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Can we please just skip to 2-5 years from now when image/video generation is so good that it's as easy to fake it as it is to lie in textual form? Most importa
by rcoveson 3y ago
Can we please just skip to 2-5 years from now when image/video generation is so good that it's as easy to fake it as it is to lie in textual form?
Most important information is textual, and there's really nothing at all that binds text to reality. So we have laws about fraud and libel for important matters. Trust is a hard problem! But we're working on it, and images were never much of a solution to it anyway.
Most of the time, we just don't care. Many stories are untrue; explicitly fictional. Some of them are untrue in ways that could emotionally damage others (gossip, insults). That's just a part of social life, to be mitigated socially, not judicially.
Images are going to be just like text. Let's all just embrace that already. You can't lie any more or less with them than you can text, once we all (inevitably) stop trusting them as though they were difficult to fabricate. There's a little turmoil coming, but there's less if we all just decide to get over it now rather than cling desperately to the idea that images are somehow more deeply intertwined with the real world than text is.
- enumjorge 3y agoI get what you're saying, and I do think we should start preparing for a future where images are not something we can trust because I think we'll inevitably get there, but images are different than text. They are information dense and can elicit an emotional reaction much faster than text can. Think of the fake images that showed Trump being violently arrested. Something like that can become viral much more easily than text. As for a world where we all learn to distrust images, I don't think we will fully get there. You still have people falling for email scams that by now are very clearly documented. Even a small percentage of people who are living in a different reality can be problematic for the rest of us.
- mitthrowaway2 3y agoA photo of Trump being violently arrested provokes a reaction because we assume it captures a real scene. A painting or a political cartoon showing the same scene would not, even if it were quite realistically painted. Before the camera was invented, paintings and engravings like that were the best anyone could do to transmit a scene, and now that AI can generate fake photorealistic images, photos will gradually have to be seen the same as a skilled painting. It might capture reality, or it might not.
- majormajor 3y agoTrends that will mitigate harassment done with stuff like this are already underway, but they're mostly ones that run contrary to the original spirit of the internet: * don't accept unsolicited messages or images from people you don't already know * don't leave your corporate-moderated walled garden of choice to search for stuff on the open internet * don't put too trust much into any information distributed primarily online I think these things will all be necessary but they are far more dystopian than the internet that I once hoped for.
- dtech 3y agoI wonder how much of that is innate and how much of that is because we're not used to fake pictures on a scale AI will allow yet
- anigbrowl 3y agoMost of it is innate. We've known photos can be faked for a long time, it was a lesson in my history textbook in high school. We've known that anyone could fake a photo using a computer for a long time too, image editing software got good in the 1990s. And so on. Rationally, we know all this. But biologically, we're wired to react first and think later; our reactions often shape our behavior more than logic. That's one reason that advertising and propaganda work; repetition trumps rationality. Add in the fact that large numbers of people are gullible fools who can be trained to uncritically repeat and spread untruths that appeal to confirmation bias.
- rcoveson 3y agoI disagree. I've known photos could be faked my whole life but I doubt I've ever been presented with a fake photo of somebody I know, and I'm confident nobody has ever faked a photo of me that I've seen. A world where anybody can fake a photo of anybody else with nothing but a laptop and a text prompt is radically different. It's not the abstract knowledge that something is possible that influences our gut reactions, its our experiences. When your friend group chat is chock-full of little jokingly-made fake images of each other, then your behavior of reacting to realistic photos as though they were real will dull and eventually go away entirely.
- mgkimsal 3y ago> and I do think we should start preparing for a future where images are not something we can trust I'm not sure we can entirely 'trust' images/photos anyway right now. Even a 'genuine/undoctored' image, paired with partial/misleading info or outright lies has an impact on what we take from an image anyway.
- tennisflyi 3y agoPretty sure those 2-5 years will never be realized due to Zeno’s paradox.
- IanCal 3y ago> Images are going to be just like text. Let's all just embrace that already. You can't lie any more or less with them than you can text, once we all (inevitably) stop trusting them as though they were difficult to fabricate People trust text and that's clearly written by someone not a snapshot of reality. There's a reason libel is a thing.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]