19 ms·

A.I. imagery may destroy history as we know it

104 points by dxs 3y ago

Simon321 3y ago
Faking images to try and change history is as old as Stalin: https://www.history.com/news/josef-stalin-great-purge-photo-retouching https://www.history.com/news/josef-stalin-great-purge-photo-...
- routerl 3y ago
  No, it's way, way older. As in "Hapsburg portraits" and "Ming Dynasty scrolls" old. And let's not forget the last time a technology came around that could "fool history"; how many people still believe the moon landing was shot on a sound stage? The notion that historians only care about images, without caring about their provenance, is absurd.
  - pacija 3y ago
    I don't know how many, but I know I do.
- eukara 3y ago
  That's like comparing horse and carriage to a modern day truck though, no? This can be fully automated, generating photoreal content on its own. You couldn't airbrush a photo via a cron job like how you can now automate some model generating thousands of images of people rioting/looting for authoritarian purposes. Who will go through the effort of verifying every one of them? Other language models with precision issues?
  - ModernMech 3y ago
    > You couldn't airbrush a photo via a cron job like how you can now automate some model generating thousands of images of people rioting/looting for authoritarian purposes. I get how this could be a problem, but it seems to me that it would only be marginally effective instead of exponentially as some assume. The reason I think this is because we already have this kind of thing going on without AI [1]. And while it does work, it's not clear to me if making the fake more realistic actually does anything for the kind of people who get worked up about this. If you want to claim Seattle is burning and it's not, just grab a picture of another place burning, and you're good. Narrative achieved. If you can pass as authentic a photo from a different place taken at a different time, then what does it matter if you can generate a new one? Are you going to trick more people? Maybe. But I have a feeling the people who are most likely to get tricked, would have been tricked by far more mundane fraud. [1] https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/fox-news-alters-protest-images-video-again-1014675/ https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/fox-news...
    - hasanas 3y ago
      People aren’t divided into “most likely to be tricked” and “least likely to be tricked”. When you generate “photos” of Big Ben burning and throw it on Twitter, you will grab the attention of many more Londoners than you could with a random image of a burning house or whatever, many of which would at least take the time to verify. Just look at the Balenciaga Pope images. By grabbing the attention of those you are essentially stepping into the realms of “historical alternations”.
- masswerk 3y ago
  But you recognize the difference in economic costs of forgery – and thus the probability of this happening?
- tivert 3y ago
  > Faking images to try and change history is as old as Stalin: https://www.history.com/news/josef-stalin-great-purge-photo-retouching https://www.history.com/news/josef-stalin-great-purge-photo-... Maybe so, but up until now forging photographs was far, far more expensive than creating real ones. It won't be too long now until someone will be able to generate in a weekend a convincing self-consistent alternate-history series of Wikipedia articles about the second term of the Trump presidency... and stuff like that's going to fill up the historical databank of the colony ship that the last humans use to flee the dying Earth.
JKCalhoun 3y ago
> The hands are often a tell-tale sign of the incompetence of an A.I. program. Curiously prescient: it was the hands of the robots in the original film, Westworld (1973), that were a tell-tale sign that they were not living.
- foob 3y ago
  There's also a technique for lucid dreaming where you make a point to look carefully at your hands throughout the day until it becomes an unconscious habit. The idea is that they won't look quite right in a dream, and you'll therefore realize that you're dreaming. I wonder if there's any particular significance to hands beyond them being conveniently accessible, or if any similar ritual would work as long as the individual believed that it would. In other words, are hands inaccurately constructed in dreams without people noticing unless they're specifically looking for it, or does the lucid dreaming technique cause the distortions because the dreamer is expecting them?
  - tokai 3y ago
    Any similar ritual works. The dreaming brain is super bad at consistency. If you know something really well, like looking at your hands, wristwatch, or something else. You'll see obvious distortions and other weirdness while dreaming. I think the distortions are always there. We are just not in a state of mind where details matters when dreaming.
    - soco 3y ago
      Which goes with the very topic of Christopher Nolan's movie Inception (2010, with Leonardo DiCaprio et al)
    - loudmax 3y ago
      Playing around with Stable Diffusion yields a lot of images that are kind of dream-like. The pictures can be fascinating, but a lot of the details are weird or inconsistent, or somehow "off". I suspect this isn't a coincidence. Neural nets are modeled after organic brains, and the mechanism that produces our dreams may have similarities with the noise generation functions in AI image models.
VaiDeN 3y ago
Some people feel threatened by AI because it makes their skills or creations seem outdated, and they blame AI for their problems. They see AI as the enemy. It's hard for them to accept, but AI is here to stay. Eventually, they will have to come to terms with it. Once they let go of their pride and stop focusing on the wrong things, everyone will realize the incredible benefits AI can offer humanity. It's worrisome that some individuals would rather hold onto their own importance than embrace the potential of AI to help everyone. This mindset is unfortunate.
- dmreedy 3y ago
  You've begun the conversation, but what is the next step? You've identified that people feel threatened. Why do you think that is? It strikes me that pride is rarely a defensive response. What are the things they should be focusing on? In a system defined by one's ability to capitalize on one's individual importance, what less unfortunate mindset should be taken?
  - Simon321 3y ago
    You've answered your own question: Change the system. If we get too good at automating jobs there should be a social safety net so we can all enjoy the fruits of AI.
    - dmreedy 3y ago
      I guess my attempts at leading the conversation where I wanted it to go were not as subtle as I had hoped. I absolutely agree the system is in dire need of some attention. I think a lot of the reaction you see around this new iteration of technology comes from people who worry that that attention will not be given. People who suddenly feel as insecure as all the other people in history left behind by growing automation. It's less pride, and more fear. And I don't feel like it's unjustified fear, given our track record.
  - VaiDeN 3y ago
