10 ms·
Fake It 'Til You Fake It
- Animats 3y agoThe article refers to an exhibition of early faked photographs at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2012, sponsored by Adobe.[1] But the article doesn't have any of the pictures. There's a book of the exhibition.[1] The free preview shows enough to give a sense of what the article mentions. [1] https://www.metmuseum.org/press/exhibitions/2012/faking-it https://www.metmuseum.org/press/exhibitions/2012/faking-it [2] https://books.google.com/books?id=nGvTg_HC32YC https://books.google.com/books?id=nGvTg_HC32YC
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- zamfi 3y agoHmm. By this argument, getting ChatGPT to write your college-course essays for you is also "nothing new", given the abundant opportunities for plagiarism that existed before. But I think ease of use matters, in part because trivial (in the sense of "easy" / "taking little time") deceptive acts are easier to justify for otherwise-ethical actors. It's also easier to get into murky waters if step 1 isn't "get my fraud on" but rather "oh what's this new feature?" or "hmm, what would ChatGPT say about Descartes?" Deception is a blurry line, but these are all technological steps that make it easier to approach that line -- and then, perhaps in a thoughtless moment, cross it.
- DeathArrow 3y ago>given the abundant opportunities for plagiarism that existed before. We cannot blame stuff for things people do. You can use a knife to cut your dinner or you can use it to kill someone. The knife and the knife maker are not to blame for your wrong doings. You can choose to lie or not. Don't blame ChatGPT if it is misused by someone. Don't blame Adobe if Photoshop is misused by someone.
- mcmoor 3y agoInterestingly now there are many people who do blame them, like the discourse with gun. It seems like ease of use and scalability really changes the nature of the discussion.
- happyraul 3y agoI think it's fair to consider what the tool is designed to do as well. Generative AI is capable of distorting reality, but I would argue that it is not the primary purpose of the tool. Likewise, knives can be used to kill, but for the most part they are tools made for cutting, not killing. On the other hand, I fail to see a purpose for guns apart from killing, and for some guns such as hand guns, for killing people.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- DeathArrow 3y ago>I fail to see a purpose for guns apart from killing, You can use guns for target shooting, you can use guns as a detterent when your life is in danger, you can use guns for hunting.
- Sebb767 3y ago> I think ease of use matters, in part because trivial (in the sense of "easy" / "taking little time") deceptive acts are easier to justify for otherwise-ethical actors. . On the other hand, the tools to do this have been easily accessible for years. Sure, you had to buy Photoshop and spend 15 minutes on YouTube, but this is not a major hurdle. Having the tools universally available just increases the awareness and makes fraud less likely, as people are more inclined to not blindly trust them.
- nly 3y agoIn my day we used to copy and paste from Encarta and then carefully rephrase it.
- midasuni 3y agoAnd before that we’d copy out of Britannica by hand. No rephrasing to do now though.
- BHSPitMonkey 3y agoUntil now, you would have needed enough disposable income to pay somebody to write comparable essays for you. Now that the option has been sufficiently democratized, we're forced to take more seriously the possibility that someone's work isn't hard-earned and evaluate our opinions of them (and their grades) differently.
- behnamoh 3y agoThe author doesn't take into account his own familiarity with the Photoshop app. For him it took 10 seconds to remove an object from a photo, but do you really think the average Joe is going to spend hours learning Photoshop just so he can remove an object in his photos? I like Google's approach here: let the average Joe benefit from AI by putting object removal tech literally under his finger tips.
- DeathArrow 3y agoAverage Joe with AI tools doesn't stand a chance to a photographer with whatever tools. Knowing how to make a good photography is a skill AI doesn't have. Just by removing something or adding something to it, it doesn't make a bad photo good. If average Joe wants to make good photographs he has a long path of learning and working. I did photography for 9 years now and still I find lots of thing to learn and exercise. I am afraid this process never stops.
- eru 3y ago> Knowing how to make a good photography is a skill AI doesn't have. Just by removing something or adding something to it, it doesn't make a bad photo good. Your second sentence might be true, but that doesn't have any bearing on the first sentence. Why wouldn't AI learn principles of composition, framing and lighting etc?
- jessekv 3y agoAI can and does. Modern phones already ship plenty of AI- driven automatic adjustments. Not always for the better, of course. To me, what makes a photo or painting "good" is the story it tells and the emotional connections it makes. This is subjective, and depends on the individual experience. Even the most advanced generative AI will be hit or miss at connecting with your individual experience, no different than the great painters and photographers over the centuries.
- eru 3y ago
- DeathArrow 3y ago>Due to rights restrictions, this image cannot be enlarged, viewed at full screen, or downloaded. Rights to a photography done in 1851? Come on!
- nicoco 3y agoEnough with your pirate propaganda! How do you expect dead artists to pay the bills? You filthy utopian anarchist!
- eru 3y agoYou are joking, but death is not really a moral obstacle here: The artist pays the bills by selling the (commercial) rights to their work. Those rights will be more valuable, if they last longer. That calculation is independent of the vagaries of the artist's longevity. (And in fact, it might make more sense to give rights a flat x years since creation, instead of tying it to whether the artist eats her vegetables and exercises.)
- amelius 3y agoThat's not how copyright was intended to work.
