You shouldn't have believed photos since Stalin had Yezhov airbrushed out of them. The only thing that makes a photo more trustworthy than a painting is that it "looks" more real, and passes itself off as true. But there have always been photographic fakes, manipulation and curation of the photos to push a message. AI will finally end this and people will realise that the image of the thing is not the thing itself.
replyYou are vastly, vastly underselling what is being lost. You can no longer look at a piece of art without first asking "is this even real", that is a collosal loss to the experience of being human. You can't just appreciate anything anymore without questioning it.
reply>You shouldn't have believed photos since Stalin had Yezhov airbrushed out of them.
It isn't just about propaganda photos, it is about -litearlly everything-, even things people have no incentive to fake, like cat videos, or someone doing a backflip or a video of a sunset.
I agree, but if you enjoy the art, why does it really matter who made it, like I enjoy looking at sea shells, no one made them, but they are nice to look at?
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replyI was worried about the complete destruction of truth, but it seems that's not the result of commoditized image generation. False AI-generated images have been widespread for years, and as far as I've seen, society has adapted very well to the understanding that images can't prove anything without detailed provenance. I'd argue that this has been helped, actually, by random people on the Internet routinely generating plausible images of events that obviously didn't happen.
reply>society has adapted very well to the understanding that images can't prove anything without detailed provenance
replyDonald Trump is the president of the United States.
I don't understand the response. Do you think that Donald Trump would not be president of the United States if powerful image models hadn't been invented? Or perhaps you're referring to the AI-generated media he's often posted since being elected; when he showed a video of getting in a fighter jet to dump poo on protesters, do you think many people believed that was a real thing he actually did?
replyI'm more reacting to the premise that society is positively adapting to the post truth world. Which it clearly is not. Half the population of the US is already living in a fake news mirror universe where everything is inverted. More convincing fake news is not going to help.
replyAnd this is just straight out of Putin's playbook, if everything is fake then people just stop beliving in the concept of truth altogether.
I think it's neither going to help nor hurt. My experience is that today, even people "living in a fake news mirror universe" understand that an image does not prove anything unless you can explain where you got it from and why anyone should believe it's authentic.
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