    Some people have an unfortunate mindset of wanting to shut down AI systems because they feel their art or job is threatened. However, I believe that the benefits of AI for society far outweigh these individual concerns. We must acknowledge that there may be issues with companies preferring AI over human employees, leading to potential unemployment. But, businesses wouldn't benefit from having poorer consumers, so it doesn't make sense to increase productivity at the cost of consumer power. Society must adapt to allow AI technologies to flourish and relieve humans of mundane tasks. We should identify tasks that only humans should manage, differentiate between human-made art and AI-generated art without banning generative processes, and find a way for everything to work together. AI can even help in building a new society based on these principles, possibly leading us towards a resource-based economy where money becomes less important.
unethical_ban 3y ago
Let me get my broken record out to say that "trust" in certain institutions, as well as cryptographic signing, will become even more indispensable over time. Webs of trust where items and documents are signed by trusted organizations to be authentic/unaltered, since we won't be able to trust our eyes or ears.
- ChatGTP 3y ago
  How will you know the crypto hasn't been broken by "AI"?
  - chpatrick 3y ago
    I think at that point we'll be well and truly screwed.
    - ChatGTP 3y ago
      But what I'm confused about is that we're supposed to be using AI to do, cancer research, solve all diseases and the mysteries of the universe, but some how cryptographically signed photos are out out the question?
      - chpatrick 3y ago
        I mean if we're at the point where an AI has cryptographic knowledge unknown to humanity and is using it maliciously, verified images will be the least of our problems.
      - unethical_ban 3y ago
        What do you mean? I don't argue that it will be impossible in the long term. Right now, though, AI doesn't seem to be able to solve fundamental new problems - only to see patterns that humans can't yet see. I don't know if it is yet expected for AI to do fundamental new research on algorithms. I also don't think the person above you suggested it's not possible - but their point stands, AI is going to really fuck society up if there is literally no way to communicate further than seeing/hearing distance between humans without knowing if the message is genuine. We'll have solved cancer and reverted to the 1700s.
quartz 3y ago
We've been living in the (golden age?) of crowdsourced information for a while now. AI-generated content at scale (especially if it has marketing dollars behind it trying to influence future models) may well cause a resurgence of curated / authenticated information services.
- whatwhaaaaat 3y ago
  We didn’t stop trusting “authenticated sources” because of “crowdsourced information”. We stopped trusting “authenticated sources” because they constantly lie to fit whatever agenda is being pushed. I can say with certainty that genie is not going back in the bottle no matter how much censoring websites past their prime implement.
  - coolbreezetft22 3y ago
    eyeroll I read the economist on a weekly basis and can confidently say that that form of curated professional journalism is much better than random partisans on twitter loudly shouting about everything
    - bugglebeetle 3y ago
      This is somewhat hilarious because the Economist is famous for its unsigned articles and IIRC lacks citations, such that you have no way to verify whether the person writing them has any expertise in whatever they’re spouting off about. It’s effectively a middle-brow subreddit in print.
      - LordDragonfang 3y ago
        While I agree that the Economist is infamous for having the occasional-to-frequent terrible take under a common pseudonym, I think you're wildly overselling the quality of most mid-brow subreddits (Or have a definition of "middle brow" that only includes the top 90th percentile).
        3y ago
xchip 3y ago
We'll make a note on that.
lofaszvanitt 3y ago
This can be easily fixed by camera creators.
- peteradio 3y ago
  How?
  - mmoskal 3y ago
    Digital signatures on photos, with each camera certificate signed by the manufacturer. Not sure why they don't do it at scale yet.
    - falcolas 3y ago
      Given how much AI processing is done to images on-camera (well, on-phone more often) these days, I'm not sure this could provide valid "proof of genuineness". For an example of on-phone manipulation, search for the Samsung moon incident.
    - soco 3y ago
      And then comes Google Photos and applies a filter, goodbye signature (in this case, the phone's). Or I have an old-fashioned film camera... I guess this idea would work only with DSLRs, which aren't that popular anymore nowadays thus we won't solve that much of the original problem.
      - rickdeckard 3y ago
        It wouldn't even work with DSLRs, as barely any image taken is used without tuning parameters or retouching. If a digital signature would stay valid after retouching, there's no value in having it in the first place. If the picture would be re-signed on editing, what's the purpose of that signature...?
        lofaszvanitt 3y ago
        You need to have the original raw. Who cares what some mongrel does to your photo in a basement?
Zetobal 3y ago
I am tired reading shitty click bait articles from people that don't work in the field but believe they know what will destroy it. AI is tiresome not because of AI but because of attention grifters.
- Jeff_Brown 3y ago
  Anticipating the social consequences of a technology only requires understanding what that technology is capable of, not how it works. This author understands, correctly, that AI can generate realistic looking images and realistic sounding bullshit very cheaply. At that point, expertise in the social science becomes more relevant than expertise in engineering.
  - vorticalbox 3y ago
    [flagged]
    - Jeff_Brown 3y ago
      GPT makes a fair point. Engineering expertise is certainly necessary to anticipate what future capabilities will arise. But none is needed to anticipate the social effects of a capability once you know the capability already exists.
- masswerk 3y ago
  > Shane Balkowitsch is a wet plate collodion photographer. (…) His life’s work is “Northern Plains Native Americans: A Modern Wet Plate Perspective” a journey to capture 1,000 Native Americans in the present day in the historic process. > Herbert Ascherman (b. 1947) is Cleveland, Ohio’s, most prominent portrait photographer. (…) Herb has a library of 2,385 books on photography. (…) Throughout his career, Herb has lectured to more than 350 organizations internationally. He has exhibited in more than 150 venues throughout the US, Europe, India, Australia and Japan. They may not be from your domain, but they are experts in what the article is about.
  - 3y ago
ekianjo 3y ago
It seems that the author is not aware that previous pictures were also used as propaganda tools...
motohagiography 3y ago
If you use these artifacts of models encompass everyone in a single ahistoric present narrative where they no longer believe anything because the images and stories they hear are filtered through a fear of being misled, you have reduced them to captives, or something lower and much worse. Destroying history wasn't unique to the 20th century either. From burning the library at Alexandria to the Church's destruction of mesoamerican culture, it's a common tactic of dominion. The march of that ideology through Russia and Asia was designed to erase the history and identity of those people as a means to subjugate them as well, so while AI is a powerful technology, this is nobody's first rodeo. The antidote to the AI/simulation/mental prison problem is the same as it ever was. Perhaps even with higher quality reasoning now that we can see the sophistication of something that is just a material language model. It is a material artifact, not alive or conscious, and whose products are simulacra. Even with access to all our data, what can an AI know of the experience of a being that created it, and what would it mean for our own ontology if we incorporated this knowledge as an analogy for our own experience? That said, after I read some philosophy and religion, and some of this AI safety and simulation hypothesis stuff, I almost became a vegetarian because it wasn't so much the cruelty of eating veal I could no longer bear, but the irony.
