6 ms·

> once everyone with zero skills can do it in seconds and with far better quality, it will become a nightmare. Will it be a nightmare? If it becomes so easy an

> once everyone with zero skills can do it in seconds and with far better quality, it will become a nightmare. Will it be a nightmare? If it becomes so easy and common that anyone can do it, then surely trust in the veracity of damaging images will drop to about 0. That loss of trust presents problems, but not ones that "safe" AI can solve.

foobarian 3y ago
Arguably that loss of trust would be a net positive.
sigmoid10 3y ago
>surely trust in the veracity of damaging images will drop to about 0 Maybe, eventually. But we don't know how long it will take (or if it will happen at all). And the time until then will be a nightmare for every single woman out there who has any sort of profile picture on any website. Just look at how celebrity deepfakes got reddit into trouble even though their generation was vastly more complex and you could still clearly tell that the videos were fake. Now imagine everyone can suddenly post undetectable nude selfies of your girlfriend on nsfw subreddits. Even if people eventually catch on, that first shock will be unavoidable.
- jquery 3y ago
  The tide is rolling in and we have two options... yell at the tide really loud that we were here first and we shouldn't have to move... or get out of the way. I'm a lot more sympathetic to the latter option myself.
- swatcoder 3y ago
  Your anxiety dream relies on there currently being some technical bottleneck limiting the creation or spread of embarassing fake nudes as a way of cyberbullying. I don't see any evidence of that. What I see is that people who want to embarass and bully others are already fully enabled to do so, and do so. It seems more likely to me and many of us that the bottleneck that stops it from being worse is simply that only so many people think it's reasonable or satisfying to distribute embarassing fake nudes of someone. Society already shuns it and it's not that effective as a way of bullying and embarassing people, so only so many people are moved to bother. Assuming that the hyped up new product is due to swoop in and disrupt the cyberbullying "industry" is just a classic technologist's fantasy. It ignores all the boring realities of actual human behavior, social norms, and secure equilibriums, etc; skips any evidence building or research effort; and just presumes that some new technology is just sooooo powerful that none of that prior ground truth stuff matters. I get why people who think that way might be on HN or in some Silicon Valley circles, but it can be one of the eyeroll-inducing vices of these communities as much as it can be one of its motivational virtues.
- mdasen 3y ago
  This: it won't happen immediately and I'd go even further to say that it even if trust in images drops to zero, it's still going to generate a lot of hell. I've always been able to say all sorts of lies. People have known for millennia that lies exist. Yet lies still hurt people a ton. If I say something like, "idle_zealot embezzled from his last company," people know that could be a lie (and I'm not saying you did, I have no idea who you are). But that kind of stuff can certainly hurt people. We all know that text can be lies and therefore we should have zero trust in any text that we read - yet that isn't how things play out in the real world. Images are compelling even if we don't trust that they're authentic. Hell, paintings were used for thousands of years to convey "truth", but a painting can be a lie just as much as text or speech. We created tons of religious art in part because it makes the stories people want others to believe more concrete for them. Everyone knows that "Christ in the Storm on the Sea of Galilee" isn't an authentic representation of anything. It was painted in 1633, more than a century and a half after the event was purported to have happened. But it's still the kind of thing that's powerful. An AI generated image of you writing racist graffiti is way more believable to be authentic. I have no reason to think you'd do such a thing, but it's within the realm of possibility. There's zero possibility (disregarding supernatural possibilities) that Rembrandt could accurately represent his scene in "Christ in the Storm on the Sea of Galilee". What happens when all the search engine results for your name start calling you a racist - even when you aren't? The fact is that even when we know things can be faked, we still put a decent amount of trust in them. People spread rumors all the time. Did your high school not have a rumor mill that just kinda destroyed some kids? Heck, we have right-wing talking heads making up outlandish nonsense that's easily verifiable as false that a third of the country believes without questioning. I'm not talking about stuff like taxes or gun control or whatever - they're claiming things like schools having to have litter boxes for students that identify as cats (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Litter_boxes_in_schools_hoax https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Litter_boxes_in_schools_hoax). We know that people lie. There should be zero trust in a statement like "schools are installing litter boxes for students that identify as cats." Yet it spread like crazy, many people still believe it despite it being proven false, and it has been used to harm a lot of LGBT students. That's a way less