I recently saw a photo on some website. It was from a Trump rally, and people had these freaky, ecstatic looks on their faces. Somebody commented that it looked like AI. Other people soon agreed; one of them remarked on the bizarre, “alien” hand on one of the babies in the crowd. That hand did look weird. There were too few fingers. It looked like a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle hand.
The problem was that this image was originally from a news story that was years prior to ChatGPT and the current AI boom. For this to be AI, the photographer would’ve had to have access to experimental software that was years away from being released to the public.
Sometimes people just look weird and, sometimes, they have weird hands, too.
While your point that sometimes people just have AI image associated traits is very salient, I worry you might not be considering the lengths these things will be used and why online discourse (in my worried opinion) is utterly fucked: The past ain’t safe either.
For now we still have archive.org but without a third party/external source validating that old content…you can’t be sure it’s actually old content.
It’s trivial to get LLMs to get image gen prompts done to “spice up those old news posts” at best (without remembering to tag the article edited/updated or bypassing that flag entirely)…and utterly fuck the very foundation of shared and accepted past reality not just presently but to anyone using the internet itself to look through the lens of the past at worst.
AI image generators have been around for a fairly long time. I remember deepfake discussion from about a decade ago. Not saying the image in discussion is though. I remember Alex Jones making conspiracy theories that revolved around Bush and lossy video compression artifacts too.
I recently saw a photo on some website. It was from a Trump rally, and people had these freaky, ecstatic looks on their faces. Somebody commented that it looked like AI. Other people soon agreed; one of them remarked on the bizarre, “alien” hand on one of the babies in the crowd. That hand did look weird. There were too few fingers. It looked like a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle hand.
The problem was that this image was originally from a news story that was years prior to ChatGPT and the current AI boom. For this to be AI, the photographer would’ve had to have access to experimental software that was years away from being released to the public.
Sometimes people just look weird and, sometimes, they have weird hands, too.
While your point that sometimes people just have AI image associated traits is very salient, I worry you might not be considering the lengths these things will be used and why online discourse (in my worried opinion) is utterly fucked: The past ain’t safe either.
For now we still have archive.org but without a third party/external source validating that old content…you can’t be sure it’s actually old content.
It’s trivial to get LLMs to get image gen prompts done to “spice up those old news posts” at best (without remembering to tag the article edited/updated or bypassing that flag entirely)…and utterly fuck the very foundation of shared and accepted past reality not just presently but to anyone using the internet itself to look through the lens of the past at worst.
AI image generators have been around for a fairly long time. I remember deepfake discussion from about a decade ago. Not saying the image in discussion is though. I remember Alex Jones making conspiracy theories that revolved around Bush and lossy video compression artifacts too.