cdumler 3y ago
No. History was never about a single artifact. Any item considered primary needs to be taken in context. What is the physical substrate used? Who was the author? What other items like it were produced? What other literature was written in the time? What were the social/political views at the time of the recording? What other artifacts corroborate this source? Etc. What it will do is continue to provide fuel for confirmation bias. What we, as humans, will have to figure out from here on out is how define and deal with constructed information. Currently, the chaos being generated is too valuable to small, but significant, group of political activists; however, I suspect Gen Z will eventually have the power to require restrictions (a la food labels) and penalties for using unsubstantiated information. The days of using the Internet as a general information source is coming to an end. There will be value in curated data sets again, like we used to have with Encyclopedias.
- masswerk 3y ago
  > There will be value in curated data sets again, like we used to have with Encyclopedias. The problem being, we destroyed all the infrastructure around this and it will be hard to rebuild, lacking any underlying economy in the first place.
flybrand 3y ago
AI imagery destroys our pre-conceived notions about the rigid nature of history. It enables us to question the concept of history as we’ve been taught.
- tivert 3y ago
  > AI imagery destroys our pre-conceived notions about the rigid nature of history. It enables us to question the concept of history as we’ve been taught. Say what now?
- greenhearth 3y ago
  Kind of like dragons destroy our notion of biology and natural selection, you mean.
- fullshark 3y ago
  I'm open to the idea that history does involve narrative spinning, and frequently facts arrive not from primary sources but inferences from said primary sources and can be incorrect. With that said this is about completely fabricated facts/evidence. Pretty different. Imagine a future where AI generated fake moon landing photos outnumber genuine photos and large swathes of the internet population believe with certainty the moon landing was faked as a result.
azubinski 3y ago
Who manipulates the past in the eyes of the masses controls the future of these masses. So it has always been and so it will be. Only now it's much easier. And nothing else happened for the most part. Just another new technique for "hyper retouching" and fake reality generating. Authentication and stuff won't help because it's a mass "unique product" for mass consumption, no matter how strange it sounds.
jxy 3y ago
Well, just like Printing press had destroyed history, religion, culture, literature, and etc. Radio had destroyed music industry. Cassette player had destroyed music industry the second time. Internet had destroyed music industry the third time. ...
- ipaddr 3y ago
  Internet killed the video store.
  - beebeepka 3y ago
    Even Randy Marsh would agree to this
- carlosjobim 3y ago
  I will argue that mass media (print and broadcast) has been the most devastating force against culture in the world. You could count preaching in this category, as in the past the broadcast was a person traveling to spread a message and then a weekly church broadcast. People used to have different customs and culture in different towns and regions. What are today's nation states used to be a rich conglomerate of different people. But countless oral traditions and stories were lost forever, or altered permanently as monotheistic culture gobbled them up. When radio later came about, mass media became a tool of total control, and almost instantly the world was thrown into war and upheavals, as those who mastered the new medium could play the masses. The same with TV as a propaganda tool. Those nation states that destroyed the tribes and took in them are now themselves getting quickly destroyed by a global monoculture. Sure, there will be some traces left of the old, but a lot is lost every day.
mattlondon 3y ago
Meh - I don't know. At least in the UK, "History" classes at school were less about memorising the facts, and more about questioning the who, what, why of some source of information. One thing that stands out in my memory is multiple different teachers always drilling into us: "never trust photos" (you don't always know who took them, for what reason, and if they were real or staged or whatever) If 12 year old kids are being taught this, I don't think future historians will be fooled by a pretty photo. It is not like people have been unable to generate imagery of non-true stuff before - CGI in films (and also games for that matter) have been pretty close to 100% realistic for some time ... no one is complaining that future historians are going to confuse the scenes from The Matrix about what really happened in the 1990s. The barrier to entry is lower now of course, but I don't think that changes the position: you cant trust a photo.
- ericd 3y ago
  Your history classes sound a lot more useful than the ones I sat through in the US - ours was mostly delivered as a set of settled fact.
  - hospitalJail 3y ago
    There is a local school that is dedicating 90 minutes to math and 90 minutes to english. Splitting science and history to a mere 45 minutes each. I completely support this. Science prior to college was basically a waste. History was full of bias and axes to grind. Don't get me wrong, teach these subjects, the scientific method is great. However, the value is low compared to the tools given in Math and English.
    - Aeolun 3y ago
      What tools are you given in English? And how many of the tools in Maths are you still using? Like, I’m very happy that I got to learn probability theory, but all the differential equations that broke my mind seem entirely pointless now.
      - 3y ago
lxe 3y ago
I didn't read the article solely because of the headline. Any statement like this made about any new tech development is automatically false.
- electrondood 3y ago
  Funny, I feel the same about blanket generalizations.
bell-cot 3y ago
BS. Fake history is far older than "my brother knocked over the pot and broke it!".
PicassoCTs 3y ago
But history is already pre destroyed? Roman emperors rewriting there predecessors into monsters, empires spewing nonsense to justify atrocities, the little lies the powerful on all ladder steps of societies tell themselves. Thats why historians have to be such detectives and goto sources who will not lie, like graveyards, drill cores and ancient cesspools. Cause the (re)written word, is almost always of no value when getting to the truth.
Balgair 3y ago
