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We havent had an ability to tell whats real and whats not for a long time. Photos have been able to be doctored since well before photoshop, writing style imita

We havent had an ability to tell whats real and whats not for a long time. Photos have been able to be doctored since well before photoshop, writing style imitated, signatures forged etc. This is a change of degree, thats all. I for one am somewhat glad we are going to be forced out of our shell when it comes to the nature of truth in media. All it means is that people are going to have to have a higher standard for what they believe. Many wont, just as many today think infowars or Joe Rogan are telling them the truth, but we shouldnt cater our society to the lowest common denominator. Instead we should create a society where the more informed people can do their best to guide and educate the people more easily fooled to develop the skills to be more discriminating in what they believe.

tambourine_man 3y ago
> This is a change of degree, thats all A large enough change in degree becomes a qualitative change. If what once required nation states budget is suddenly free and in your pocket, it’s potentially a tectonic shift.
- MeImCounting 3y ago
  Who was really reading/believing articles written by random people anyway? I would not take any random blog as true or useful unless I was familiar with the author and their work. How is the "AI injected" world any different? There will be more disinformation to fool those of us who believe something they read based on anything but the source. So what? Thats already a huge industry. Fooling the easily fooled accounts for most social media and ad traffic already. So now they get more fooled or fooled more often? I think thats not good but also not catastrophic in the way that is being implied.
  - fnimick 3y ago
    > Who was really reading/believing articles written by random people anyway? I would not take any random blog as true or useful unless I was familiar with the author and their work. That works for you, but for everyone else who is less diligent in source evaluation, this now gets worse. Don't you agree that society suffers when a large proportion of people now get their information from fake sources?
    - MeImCounting 3y ago
      The argument I am making is that this is already happening. It wont be great that the BS is more convincing and more pervasive. It also wont be the end of society and truth, leading us all to a deadly spiral of misinformation. People should strive to be more critical, if that includes evaluating the source of whatever they listen to then I think thats great. This is something we should be doing anyway.
      - fnimick 3y ago
        I think I disagree with your underlying assumption that as long as you, personally, are critically evaluating sources and are 'safe', it doesn't matter whether other people end up in the misinformation spiral. I can be as critical as I want, if the people around me who vote, have influence on my environment, etc end up in misinformation, it has a huge impact on my life.
        MeImCounting 3y ago
        Yeah but those people are already taking whatever they read on the internet at face value. They already believe whatever conspiracy theory they read on tik tok or facebook. They already believe whatever fox news tells them too. Advocating for critical and thoughtful consumption of media will become more important with the rise of AI and it will also lift up society as a whole. If society really takes this seriously we could make real progress and help many people who are currently vulnerable to misinformation become less so.
yunohn 3y ago
Paraphrasing, “Everyone should assume everything is FUD and lies all the time, become more educated, and be more critical and questioning”. Honestly this an absurd take, and I like AI…
- MeImCounting 3y ago
  Like I said before its a matter of degree. Are you not already assuming this? Why not? Is being more critical and questioning not a good thing? Is being more educated not a good thing?
  - aydyn 3y ago
    its absurd because its not going to happen. Its magical thinking to expect the general population to live past their daily life and understand these issues.
- BeFlatXIII 3y ago
  But is it wrong?
  - program_whiz 3y ago
    Its the type of magical thinking that also says "yes to fix obesity we just need 75% of the population to buy more expensive, less tasty, and more difficult to prepare food, and to gain more self-discipline, and to make more time for exercising. Its simply CICO". "The reason people are smoking is they need more discipline to resist their peers and all the advertising". When its clear that humans have a nature, and it doesn't really change. So in the same way, expecting a population with average 100 IQ to suddenly become discerning, diligent, credulous, scientifically minded, wary, etc. is just ludicruous. The average person is just reading headlines for like 15m at the store, in traffic, smoke break, etc. not doing a thesis every day. If they see a video of politician saying "Quit your job now, I'm handing out $1M to everyone who votes for me" they aren't going to do a deep dive to determine if its deep fake, they will just accept it. I personally have seen two or three cases of myself or someone I know getting duped by fake info, about meaningless trivia, but just the result of a quick google like "is so and so dead" or "did so and so break up" and got wrong info, because I don't care enough to do the deep dive to invalidate it.
karaterobot 3y ago
> We havent had an ability to tell whats real and whats not for a long time. Photos have been able to be doctored since well before photoshop, writing style imitated, signatures forged etc. This is a change of degree, thats all. This kind of argument rubs me the wrong way. It's like saying a printing press is just a faster scriptorium, or a nuclear bomb is just a change in degree from a hand grenade. It's misleading because it ignores the monumental difference in society these later inventions brought about, which were not caused by the previous inventions, and never would have been. It ends up being an argument to not engage with the reality of the situation.
- the_snooze 3y ago
  I agree. There's this weird contradiction in tech circles to hand-wave away legitimate concerns about scale (e.g., ubiquitous surveillance is just a policeman at scale), while simultaneously putting a lot of emphasis and value on whether a system is scalable. The more complicated reality is that things qualitatively change at scale. We need to have honest sober discussions about the trade-offs and unknowns involved, instead of just YOLOing blindly into moving fast and breaking things.
- OliveMate 3y ago
  I feel the issue is with human filters. Creating a seamless and believable image edit requires time and effort, regardless of how experienced the editor is. You were limited by what images you could source, how they'd fit together (does the lighting and perspective match?), and there was often a contextual paper trail people could follow ('I recognise that picture of X'). With these image generation models, the only things filtered by human involvement are the creation of the prompt, and whether or not they believe any generated image is believable. The required time and effort is minimal, and on top of that you can generate hundreds by the time a single person can make a convincing Photoshop edit. --- In terms of being able to sift through generated images across the wider internet, I've no idea what can be done. But I feel a potential defence against them would be for news sources to publish the exact images they were sent online, keeping the original resolution, removing cropping, and retaining Exif data.
dehrmann 3y ago
That's an interesting take. Essentially, we've been spoiled by living an a high SNR world, but that's changing, so we'll need more robust human systems. Not to get too political, but covid and the 2020 US presidential election showed how bad we are at handling untrustworthy information.
- xerox13ster 3y ago
  S:N, S-N, signal:noise, signal-noise, S/N, SN ratio. I got way downthread before it clicked what this was. Why not abbreviate it to HSNR?
ponderings 3y ago
people writing konglish or euroenglish etc can also write articles now. For the majority English is the second or 3rd language.
lm28469 3y ago
> This is a change of degree, thats all. Just like between a fork and a nuke, not sure it's a very solid argument
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
red-iron-pine 3y ago
> We havent had an ability to tell whats real and whats not for a long time. Photos have been able to be doctored since well before photoshop, writing style imitated, signatures forged etc. This is a change of degree, thats all. But not in an automated way, that is difficult to detect, and that could impact every facet of your life. Like, yeah, photoshop was a thing, but now AI filters can "nudify" virtually any picture, quickly, and in an automated way. Ditto for generating ads, political propaganda, etc.