believable story than an AI image of you with a racist tattoo. Finally, no one likes their name and image appropriated for things that aren't them. We don't like lies being spread about us even if 99% of people won't believe the lies. Heck, we see Donald Trump go on rants about truthful images of him that portray his body in ways he doesn't like (and they're just things like him golfing, but an unflattering pose). I don't want fake naked images of me even if they're literally labeled as fake. It still feels like an invasion of privacy and in a lot of ways it would end up that way - people would debate things like "nah, her breasts probably aren't that big." Words can hurt. Images can hurt even more - even if it's all lies. There's a reason why we created paintings even when we knew that paintings weren't authentic: images have power and that power is going to hurt people even more than the words we've always been able to use for lies. tl;dr: 1) It will take a long time before people's trust in images "drops to zero"; 2) Even when people know an image isn't real, it's still compelling - it's why paintings have existed and were important politically for millennia; 3) We've always known speech and text can be lies, but we regularly see lies believed and hugely damage people's lives - and images will always be more compelling than speech/text; 4) Even if no one believes something is true, there's something psychologically damaging about someone spreading lies about you - and it's a lot worse when they can do it with imagery.
IanCal 3y ago
> If it becomes so easy and common that anyone can do it, then surely trust in the veracity of damaging images will drop to about 0 People believe plenty of just written words - which are extremely easy to "fake", you just type them. Why has that trust not dropped to about 0?
- UberFly 3y ago
  Exactly. They are giving people's deductive reasoning skills too much credit.
- Al-Khwarizmi 3y ago
  It kind of has? People believe written words when they come from a source that they consider, erroneously or not, to be trustworthy (newspaper, printed book, Wikipedia, etc.). They trust the source, not the words themselves just due to being written somewhere. This has so far not been true of videos (e.g. a video of a celebrity from a random source has typically been trusted by laypeople) and should change.
- raxxorraxor 3y ago
  It is always the others that believe in false information. "The stupid people", I guess. This is a completely fictional perspective that there are masses convinced and led astray by misinformation on the internet. Misinformation only works if it confirms what people want to believe already. That there exists or not exists such material is secondary at best. But well, that is off topic I guess.
Sohcahtoa82 3y ago
> if it becomes so easy and common that anyone can do it, then surely trust in the veracity of damaging images will drop to about 0. Spend more time on Facebook and you'll lose your faith in humanity. I've seen obviously AI generated pictures of a 5 year old holding a chainsaw right next to a beautiful wooden sculpture, and the comments are filled with boomers amazed at that child's talent. There are still people that think the IRS will call them and make them pay their taxes over the phone with Apple gift cards.
- SkyBelow 3y ago
  If we follow the idea of safety, should we restrict the internet so either such users can safely use the internet (and phones, gift cards, technology in general) without being scammed, or otherwise restrict it so that at risk individuals can't use the technology at all? Otherwise, why is AI specifically being targeted, other than the fear of new things that looks similar to the moral panics of video games.
  - themoonisachees 3y ago
    In concept this is maybe desirable; boot anyone off the internet that isn't able to use it safely. In reality this is a disaster. The elderly and homeless people are already being left behind massively by a society that believes internet access is something everybody everywhere has. This is somewhat fine when the thing they want to access is twitter (and even then, even with the current state of twitter, who are you to judge who should and should not be on it?), but it becomes a Major Problem™ when the thing they want to access is their bank. Any technological solutions you just thought about for this problem are not sufficient when we're talking about "Can everybody continue to live their lives considering we've kinda thrust the internet on them without them asking"
BryantD 3y ago
Let me give you a specific counterexample: it's easy and common to generate phishing emails. Trust in email has not dropped to the degree that phishing is not a problem.
- Al-Khwarizmi 3y ago
  Phishing emails mostly work because they apparently come from a trusted source, though. The key is that they fake the source, not that people will just trust random written words just because they are written, as they do with videos. A better analogy would be Nigerian prince emails, but only a tiny minority of people believe those... or at least that's what I want to think!
  - BryantD 3y ago
    The trusted source thing is important, but there's some degree of evidence that videos and images generate trust in a source, I think?
    - amenhotep 3y ago
      That's the point. They do, but they no longer should. Our technical capabilities for lying have begun to overwhelm the old heuristics, and the sooner people realise the better.