Related: Peter Jackson's They Shall Not Grow Old [0] is a great counterpoint to the general idea put forth here. If you've not seen it, do yourself and ANZAC Day treat and watch it this evening. It's from just before all this AI stuff went off. Jackson (of LoTR fame) is a huge WWI buff and was approached by the Imperial War Museum and the BBC for this film. He takes old archival footage and then uses a lot of computer massaging and hard work to 'update' the old footage. It really gives a good feeling of the life of a Brittish solider in the first war. He puts the camera speed at modern fps, he colorizes the black and white, he puts sound in, de-jitters it, etc. I managed to see it in theaters, and the moment when it goes from black and white to color is just amazing. The whole audience just gasped. Really. These boys jumping around, walking like penguins, grainy and burned, silent, on the old archives, they become people, real people again. I'm not watching a 'historical' thingy in school anymore, I'm watching a real boy march along in the toxic sludge of Passchendaele, staring at this new fangled camera thing. That feeling, that moment, anchored to the horrible reality of the footage, but made better and somehow more real, that is what AI can give us on a mass scale for all this old evidence. Jackson's hard work paved the way to treat this new genre of lovingly updated historical footage. AI will take it all the way. Really, this ANZAC Day, go watch it [1]. You will not regret it. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/They_Shall_Not_Grow_Old https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/They_Shall_Not_Grow_Old [1] https://www.amazon.com/They-Shall-Not-Grow-Old/dp/B07PMNNGVH https://www.amazon.com/They-Shall-Not-Grow-Old/dp/B07PMNNGVH
- hospitalJail 3y ago
  I'm with you. Black and white footage feels fake. The colored stuff was mind boggling. The worst part was that the footage was taken during mostly peaceful moments and re-enactments for obvious reasons. The stuff in Ukraine on head mounted cameras is something that has surpassed all.
  - Balgair 3y ago
    Yeah, I'm waiting for film makers, like Werner Hertzog, to take all the Ukraine footage to the cinema. 'Cleaning' it up to get past the artifacts and jitter and confusion to a real message. Editing all those hours of gopro will be massively helped by AI, I think.
jasfi 3y ago
Rewriting could be worse. I hope there are safeguards against that, but then misinformation is already trying to do that.
- dclowd9901 3y ago
  Reminds me of the plot line of Metal Gear Solid 2. It seemed so goofy and far fetched at the time: a machine with ubiquitous access to digital information capable of rewriting history and news such that it controls the narrative. Yet we see examples of informational and societal manipulation all over now. Kojima might have been about out there on the details, but on the general thesis, he was dead on.
m3kw9 3y ago
Is there really an incentive for people do that? I mean the effort it takes would need to be more than a few joes pumping out “George Washington in a hoodie” photos and to also drowning out all literature that was before it
seydor 3y ago
... the same way fiction did.
hospitalJail 3y ago
On the flip side, I'd really like to see AI make pictures of historical things that were only written about in detail. It will forever be impossible to see these, but these would be a chance to make historical moments feel real. Its too easy to forget there were real people living through them.
- fullshark 3y ago
  A lot of our conceptions of various historical events are based on artistic interpretations and maybe this will happen at a larger scale. I.e what do you think Washington crossing the Delaware or the Last Supper looked like?
Animats 3y ago
This is not a historian. It's some guy who's into wet-plate photography. His style can now be easily replicated. His wet-plate work is now just an unimportant hobby.
- stephencoyner 3y ago
  I never thought of hobbies as having importance to the outside world. I think the whole point is that it brings you joy and can take your mind off of other things. Not every aspect of life is competition.
- mym1990 3y ago
  So as everyone's photographic style becomes easily replicated, that means all of photography will become an unimportant hobby?
  - confoundcofound 3y ago
    Maybe it does mean that. I'm really looking forward to the great humbling that AI will bring artists who for some reason feel their craft is sacred and thereby should be gatekept and protected. Don't get me wrong, I love art and think it's important. But so is medicine and plumbing.
    - Animats 3y ago
      That happened to musicians years ago. "Laptop bands" were once a joke, and now they're normal. Celebrity DJs now get more attention than most musicians, and most of what DJs now do is semi-automated. This annoys lower-tier boomer musicians, for whom Being In A Band was a big deal. That died when there were several million bands listed on Myspace.
    - mym1990 3y ago
      I haven't met many artists who think that way, if anything, they work extremely hard for almost nothing at all(although that has often been the case through history). Almost no one goes into the arts to make money, some do happen to find it. But the arts evoke a very human part of ourselves, and when that is replaced with unending generated content by a computer, have fun living in a society exclusively consisting of corporate drones and homeless people.
CamperBob2 3y ago
A.I. has quickly become part of our digital history but at an enormous emotional and commercial cost to those who still prize the individualism and creativity of image-making. Did you call the police when the AI researchers broke into your studio and stole your camera? No? Well, the cost must not have been that enormous, then. Really getting tired of all the whining from the "artists" among us. Whining is boring. Come up with something new. You're an artist; that's your job.
Aeolun 3y ago
> history, itself, will become unalterably altered Is ‘unalterably altered’ not a contradiction? Or does it just mean there’s no way back?
- awb 3y ago
  They mean no way back. Photos have been staged / forged for a long time. The big difference is the ability for AI to create fake photos in seconds which could inundate future historians unless there was an equally quick way to spot a fake photo.
jwfergus 3y ago
Maybe a crypto person would know more, but couldn't some DAO be incentivized to verify the authenticity of current known historical documents/images and create a block chain of agreed upon authentic historical imagery? The longer it takes for us to do that, maybe the more likely falsifications can slip in, but I have a feeling that the real world nature of many history books and libraries means we can have a pretty strong head start.
- aketchum 3y ago
  you still have the issue of "junk in, junk out". Being on a block chain does absolutely nothing to ensure that the information on the chain is correct. There isn't really any reason to use a DAO for this vs a standard database.
- tdaltonc 3y ago
  As a crypto person, I don't think a DAO would really add anything here. Individuals or traditional organization "signing" their endorsements of contents authenticity will become a bigger thing in the future. It's not that different from SSL. When you access a website using modern cryptography the content is effectively endorsed by that organization as authentic.
stared 3y ago
It is good I saw photos of platypuses before Stable Diffusion.
spaceman_2020 3y ago
I mean outside of the two World Wars, practically all the history I was taught in high school was pre photography. Surely you’re not going to be fooled by a photograph of Julius Caesar.
akagusu 3y ago
AI will destroy every field it's applied. People are smart enough to know it but nobody wants to admit it, so every time an article like this pops up somewhere, you can see how much people are in denial because everybody tries to minimize the impacts of AI