tambourine_man 3y ago

> This is a change of degree, thats all A large enough change in degree becomes a qualitative change. If what once required nation states budget is suddenly free and in your pocket, it’s potentially a tectonic shift.

MeImCounting 3y ago
Who was really reading/believing articles written by random people anyway? I would not take any random blog as true or useful unless I was familiar with the author and their work. How is the "AI injected" world any different? There will be more disinformation to fool those of us who believe something they read based on anything but the source. So what? Thats already a huge industry. Fooling the easily fooled accounts for most social media and ad traffic already. So now they get more fooled or fooled more often? I think thats not good but also not catastrophic in the way that is being implied.
- fnimick 3y ago
  > Who was really reading/believing articles written by random people anyway? I would not take any random blog as true or useful unless I was familiar with the author and their work. That works for you, but for everyone else who is less diligent in source evaluation, this now gets worse. Don't you agree that society suffers when a large proportion of people now get their information from fake sources?
  - MeImCounting 3y ago
    The argument I am making is that this is already happening. It wont be great that the BS is more convincing and more pervasive. It also wont be the end of society and truth, leading us all to a deadly spiral of misinformation. People should strive to be more critical, if that includes evaluating the source of whatever they listen to then I think thats great. This is something we should be doing anyway.
    - fnimick 3y ago
      I think I disagree with your underlying assumption that as long as you, personally, are critically evaluating sources and are 'safe', it doesn't matter whether other people end up in the misinformation spiral. I can be as critical as I want, if the people around me who vote, have influence on my environment, etc end up in misinformation, it has a huge impact on my life.
      - MeImCounting 3y ago
        Yeah but those people are already taking whatever they read on the internet at face value. They already believe whatever conspiracy theory they read on tik tok or facebook. They already believe whatever fox news tells them too. Advocating for critical and thoughtful consumption of media will become more important with the rise of AI and it will also lift up society as a whole. If society really takes this seriously we could make real progress and help many people who are currently vulnerable to misinformation become less so.