- vitus 3y agoEither way, this point is moot, as any copyrighted material from mid-19th century France entered the public domain long ago. In this case, Baldus died in 1889, so any of his works would have entered the public domain in 1939, in accordance with French law at the time -- the Literary and Artistic Property Act of 1793 established a copyright term of lifetime + 10 years, which was then extended to 50 years by the Literary and Artistic Property Act of 1866. The next extension to lifetime + 70 for general works* in 1992 came well beyond the point Baldus's work would have entered the public domain. * Copyright term was previously extended in the 1950s to lifetime + 70 years specifically for musical compositions.
- eru 3y ago
- locallost 3y agoI heard this argument 15 years ago when a photographer was making his photos nicer (nothing heavy) and another person objected to it. He said "it was always done just not with digital tools". But it does feel different because the advertised possibilities make it so easy to create on paper a photo of something impressive. I worry about it because it can create unrealistic expectations of what is possible - how does a person wo wants do dunk a basketball, but can't, feel if everyone posts their dunking photos that are fake? On the flip side if everyone does it, it might devalue the whole wow effect, making it less impressive and less important. Then again, it's always true that the world we'll die in will be different than the world we were born in, and we might not like it. Maybe that's how it goes.
- bryanrasmussen 3y ago>how does a person wo wants do dunk a basketball, but can't, feel if everyone posts their dunking photos that are fake? On the flip side if everyone does it, it might devalue the whole wow effect, making it less impressive and less important. reminds me of a meme I saw yesterday - "Before Auto-Tune there was talent", with a picture of Steve Perry back in the Journey days.
- rzzzt 3y agoWe only know that Auto-Tune exists because T-Pain and Cher's sound engineer set it to "snap to grid" mode as a deliberate artistic choice. This pretty much mirrors @locallost's story in the audio domain. Shaving off cents here and there to make someone's singing voice prettier does not hurt anyone.
- k__ 3y agoPretty much so. For some people music is an art form to express themselves, the skill/talent part is just an obstacle. There is still much work to do on the rest of the song writing and production.
- blowski 3y agoAuto-tune has done to singing what photography did to painting - if anybody can be in tune, then being tuneful is no longer impressive. So other qualities become important, such as timbre and authenticity.
- jessekv 3y agoMy view is that painting is the purest form of photography. Photography with all its perceived technological requirements is wrongly treated as a separate art, one that is more scientific and therefore more objective. These fallacies are what is getting undermined now with the broader availability of powerful AI tools.
- type0 3y agoBoth photography and painting are technical endeavors
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- smusamashah 3y agoArticle says Lochness monster and Big foot sightings are on a decline. But now as everyone can easily manipulate images, should we again expect a rise in these and lot more other weird things?
- KaiserPro 3y agoFor a good well funded news desk, proof of provenance for images is part of the process. You dispatch your photo editors to verify and make sure the image is correct. They have always done this. Which is why when things like this: https://www.theguardian.com/media/2004/may/14/pressandpublishing.iraqandthemedia https://www.theguardian.com/media/2004/may/14/pressandpublis... happen, it was an editorial decision rather than a "mistake" (this is the same bloke who lied under about hacking a child's answerphone.) For journalism thats given away as a side effect, rather than the main business, they don't have the same time and money to verify anything
- ChrisMarshallNY 3y agoI remember some controversy, a number of years ago (can't remember who), when a news magazine (I think TIME, maybe), posted a non-retouched photo of some celebrity, and they got upset about it. I think that there were cries of "discrimination." You can't win, for losing.
- wodenokoto 3y agoWhat does the iPhone have in response to these pixel phone image manipulation features? If you don’t know in advance which app to get, it’s quite daunting trying to find anything useful on the App Store (either directly or via google)
- verisimi 3y ago> It feels like a death spiral of trust A death spiral of misplaced trust. Ie - this is actually closer to truth.
- xyzelement 3y agoI find that mentally going from “I know” to “I don’t know” is motion from a less to more truthful understanding. In the past we assumed photographs were “real” although they never were objective (no pun intended.) Even if not retouched, a photograph shows you a subjectively selected and framed moment and asks you to trust that it’s an accurate representation of a topic. The picture then evokes an emotional response and you walk around all day or more with a certain feeling based on what you perceive is an objective piece of data that you perceived but in reality was a carefully selected piece of input to trigger the output that it does. So from that perspective, moving into the world where we recognize that a picture doesn’t mean anything is better.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- oglop 3y agoAt the limit, and with dubious meaning “generated by AI or digital tools”; all image media will be dubious shortly. All intellectual pieces around culture will be dubious. All political media will be dubious. I expect this to be in a very short time but could be wrong. And of course a child will say “and what’s dubious, that’s how it is” and so I become old and don’t understand anything anymore.
- TriangleEdge 3y ago"We all live with a growing sense that everything around us is fraudulent." I predict that we will eventually only trust the internet as we know it today for fabricated stories (port 443 and 80 anyway), and will value live interactions more as a result.
- alsetmusic 3y agoAh, the "what constitutes a photo," question. We've already had arguments in a court (can't recall the case) where someone argued that a photo from a phone wasn't legitimate evidence because phones can hallucinate data. The word hallucinate wasn't used; that's just what I thought of because of "AI" text generation and contemporary reporting. Anyway, I expect this will become more of an issue over time and I don't know how we'll square the problem.
- ctrlp 3y agoWouldn't care so much if Pixel photo manipulation didn't make everyone look like plasticine dog shit. Amazing how bad photos of people are on its camera and no obvious way to turn it off. You can literally see it in action in the brief moment when you view a photo you've taken before it is algorithmically "fixed" and rendered horrific and unusable.