upvote

points

by int0x295 hours ago |
comments
upvoteby bonoboTP5 hours ago|
next
[-]
It's already possible to lie with text. Pixels are pixels. If we can't blindly believe pixels to show the truth, we will be simply back to the pre-photography era which managed to have a concept of truth regardless.
reply
upvoteby BoredPositron2 hours ago|
parent|
[-]
When could you ever trust pixels?
reply
upvoteby tptacek5 hours ago|
prev|
next
[-]
It either works reliably or it doesn't; if it doesn't, it's better that everybody be clear about that.
reply
upvoteby xp845 hours ago|
parent|
next
[-]
Fair enough. While I would kind of wish AI could be reliably detected, deep down I know this is impossible and it would be pretty bad if we had, say, a prosecution that succeeded because "this 'provably-non-AI' photo places you at the scene of the crime" because only a few underground people know how to remove a watermark.
reply
upvoteby ninjalanternshk3 hours ago|
parent|
prev|
[-]
Not necessarily. Knowing an image for sure is fake has value, even if you can’t guarantee the reverse is true.
reply
upvoteby jameson4 hours ago|
prev|
next
[-]
It's best for privacy not to do this in the first place because:

- Watermarks are optional by AI provider so bad actors will circumvent by using another provider

- GH project proves watermarks can be removed

Given these, trying to ensure "truth" is a futile effort unfortunately, and watermarking only gives companies advantage to violate privacy

reply
upvoteby 5 hours ago|
prev|
next
[-]
deleted
reply
upvoteby 63stack5 hours ago|
prev|
next
[-]
Nobody said that?
reply
upvoteby int0x295 hours ago|
parent|
[-]
Saying that watermarking fake things is bad kinda strongly implies it
reply
upvoteby 5 hours ago|
parent|
[-]
deleted
reply
upvoteby streetfighter645 hours ago|
prev|
next
[-]
The concept of truth? A bit overblown don't you think? Because some guy can make a realistic looking fake videos that destroys the "concept" of truth? How?
reply
upvoteby 151555 hours ago|
prev|
[-]
Stalin had no issues photoshopping images almost 100 years ago.
reply
upvoteby int0x295 hours ago|
parent|
next
[-]
Generating realistic video of arbitrary things and people at scale is quite a bit of a different game than retouching photos
reply
upvoteby tredre35 hours ago|
parent|
prev|
next
[-]
Stalin had all the resources imaginables at his disposal.

Now Nancy, a tech-phobic waitress who has a grudge against her coworker can make up an entire scenario with one prompt and her colleagues might blindly believe her.

Let's not pretend they're the same thing.

Gen AI is inevitable. Watermarking is likely futile. But in my opinion it is still very important to discuss how, as a society, we're going to live in a post-truth world now that anybody can, IN SECONDS, not only fabricate a story but also spread it to thousands of people through their social media.

reply
upvoteby nomel5 hours ago|
parent|
next
[-]
Simple, don't trust what you see on the internet, which has been a constant since the mid 90's when it was invented.
reply
upvoteby xp844 hours ago|
parent|
next
[-]
When that idea was originated, the advice was more like:

"Don't trust what you see on the Internet. Trust instead what you read in a reputable daily newspaper, or Peter Jennings or Tom Brokaw on the nightly news, or BBC World News."

Today, the Internet, especially the part which is not trustable, has nearly finished killing most of the "trustworthy" news sources, by outcompeting them for ad dollars - by being way better at targeting ads (e.g. Meta) and by scientifically perfecting addiction (e.g. TikTok). What remains is mostly controlled by governments and has far from a perfect record of being fact-based and impartial.[1] There are a ton of independent people out there in good faith posting facts on the Internet, but we just agreed that we shouldn't trust what we see on the Internet.

So doesn't this become "Don't trust anything"? And doesn't that, in practice, get implemented as "Don't trust anything that challenges what you believe to be true"? This feels like a really, really bad change to our society - and I'd argue it's already completely happened.

[1] https://apnews.com/article/bbc-gaza-documentary-hamas-sancti...

reply
upvoteby nomel2 hours ago|
parent|
[-]
This isn't just ads, trust in the mainstream media, itself, is very low [1], deservedly so in my opinion. The continuous lies by omission, the outright incorrect headlines/articles that they edit after a day, the lock-step messaging, alignment, and avoidance of topics, pushed by their respective political parties/billionaire owners (6 companies own 90% of media [2]), made me switch to more independent journalists.

[1] https://news.gallup.com/poll/695762/trust-media-new-low.aspx

[2] https://www.businessinsider.com/these-6-corporations-control...

reply
upvoteby Octoth0rpe2 hours ago|
parent|
prev|
[-]
Adequately implementing solves one problem (the making up a story because of a grudge), but creates a whole new set of likely much worse problems: how does one maintain a democracy / civil society? It's not just the trust of "social media" that you've eroded, you've almost certainly killed trust in traditional news reporting as well, especially considering just how much of traditional media is discovered via social media.

Effective democracy requires an informed voter base. Society requires its constituents to be invested in its continuity. Neither of those is achievable when we completely discard trust.

reply
upvoteby 151555 hours ago|
parent|
prev|
next
[-]
People will just become numb to images and video and trust nothing: this is already happening.
reply
upvoteby xp844 hours ago|
parent|
[-]
Yes, it's happened. Except a lot of people do have an exception - they'll trust the slop that reinforces their existing biases, or even if they know in their hearts it's not true, viewing their side's lies regularly still has an effect on the way they think.
reply
upvoteby xp844 hours ago|
parent|
prev|
[-]
Good point. Sometimes I wonder if social media, just almost every aspect of it, is the real cancer. Allowing just about anyone (globally) to anonymously deploy information warfare via the social media vector just seems bound to have horrible outcomes. It's just as bad with text as with images or video. Because of social media, we've trained at least 3 separate generations to self-sort into camps with customized ideological info sources that have incredibly-low standards for fact-checking and every incentive to tell their audience (1) exactly what they want and (2) whatever will enrage them most.

AI kind of makes this worse, but also only barely. Because most people really ought to know by now that almost any content could be AI, a video of, say, Trump kicking a baby or violating a goat wouldn't convince anyone that those acts happened (unless they already believed they happened).

Thing is, we're so flooded in biased BS, and no one has any incentive to produce non-sensational, factual news. I absolutely see 'post-truth' as the inevitability. You can't "weed a garden" when it is 100% weeds. The term "news" will cease to mean facts, and just become a branch of entertainment. Kind of the way "Reality TV" went from being supposedly a documentary (e.g. COPS) to just being a flavor of entertainment, where nothing needs to be real.

reply
upvoteby croes5 hours ago|
parent|
prev|
[-]
A good example why fake images are bad.

Do you want to make it easier for the next Stalin?

reply
upvoteby 151555 hours ago|
parent|
[-]
The genie has been out of the bottle for 100 years, it's delusional to think that some voluntary watermark is going to stop that.

In reality, all images will cease to be trustworthy and there's nothing that can be done about this.

reply