yunohn 3y ago

Paraphrasing, “Everyone should assume everything is FUD and lies all the time, become more educated, and be more critical and questioning”. Honestly this an absurd take, and I like AI…

MeImCounting 3y ago
Like I said before its a matter of degree. Are you not already assuming this? Why not? Is being more critical and questioning not a good thing? Is being more educated not a good thing?
- aydyn 3y ago
  its absurd because its not going to happen. Its magical thinking to expect the general population to live past their daily life and understand these issues.
BeFlatXIII 3y ago
But is it wrong?
- program_whiz 3y ago
  Its the type of magical thinking that also says "yes to fix obesity we just need 75% of the population to buy more expensive, less tasty, and more difficult to prepare food, and to gain more self-discipline, and to make more time for exercising. Its simply CICO". "The reason people are smoking is they need more discipline to resist their peers and all the advertising". When its clear that humans have a nature, and it doesn't really change. So in the same way, expecting a population with average 100 IQ to suddenly become discerning, diligent, credulous, scientifically minded, wary, etc. is just ludicruous. The average person is just reading headlines for like 15m at the store, in traffic, smoke break, etc. not doing a thesis every day. If they see a video of politician saying "Quit your job now, I'm handing out $1M to everyone who votes for me" they aren't going to do a deep dive to determine if its deep fake, they will just accept it. I personally have seen two or three cases of myself or someone I know getting duped by fake info, about meaningless trivia, but just the result of a quick google like "is so and so dead" or "did so and so break up" and got wrong info, because I don't care enough to do the deep dive to invalidate it.

karaterobot 3y ago

> We havent had an ability to tell whats real and whats not for a long time. Photos have been able to be doctored since well before photoshop, writing style imitated, signatures forged etc. This is a change of degree, thats all. This kind of argument rubs me the wrong way. It's like saying a printing press is just a faster scriptorium, or a nuclear bomb is just a change in degree from a hand grenade. It's misleading because it ignores the monumental difference in society these later inventions brought about, which were not caused by the previous inventions, and never would have been. It ends up being an argument to not engage with the reality of the situation.

the_snooze 3y ago
I agree. There's this weird contradiction in tech circles to hand-wave away legitimate concerns about scale (e.g., ubiquitous surveillance is just a policeman at scale), while simultaneously putting a lot of emphasis and value on whether a system is scalable. The more complicated reality is that things qualitatively change at scale. We need to have honest sober discussions about the trade-offs and unknowns involved, instead of just YOLOing blindly into moving fast and breaking things.
OliveMate 3y ago
I feel the issue is with human filters. Creating a seamless and believable image edit requires time and effort, regardless of how experienced the editor is. You were limited by what images you could source, how they'd fit together (does the lighting and perspective match?), and there was often a contextual paper trail people could follow ('I recognise that picture of X'). With these image generation models, the only things filtered by human involvement are the creation of the prompt, and whether or not they believe any generated image is believable. The required time and effort is minimal, and on top of that you can generate hundreds by the time a single person can make a convincing Photoshop edit. --- In terms of being able to sift through generated images across the wider internet, I've no idea what can be done. But I feel a potential defence against them would be for news sources to publish the exact images they were sent online, keeping the original resolution, removing cropping, and retaining Exif data.

dehrmann 3y ago

That's an interesting take. Essentially, we've been spoiled by living an a high SNR world, but that's changing, so we'll need more robust human systems. Not to get too political, but covid and the 2020 US presidential election showed how bad we are at handling untrustworthy information.

xerox13ster 3y ago
S:N, S-N, signal:noise, signal-noise, S/N, SN ratio. I got way downthread before it clicked what this was. Why not abbreviate it to HSNR?

ponderings 3y ago

people writing konglish or euroenglish etc can also write articles now. For the majority English is the second or 3rd language.

lm28469 3y ago

> This is a change of degree, thats all. Just like between a fork and a nuke, not sure it's a very solid argument

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

red-iron-pine 3y ago

> We havent had an ability to tell whats real and whats not for a long time. Photos have been able to be doctored since well before photoshop, writing style imitated, signatures forged etc. This is a change of degree, thats all. But not in an automated way, that is difficult to detect, and that could impact every facet of your life. Like, yeah, photoshop was a thing, but now AI filters can "nudify" virtually any picture, quickly, and in an automated way. Ditto for generating ads, political propaganda, etc.