104 points by dxs 3y ago

Faking images to try and change history is as old as Stalin: https://www.history.com/news/josef-stalin-great-purge-photo-retouching https://www.history.com/news/josef-stalin-great-purge-photo-...

routerl 3y ago
No, it's way, way older. As in "Hapsburg portraits" and "Ming Dynasty scrolls" old. And let's not forget the last time a technology came around that could "fool history"; how many people still believe the moon landing was shot on a sound stage? The notion that historians only care about images, without caring about their provenance, is absurd.
- pacija 3y ago
  I don't know how many, but I know I do.
eukara 3y ago
That's like comparing horse and carriage to a modern day truck though, no? This can be fully automated, generating photoreal content on its own. You couldn't airbrush a photo via a cron job like how you can now automate some model generating thousands of images of people rioting/looting for authoritarian purposes. Who will go through the effort of verifying every one of them? Other language models with precision issues?
- ModernMech 3y ago
  > You couldn't airbrush a photo via a cron job like how you can now automate some model generating thousands of images of people rioting/looting for authoritarian purposes. I get how this could be a problem, but it seems to me that it would only be marginally effective instead of exponentially as some assume. The reason I think this is because we already have this kind of thing going on without AI [1]. And while it does work, it's not clear to me if making the fake more realistic actually does anything for the kind of people who get worked up about this. If you want to claim Seattle is burning and it's not, just grab a picture of another place burning, and you're good. Narrative achieved. If you can pass as authentic a photo from a different place taken at a different time, then what does it matter if you can generate a new one? Are you going to trick more people? Maybe. But I have a feeling the people who are most likely to get tricked, would have been tricked by far more mundane fraud. [1] https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/fox-news-alters-protest-images-video-again-1014675/ https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/fox-news...
  - hasanas 3y ago
    People aren’t divided into “most likely to be tricked” and “least likely to be tricked”. When you generate “photos” of Big Ben burning and throw it on Twitter, you will grab the attention of many more Londoners than you could with a random image of a burning house or whatever, many of which would at least take the time to verify. Just look at the Balenciaga Pope images. By grabbing the attention of those you are essentially stepping into the realms of “historical alternations”.
masswerk 3y ago
But you recognize the difference in economic costs of forgery – and thus the probability of this happening?
tivert 3y ago
> Faking images to try and change history is as old as Stalin: https://www.history.com/news/josef-stalin-great-purge-photo-retouching https://www.history.com/news/josef-stalin-great-purge-photo-... Maybe so, but up until now forging photographs was far, far more expensive than creating real ones. It won't be too long now until someone will be able to generate in a weekend a convincing self-consistent alternate-history series of Wikipedia articles about the second term of the Trump presidency... and stuff like that's going to fill up the historical databank of the colony ship that the last humans use to flee the dying Earth.

JKCalhoun 3y ago

> The hands are often a tell-tale sign of the incompetence of an A.I. program. Curiously prescient: it was the hands of the robots in the original film, Westworld (1973), that were a tell-tale sign that they were not living.

foob 3y ago
There's also a technique for lucid dreaming where you make a point to look carefully at your hands throughout the day until it becomes an unconscious habit. The idea is that they won't look quite right in a dream, and you'll therefore realize that you're dreaming. I wonder if there's any particular significance to hands beyond them being conveniently accessible, or if any similar ritual would work as long as the individual believed that it would. In other words, are hands inaccurately constructed in dreams without people noticing unless they're specifically looking for it, or does the lucid dreaming technique cause the distortions because the dreamer is expecting them?
- tokai 3y ago
  Any similar ritual works. The dreaming brain is super bad at consistency. If you know something really well, like looking at your hands, wristwatch, or something else. You'll see obvious distortions and other weirdness while dreaming. I think the distortions are always there. We are just not in a state of mind where details matters when dreaming.
  - soco 3y ago
    Which goes with the very topic of Christopher Nolan's movie Inception (2010, with Leonardo DiCaprio et al)
  - loudmax 3y ago
    Playing around with Stable Diffusion yields a lot of images that are kind of dream-like. The pictures can be fascinating, but a lot of the details are weird or inconsistent, or somehow "off". I suspect this isn't a coincidence. Neural nets are modeled after organic brains, and the mechanism that produces our dreams may have similarities with the noise generation functions in AI image models.

VaiDeN 3y ago

Some people feel threatened by AI because it makes their skills or creations seem outdated, and they blame AI for their problems. They see AI as the enemy. It's hard for them to accept, but AI is here to stay. Eventually, they will have to come to terms with it. Once they let go of their pride and stop focusing on the wrong things, everyone will realize the incredible benefits AI can offer humanity. It's worrisome that some individuals would rather hold onto their own importance than embrace the potential of AI to help everyone. This mindset is unfortunate.

dmreedy 3y ago
You've begun the conversation, but what is the next step? You've identified that people feel threatened. Why do you think that is? It strikes me that pride is rarely a defensive response. What are the things they should be focusing on? In a system defined by one's ability to capitalize on one's individual importance, what less unfortunate mindset should be taken?
- Simon321 3y ago
  You've answered your own question: Change the system. If we get too good at automating jobs there should be a social safety net so we can all enjoy the fruits of AI.
  - dmreedy 3y ago
    I guess my attempts at leading the conversation where I wanted it to go were not as subtle as I had hoped. I absolutely agree the system is in dire need of some attention. I think a lot of the reaction you see around this new iteration of technology comes from people who worry that that attention will not be given. People who suddenly feel as insecure as all the other people in history left behind by growing automation. It's less pride, and more fear. And I don't feel like it's unjustified fear, given our track record.
- VaiDeN 3y ago
  Some people have an unfortunate mindset of wanting to shut down AI systems because they feel their art or job is threatened. However, I believe that the benefits of AI for society far outweigh these individual concerns. We must acknowledge that there may be issues with companies preferring AI over human employees, leading to potential unemployment. But, businesses wouldn't benefit from having poorer consumers, so it doesn't make sense to increase productivity at the cost of consumer power. Society must adapt to allow AI technologies to flourish and relieve humans of mundane tasks. We should identify tasks that only humans should manage, differentiate between human-made art and AI-generated art without banning generative processes, and find a way for everything to work together. AI can even help in building a new society based on these principles, possibly leading us towards a resource-based economy where money becomes less important.

unethical_ban 3y ago

Let me get my broken record out to say that "trust" in certain institutions, as well as cryptographic signing, will become even more indispensable over time. Webs of trust where items and documents are signed by trusted organizations to be authentic/unaltered, since we won't be able to trust our eyes or ears.