foobarian 3y ago

Arguably that loss of trust would be a net positive.

sigmoid10 3y ago

>surely trust in the veracity of damaging images will drop to about 0 Maybe, eventually. But we don't know how long it will take (or if it will happen at all). And the time until then will be a nightmare for every single woman out there who has any sort of profile picture on any website. Just look at how celebrity deepfakes got reddit into trouble even though their generation was vastly more complex and you could still clearly tell that the videos were fake. Now imagine everyone can suddenly post undetectable nude selfies of your girlfriend on nsfw subreddits. Even if people eventually catch on, that first shock will be unavoidable.

jquery 3y ago
The tide is rolling in and we have two options... yell at the tide really loud that we were here first and we shouldn't have to move... or get out of the way. I'm a lot more sympathetic to the latter option myself.
swatcoder 3y ago
Your anxiety dream relies on there currently being some technical bottleneck limiting the creation or spread of embarassing fake nudes as a way of cyberbullying. I don't see any evidence of that. What I see is that people who want to embarass and bully others are already fully enabled to do so, and do so. It seems more likely to me and many of us that the bottleneck that stops it from being worse is simply that only so many people think it's reasonable or satisfying to distribute embarassing fake nudes of someone. Society already shuns it and it's not that effective as a way of bullying and embarassing people, so only so many people are moved to bother. Assuming that the hyped up new product is due to swoop in and disrupt the cyberbullying "industry" is just a classic technologist's fantasy. It ignores all the boring realities of actual human behavior, social norms, and secure equilibriums, etc; skips any evidence building or research effort; and just presumes that some new technology is just sooooo powerful that none of that prior ground truth stuff matters. I get why people who think that way might be on HN or in some Silicon Valley circles, but it can be one of the eyeroll-inducing vices of these communities as much as it can be one of its motivational virtues.
mdasen 3y ago
This: it won't happen immediately and I'd go even further to say that it even if trust in images drops to zero, it's still going to generate a lot of hell. I've always been able to say all sorts of lies. People have known for millennia that lies exist. Yet lies still hurt people a ton. If I say something like, "idle_zealot embezzled from his last company," people know that could be a lie (and I'm not saying you did, I have no idea who you are). But that kind of stuff can certainly hurt people. We all know that text can be lies and therefore we should have zero trust in any text that we read - yet that isn't how things play out in the real world. Images are compelling even if we don't trust that they're authentic. Hell, paintings were used for thousands of years to convey "truth", but a painting can be a lie just as much as text or speech. We created tons of religious art in part because it makes the stories people want others to believe more concrete for them. Everyone knows that "Christ in the Storm on the Sea of Galilee" isn't an authentic representation of anything. It was painted in 1633, more than a century and a half after the event was purported to have happened. But it's still the kind of thing that's powerful. An AI generated image of you writing racist graffiti is way more believable to be authentic. I have no reason to think you'd do such a thing, but it's within the realm of possibility. There's zero possibility (disregarding supernatural possibilities) that Rembrandt could accurately represent his scene in "Christ in the Storm on the Sea of Galilee". What happens when all the search engine results for your name start calling you a racist - even when you aren't? The fact is that even when we know things can be faked, we still put a decent amount of trust in them. People spread rumors all the time. Did your high school not have a rumor mill that just kinda destroyed some kids? Heck, we have right-wing talking heads making up outlandish nonsense that's easily verifiable as false that a third of the country believes without questioning. I'm not talking about stuff like taxes or gun control or whatever - they're claiming things like schools having to have litter boxes for students that identify as cats (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Litter_boxes_in_schools_hoax https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Litter_boxes_in_schools_hoax). We know that people lie. There should be zero trust in a statement like "schools are installing litter boxes for students that identify as cats." Yet it spread like crazy, many people still believe it despite it being proven false, and it has been used to harm a lot of LGBT students. That's a way less believable story than an AI image of you with a racist tattoo. Finally, no one likes their name and image appropriated for things that aren't them. We don't like lies being spread about us even if 99% of people won't believe the lies. Heck, we see Donald Trump go on rants about truthful images of him that portray his body in ways he doesn't like (and they're just things like him golfing, but an unflattering pose). I don't want fake naked images of me even if they're literally labeled as fake. It still feels like an invasion of privacy and in a lot of ways it would end up that way - people would debate things like "nah, her breasts probably aren't that big." Words can hurt. Images can hurt even more - even if it's all lies. There's a reason why we created paintings even when we knew that paintings weren't authentic: images have power and that power is going to hurt people even more than the words we've always been able to use for lies. tl;dr: 1) It will take a long time before people's trust in images "drops to zero"; 2) Even when people know an image isn't real, it's still compelling - it's why paintings have existed and were important politically for millennia; 3) We've always known speech and text can be lies, but we regularly see lies believed and hugely damage people's lives - and images will always be more compelling than speech/text; 4) Even if no one believes something is true, there's something psychologically damaging about someone spreading lies about you - and it's a lot worse when they can do it with imagery.

