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

petapixel.com

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

#51

Post by masswerk »

cdumler wrote: post #35

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 confi…

> There will be value in curated data sets again, like we used to have with Encyclopedias.

The problem being, we destroyed all the infrastructure around this and it will be hard to rebuild, lacking any underlying economy in the first place.

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

#52

Post by lofaszvanitt »

rickdeckard wrote: post #36
mmoskal wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Digital signatures on photos, with each camera certificate signed by the manufacturer. Not sure why they don't do it at scale yet.

Which solves what exactly? A digital signature would basically be an EXIF that doesn't survive editing. If every photo shot in the past decade would have a certificate added by the camera, still none of the photos you see today would be signed, as they were either modified after the shot or are anyway older than a decade...

You, the creator, have the original (like a raw cr2) image, so you have proof of evidence that is was created by you, by that camera. Plus sensors have quirks that already uniquely identifies cameras...

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

#54

Post by lofaszvanitt »

rickdeckard wrote: post #41
soco wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And then comes Google Photos and applies a filter, goodbye signature (in this case, the phone's). Or I have an old-fashioned film camera... I guess this idea would work only with DSLRs, which aren't that popular anymore nowadays thus we won't solve that much of the original problem.

It wouldn't even work with DSLRs, as barely any image taken is used without tuning parameters or retouching. If a digital signature would stay valid after retouching, there's no value in having it in the first place. If the picture would be re-signed on editing, what's the purpose of that signature...?

You need to have the original raw. Who cares what some mongrel does to your photo in a basement?

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

#55

Post by tivert »

Zetobal wrote: post #20

I am tired reading shitty click bait articles from people that don't work in the field but believe they know what will destroy it. AI is tiresome not because of AI but because of attention grifters.

> I am tired reading shitty click bait articles from people that don't work in the field but believe they know what will destroy it. AI is tiresome not because of AI but because of attention grifters.

I am tired of reading shitty, low effort comments complaining about people thinking about the implications of "AI."

This article isn't click bait, unless you're under the mistaken impression that everything topical is click bait.

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

#56

Post by fullshark »

tivert wrote: post #55
Zetobal wrote: post #20

I am tired reading shitty click bait articles from people that don't work in the field but believe they know what will destroy it. AI is tiresome not because of AI but because of attention grifters.

> I am tired reading shitty click bait articles from people that don't work in the field but believe they know what will destroy it. AI is tiresome not because of AI but because of attention grifters. I am tired of reading shitty, low effort comments complaining about people thinking about the implications of "AI." This article isn't click bait, unless you're under the mistaken impression that everything topical is c…

Article is pretty thin though and seems to exist only to show off the fake Native American photographs.

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

#57

Post by tivert »

Simon321 wrote: post #2

Faking images to try and change history is as old as Stalin: https://www.history.com/news/josef-stalin-great-purge-photo-...

> Faking images to try and change history is as old as Stalin: https://www.history.com/news/josef-stalin-great-purge-photo-...

Maybe so, but up until now forging photographs was far, far more expensive than creating real ones.

It won't be too long now until someone will be able to generate in a weekend a convincing self-consistent alternate-history series of Wikipedia articles about the second term of the Trump presidency... and stuff like that's going to fill up the historical databank of the colony ship that the last humans use to flee the dying Earth.

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

#58

Post by fullshark »

flybrand wrote: post #37

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'm open to the idea that history does involve narrative spinning, and frequently facts arrive not from primary sources but inferences from said primary sources and can be incorrect.

With that said this is about completely fabricated facts/evidence. Pretty different. Imagine a future where AI generated fake moon landing photos outnumber genuine photos and large swathes of the internet population believe with certainty the moon landing was faked as a result.

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

#59

Post by Jeff_Brown »

vorticalbox wrote: post #49
Jeff_Brown wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anticipating the social consequences of a technology only requires understanding what that technology is capable of, not how it works. This author understands, correctly, that AI can generate realistic looking images and realistic sounding bullshit very cheaply. At that point, expertise in the social science becomes more relevant than expertise in engineering.

[flagged]

GPT makes a fair point. Engineering expertise is certainly necessary to anticipate what future capabilities will arise. But none is needed to anticipate the social effects of a capability once you know the capability already exists.

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

#60

Post by tivert »

fullshark wrote: post #56
tivert wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I am tired reading shitty click bait articles from people that don't work in the field but believe they know what will destroy it. AI is tiresome not because of AI but because of attention grifters. I am tired of reading shitty, low effort comments complaining about people thinking about the implications of "AI." This article isn't click bait, unless you're under the mistaken impression that everything topical is c…

Article is pretty thin though and seems to exist only to show off the fake Native American photographs.

> Article is pretty thin though and seems to exist only to show off the fake Native American photographs.

So? Your comment does even less than that, and yet you still posted for us to read.

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