ChatGTP 3y ago
How will you know the crypto hasn't been broken by "AI"?
- chpatrick 3y ago
  I think at that point we'll be well and truly screwed.
  - ChatGTP 3y ago
    But what I'm confused about is that we're supposed to be using AI to do, cancer research, solve all diseases and the mysteries of the universe, but some how cryptographically signed photos are out out the question?
    - chpatrick 3y ago
      I mean if we're at the point where an AI has cryptographic knowledge unknown to humanity and is using it maliciously, verified images will be the least of our problems.
    - unethical_ban 3y ago
      What do you mean? I don't argue that it will be impossible in the long term. Right now, though, AI doesn't seem to be able to solve fundamental new problems - only to see patterns that humans can't yet see. I don't know if it is yet expected for AI to do fundamental new research on algorithms. I also don't think the person above you suggested it's not possible - but their point stands, AI is going to really fuck society up if there is literally no way to communicate further than seeing/hearing distance between humans without knowing if the message is genuine. We'll have solved cancer and reverted to the 1700s.

quartz 3y ago

We've been living in the (golden age?) of crowdsourced information for a while now. AI-generated content at scale (especially if it has marketing dollars behind it trying to influence future models) may well cause a resurgence of curated / authenticated information services.

whatwhaaaaat 3y ago
We didn’t stop trusting “authenticated sources” because of “crowdsourced information”. We stopped trusting “authenticated sources” because they constantly lie to fit whatever agenda is being pushed. I can say with certainty that genie is not going back in the bottle no matter how much censoring websites past their prime implement.
- coolbreezetft22 3y ago
  eyeroll I read the economist on a weekly basis and can confidently say that that form of curated professional journalism is much better than random partisans on twitter loudly shouting about everything
  - bugglebeetle 3y ago
    This is somewhat hilarious because the Economist is famous for its unsigned articles and IIRC lacks citations, such that you have no way to verify whether the person writing them has any expertise in whatever they’re spouting off about. It’s effectively a middle-brow subreddit in print.
    - LordDragonfang 3y ago
      While I agree that the Economist is infamous for having the occasional-to-frequent terrible take under a common pseudonym, I think you're wildly overselling the quality of most mid-brow subreddits (Or have a definition of "middle brow" that only includes the top 90th percentile).
      - 3y ago

xchip 3y ago

We'll make a note on that.

lofaszvanitt 3y ago

This can be easily fixed by camera creators.

peteradio 3y ago
How?
- mmoskal 3y ago
  Digital signatures on photos, with each camera certificate signed by the manufacturer. Not sure why they don't do it at scale yet.
  - falcolas 3y ago
    Given how much AI processing is done to images on-camera (well, on-phone more often) these days, I'm not sure this could provide valid "proof of genuineness". For an example of on-phone manipulation, search for the Samsung moon incident.
  - soco 3y ago
    And then comes Google Photos and applies a filter, goodbye signature (in this case, the phone's). Or I have an old-fashioned film camera... I guess this idea would work only with DSLRs, which aren't that popular anymore nowadays thus we won't solve that much of the original problem.
    - rickdeckard 3y ago
      It wouldn't even work with DSLRs, as barely any image taken is used without tuning parameters or retouching. If a digital signature would stay valid after retouching, there's no value in having it in the first place. If the picture would be re-signed on editing, what's the purpose of that signature...?
      - lofaszvanitt 3y ago
        You need to have the original raw. Who cares what some mongrel does to your photo in a basement?

Zetobal 3y ago

I am tired reading shitty click bait articles from people that don't work in the field but believe they know what will destroy it. AI is tiresome not because of AI but because of attention grifters.

Jeff_Brown 3y ago
Anticipating the social consequences of a technology only requires understanding what that technology is capable of, not how it works. This author understands, correctly, that AI can generate realistic looking images and realistic sounding bullshit very cheaply. At that point, expertise in the social science becomes more relevant than expertise in engineering.
- vorticalbox 3y ago
  [flagged]
  - Jeff_Brown 3y ago
    GPT makes a fair point. Engineering expertise is certainly necessary to anticipate what future capabilities will arise. But none is needed to anticipate the social effects of a capability once you know the capability already exists.
masswerk 3y ago
> Shane Balkowitsch is a wet plate collodion photographer. (…) His life’s work is “Northern Plains Native Americans: A Modern Wet Plate Perspective” a journey to capture 1,000 Native Americans in the present day in the historic process. > Herbert Ascherman (b. 1947) is Cleveland, Ohio’s, most prominent portrait photographer. (…) Herb has a library of 2,385 books on photography. (…) Throughout his career, Herb has lectured to more than 350 organizations internationally. He has exhibited in more than 150 venues throughout the US, Europe, India, Australia and Japan. They may not be from your domain, but they are experts in what the article is about.
- 3y ago

ekianjo 3y ago

It seems that the author is not aware that previous pictures were also used as propaganda tools...

motohagiography 3y ago

If you use these artifacts of models encompass everyone in a single ahistoric present narrative where they no longer believe anything because the images and stories they hear are filtered through a fear of being misled, you have reduced them to captives, or something lower and much worse. Destroying history wasn't unique to the 20th century either. From burning the library at Alexandria to the Church's destruction of mesoamerican culture, it's a common tactic of dominion. The march of that ideology through Russia and Asia was designed to erase the history and identity of those people as a means to subjugate them as well, so while AI is a powerful technology, this is nobody's first rodeo. The antidote to the AI/simulation/mental prison problem is the same as it ever was. Perhaps even with higher quality reasoning now that we can see the sophistication of something that is just a material language model. It is a material artifact, not alive or conscious, and whose products are simulacra. Even with access to all our data, what can an AI know of the experience of a being that created it, and what would it mean for our own ontology if we incorporated this knowledge as an analogy for our own experience? That said, after I read some philosophy and religion, and some of this AI safety and simulation hypothesis stuff, I almost became a vegetarian because it wasn't so much the cruelty of eating veal I could no longer bear, but the irony.

