A.I. imagery may destroy history as we know it

> You couldn't airbrush a photo via a cron job like how you can now automate some model generating thousands of images of people rioting/looting for authoritarian purposes.

I get how this could be a problem, but it seems to me that it would only be marginally effective instead of exponentially as some assume. The reason I think this is because we already have this kind of thing going on without AI [1]. And while it does work, it's not clear to me if making the fake more realistic actually does anything for the kind of people who get worked up about this. If you want to claim Seattle is burning and it's not, just grab a picture of another place burning, and you're good. Narrative achieved.

If you can pass as authentic a photo from a different place taken at a different time, then what does it matter if you can generate a new one? Are you going to trick more people? Maybe. But I have a feeling the people who are most likely to get tricked, would have been tricked by far more mundane fraud.

[1] https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/fox-news...

No. History was never about a single artifact. Any item considered primary needs to be taken in context. What is the physical substrate used? Who was the author? What other items like it were produced? What other literature was written in the time? What were the social/political views at the time of the recording? What other artifacts corroborate this source? Etc.

What it will do is continue to provide fuel for confirmation bias. What we, as humans, will have to figure out from here on out is how define and deal with constructed information. Currently, the chaos being generated is too valuable to small, but significant, group of political activists; however, I suspect Gen Z will eventually have the power to require restrictions (a la food labels) and penalties for using unsubstantiated information.

The days of using the Internet as a general information source is coming to an end. There will be value in curated data sets again, like we used to have with Encyclopedias.

AI imagery destroys our pre-conceived notions about the rigid nature of history. It enables us to question the concept of history as we’ve been taught.

I guess my attempts at leading the conversation where I wanted it to go were not as subtle as I had hoped.

I absolutely agree the system is in dire need of some attention. I think a lot of the reaction you see around this new iteration of technology comes from people who worry that that attention will not be given. People who suddenly feel as insecure as all the other people in history left behind by growing automation. It's less pride, and more fear. And I don't feel like it's unjustified fear, given our track record.