I think neural nets could help finding fake news and factual mistakes. Then it wouldn't matter who wrote it if it is helpful and true.

Yetanfou 6y ago

That is like saying "black powder has existed for centuries, are nuclear weapons really that big a problem?". The difference between an image editor like Photoshop and an automated image generation program is the far greater production capacity, speed, the lower cost and the fact that anyone with the right equipment can use it whereas the end result of of an image editor only is as good as the person using it,