cdumler 3y ago

No. History was never about a single artifact. Any item considered primary needs to be taken in context. What is the physical substrate used? Who was the author? What other items like it were produced? What other literature was written in the time? What were the social/political views at the time of the recording? What other artifacts corroborate this source? Etc. What it will do is continue to provide fuel for confirmation bias. What we, as humans, will have to figure out from here on out is how define and deal with constructed information. Currently, the chaos being generated is too valuable to small, but significant, group of political activists; however, I suspect Gen Z will eventually have the power to require restrictions (a la food labels) and penalties for using unsubstantiated information. The days of using the Internet as a general information source is coming to an end. There will be value in curated data sets again, like we used to have with Encyclopedias.

masswerk 3y ago
> There will be value in curated data sets again, like we used to have with Encyclopedias. The problem being, we destroyed all the infrastructure around this and it will be hard to rebuild, lacking any underlying economy in the first place.

flybrand 3y ago

AI imagery destroys our pre-conceived notions about the rigid nature of history. It enables us to question the concept of history as we’ve been taught.

tivert 3y ago
> AI imagery destroys our pre-conceived notions about the rigid nature of history. It enables us to question the concept of history as we’ve been taught. Say what now?
greenhearth 3y ago
Kind of like dragons destroy our notion of biology and natural selection, you mean.
fullshark 3y ago
I'm open to the idea that history does involve narrative spinning, and frequently facts arrive not from primary sources but inferences from said primary sources and can be incorrect. With that said this is about completely fabricated facts/evidence. Pretty different. Imagine a future where AI generated fake moon landing photos outnumber genuine photos and large swathes of the internet population believe with certainty the moon landing was faked as a result.

azubinski 3y ago

Who manipulates the past in the eyes of the masses controls the future of these masses. So it has always been and so it will be. Only now it's much easier. And nothing else happened for the most part. Just another new technique for "hyper retouching" and fake reality generating. Authentication and stuff won't help because it's a mass "unique product" for mass consumption, no matter how strange it sounds.

jxy 3y ago

Well, just like Printing press had destroyed history, religion, culture, literature, and etc. Radio had destroyed music industry. Cassette player had destroyed music industry the second time. Internet had destroyed music industry the third time. ...

ipaddr 3y ago
Internet killed the video store.
- beebeepka 3y ago
  Even Randy Marsh would agree to this
carlosjobim 3y ago
I will argue that mass media (print and broadcast) has been the most devastating force against culture in the world. You could count preaching in this category, as in the past the broadcast was a person traveling to spread a message and then a weekly church broadcast. People used to have different customs and culture in different towns and regions. What are today's nation states used to be a rich conglomerate of different people. But countless oral traditions and stories were lost forever, or altered permanently as monotheistic culture gobbled them up. When radio later came about, mass media became a tool of total control, and almost instantly the world was thrown into war and upheavals, as those who mastered the new medium could play the masses. The same with TV as a propaganda tool. Those nation states that destroyed the tribes and took in them are now themselves getting quickly destroyed by a global monoculture. Sure, there will be some traces left of the old, but a lot is lost every day.

mattlondon 3y ago

Meh - I don't know. At least in the UK, "History" classes at school were less about memorising the facts, and more about questioning the who, what, why of some source of information. One thing that stands out in my memory is multiple different teachers always drilling into us: "never trust photos" (you don't always know who took them, for what reason, and if they were real or staged or whatever) If 12 year old kids are being taught this, I don't think future historians will be fooled by a pretty photo. It is not like people have been unable to generate imagery of non-true stuff before - CGI in films (and also games for that matter) have been pretty close to 100% realistic for some time ... no one is complaining that future historians are going to confuse the scenes from The Matrix about what really happened in the 1990s. The barrier to entry is lower now of course, but I don't think that changes the position: you cant trust a photo.

ericd 3y ago
Your history classes sound a lot more useful than the ones I sat through in the US - ours was mostly delivered as a set of settled fact.
- hospitalJail 3y ago
  There is a local school that is dedicating 90 minutes to math and 90 minutes to english. Splitting science and history to a mere 45 minutes each. I completely support this. Science prior to college was basically a waste. History was full of bias and axes to grind. Don't get me wrong, teach these subjects, the scientific method is great. However, the value is low compared to the tools given in Math and English.
  - Aeolun 3y ago
    What tools are you given in English? And how many of the tools in Maths are you still using? Like, I’m very happy that I got to learn probability theory, but all the differential equations that broke my mind seem entirely pointless now.
    - 3y ago

lxe 3y ago

I didn't read the article solely because of the headline. Any statement like this made about any new tech development is automatically false.

electrondood 3y ago
Funny, I feel the same about blanket generalizations.

bell-cot 3y ago

BS. Fake history is far older than "my brother knocked over the pot and broke it!".

PicassoCTs 3y ago

But history is already pre destroyed? Roman emperors rewriting there predecessors into monsters, empires spewing nonsense to justify atrocities, the little lies the powerful on all ladder steps of societies tell themselves. Thats why historians have to be such detectives and goto sources who will not lie, like graveyards, drill cores and ancient cesspools. Cause the (re)written word, is almost always of no value when getting to the truth.