IanCal 3y ago

> If it becomes so easy and common that anyone can do it, then surely trust in the veracity of damaging images will drop to about 0 People believe plenty of just written words - which are extremely easy to "fake", you just type them. Why has that trust not dropped to about 0?

UberFly 3y ago
Exactly. They are giving people's deductive reasoning skills too much credit.
Al-Khwarizmi 3y ago
It kind of has? People believe written words when they come from a source that they consider, erroneously or not, to be trustworthy (newspaper, printed book, Wikipedia, etc.). They trust the source, not the words themselves just due to being written somewhere. This has so far not been true of videos (e.g. a video of a celebrity from a random source has typically been trusted by laypeople) and should change.
raxxorraxor 3y ago
It is always the others that believe in false information. "The stupid people", I guess. This is a completely fictional perspective that there are masses convinced and led astray by misinformation on the internet. Misinformation only works if it confirms what people want to believe already. That there exists or not exists such material is secondary at best. But well, that is off topic I guess.

Sohcahtoa82 3y ago

> if it becomes so easy and common that anyone can do it, then surely trust in the veracity of damaging images will drop to about 0. Spend more time on Facebook and you'll lose your faith in humanity. I've seen obviously AI generated pictures of a 5 year old holding a chainsaw right next to a beautiful wooden sculpture, and the comments are filled with boomers amazed at that child's talent. There are still people that think the IRS will call them and make them pay their taxes over the phone with Apple gift cards.

SkyBelow 3y ago
If we follow the idea of safety, should we restrict the internet so either such users can safely use the internet (and phones, gift cards, technology in general) without being scammed, or otherwise restrict it so that at risk individuals can't use the technology at all? Otherwise, why is AI specifically being targeted, other than the fear of new things that looks similar to the moral panics of video games.
- themoonisachees 3y ago
  In concept this is maybe desirable; boot anyone off the internet that isn't able to use it safely. In reality this is a disaster. The elderly and homeless people are already being left behind massively by a society that believes internet access is something everybody everywhere has. This is somewhat fine when the thing they want to access is twitter (and even then, even with the current state of twitter, who are you to judge who should and should not be on it?), but it becomes a Major Problem™ when the thing they want to access is their bank. Any technological solutions you just thought about for this problem are not sufficient when we're talking about "Can everybody continue to live their lives considering we've kinda thrust the internet on them without them asking"

BryantD 3y ago

Let me give you a specific counterexample: it's easy and common to generate phishing emails. Trust in email has not dropped to the degree that phishing is not a problem.

Al-Khwarizmi 3y ago
Phishing emails mostly work because they apparently come from a trusted source, though. The key is that they fake the source, not that people will just trust random written words just because they are written, as they do with videos. A better analogy would be Nigerian prince emails, but only a tiny minority of people believe those... or at least that's what I want to think!
- BryantD 3y ago
  The trusted source thing is important, but there's some degree of evidence that videos and images generate trust in a source, I think?
  - amenhotep 3y ago
    That's the point. They do, but they no longer should. Our technical capabilities for lying have begun to overwhelm the old heuristics, and the sooner people realise the better.