Balgair 3y ago

Related: Peter Jackson's They Shall Not Grow Old [0] is a great counterpoint to the general idea put forth here. If you've not seen it, do yourself and ANZAC Day treat and watch it this evening. It's from just before all this AI stuff went off. Jackson (of LoTR fame) is a huge WWI buff and was approached by the Imperial War Museum and the BBC for this film. He takes old archival footage and then uses a lot of computer massaging and hard work to 'update' the old footage. It really gives a good feeling of the life of a Brittish solider in the first war. He puts the camera speed at modern fps, he colorizes the black and white, he puts sound in, de-jitters it, etc. I managed to see it in theaters, and the moment when it goes from black and white to color is just amazing. The whole audience just gasped. Really. These boys jumping around, walking like penguins, grainy and burned, silent, on the old archives, they become people, real people again. I'm not watching a 'historical' thingy in school anymore, I'm watching a real boy march along in the toxic sludge of Passchendaele, staring at this new fangled camera thing. That feeling, that moment, anchored to the horrible reality of the footage, but made better and somehow more real, that is what AI can give us on a mass scale for all this old evidence. Jackson's hard work paved the way to treat this new genre of lovingly updated historical footage. AI will take it all the way. Really, this ANZAC Day, go watch it [1]. You will not regret it. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/They_Shall_Not_Grow_Old https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/They_Shall_Not_Grow_Old [1] https://www.amazon.com/They-Shall-Not-Grow-Old/dp/B07PMNNGVH https://www.amazon.com/They-Shall-Not-Grow-Old/dp/B07PMNNGVH

hospitalJail 3y ago
I'm with you. Black and white footage feels fake. The colored stuff was mind boggling. The worst part was that the footage was taken during mostly peaceful moments and re-enactments for obvious reasons. The stuff in Ukraine on head mounted cameras is something that has surpassed all.
- Balgair 3y ago
  Yeah, I'm waiting for film makers, like Werner Hertzog, to take all the Ukraine footage to the cinema. 'Cleaning' it up to get past the artifacts and jitter and confusion to a real message. Editing all those hours of gopro will be massively helped by AI, I think.

jasfi 3y ago

Rewriting could be worse. I hope there are safeguards against that, but then misinformation is already trying to do that.

dclowd9901 3y ago
Reminds me of the plot line of Metal Gear Solid 2. It seemed so goofy and far fetched at the time: a machine with ubiquitous access to digital information capable of rewriting history and news such that it controls the narrative. Yet we see examples of informational and societal manipulation all over now. Kojima might have been about out there on the details, but on the general thesis, he was dead on.

m3kw9 3y ago

Is there really an incentive for people do that? I mean the effort it takes would need to be more than a few joes pumping out “George Washington in a hoodie” photos and to also drowning out all literature that was before it

seydor 3y ago

... the same way fiction did.

hospitalJail 3y ago

On the flip side, I'd really like to see AI make pictures of historical things that were only written about in detail. It will forever be impossible to see these, but these would be a chance to make historical moments feel real. Its too easy to forget there were real people living through them.

fullshark 3y ago
A lot of our conceptions of various historical events are based on artistic interpretations and maybe this will happen at a larger scale. I.e what do you think Washington crossing the Delaware or the Last Supper looked like?

Animats 3y ago

This is not a historian. It's some guy who's into wet-plate photography. His style can now be easily replicated. His wet-plate work is now just an unimportant hobby.

stephencoyner 3y ago
I never thought of hobbies as having importance to the outside world. I think the whole point is that it brings you joy and can take your mind off of other things. Not every aspect of life is competition.
mym1990 3y ago
So as everyone's photographic style becomes easily replicated, that means all of photography will become an unimportant hobby?
- confoundcofound 3y ago
  Maybe it does mean that. I'm really looking forward to the great humbling that AI will bring artists who for some reason feel their craft is sacred and thereby should be gatekept and protected. Don't get me wrong, I love art and think it's important. But so is medicine and plumbing.
  - Animats 3y ago
    That happened to musicians years ago. "Laptop bands" were once a joke, and now they're normal. Celebrity DJs now get more attention than most musicians, and most of what DJs now do is semi-automated. This annoys lower-tier boomer musicians, for whom Being In A Band was a big deal. That died when there were several million bands listed on Myspace.
  - mym1990 3y ago
    I haven't met many artists who think that way, if anything, they work extremely hard for almost nothing at all(although that has often been the case through history). Almost no one goes into the arts to make money, some do happen to find it. But the arts evoke a very human part of ourselves, and when that is replaced with unending generated content by a computer, have fun living in a society exclusively consisting of corporate drones and homeless people.

CamperBob2 3y ago

A.I. has quickly become part of our digital history but at an enormous emotional and commercial cost to those who still prize the individualism and creativity of image-making. Did you call the police when the AI researchers broke into your studio and stole your camera? No? Well, the cost must not have been that enormous, then. Really getting tired of all the whining from the "artists" among us. Whining is boring. Come up with something new. You're an artist; that's your job.

Aeolun 3y ago

> history, itself, will become unalterably altered Is ‘unalterably altered’ not a contradiction? Or does it just mean there’s no way back?

awb 3y ago
They mean no way back. Photos have been staged / forged for a long time. The big difference is the ability for AI to create fake photos in seconds which could inundate future historians unless there was an equally quick way to spot a fake photo.

jwfergus 3y ago

Maybe a crypto person would know more, but couldn't some DAO be incentivized to verify the authenticity of current known historical documents/images and create a block chain of agreed upon authentic historical imagery? The longer it takes for us to do that, maybe the more likely falsifications can slip in, but I have a feeling that the real world nature of many history books and libraries means we can have a pretty strong head start.

aketchum 3y ago
you still have the issue of "junk in, junk out". Being on a block chain does absolutely nothing to ensure that the information on the chain is correct. There isn't really any reason to use a DAO for this vs a standard database.
tdaltonc 3y ago
As a crypto person, I don't think a DAO would really add anything here. Individuals or traditional organization "signing" their endorsements of contents authenticity will become a bigger thing in the future. It's not that different from SSL. When you access a website using modern cryptography the content is effectively endorsed by that organization as authentic.

stared 3y ago

It is good I saw photos of platypuses before Stable Diffusion.

spaceman_2020 3y ago

I mean outside of the two World Wars, practically all the history I was taught in high school was pre photography. Surely you’re not going to be fooled by a photograph of Julius Caesar.

akagusu 3y ago

AI will destroy every field it's applied. People are smart enough to know it but nobody wants to admit it, so every time an article like this pops up somewhere, you can see how much people are in denial because everybody tries to minimize the impacts of AI