I think the main reason is that altering or staging photos has been around for a while, and you should no more trust a photo of an event than you should trust a written account of it. The answer, for both, is "chain of custody" - do you trust whoever is showing you the image or printing the account?
The real worry is video. It's far more visceral in its impact even than images, and social media has evolved to spread video virally and untraceably. There's already a problem with authentic video being deceptively described: clips of the aftermath of Syrian or Russian bombings of civilians being described as coming from Gaza, for instance. In that case it's fairly easy to show the context of the video by linking to the CNN report from 2015 or whatever that the footage was taken from. But if the video is AI-generated you won't be able to do that.
In that case it's fairly easy to show the context of the video by linking to the CNN report from 2015 or whatever that the footage was taken from.
I don't think this is easy! If I see footage on IG or something, I have no idea how to see if it was actually CNN 2015 footage.
Counterpoint: we're getting on for a decade of being Concerned about this now, and what actual consequences have there been? When and where has it happened?
It's much more interesting, I think, that electorally useful chunks of the population can be fooled by scrawling two eyes and a nose on a paper bag, or just by looking right in the camera and lying hard enough. Or that about a third of every electorate I can think of would personally walk past Their Guy torturing kittens to vote for him, while another third don't need no stinkin' deepfakes to be convinced he's done worse, as they're already at 100% neg pol.
While on the other hand, if you actually do care about the veracity or otherwise of photographs, there's never been a culture of scrutiny as well developed. (Remember that time Jeffrey Lewis ID'd the new North Korean missile from the reflection on the dictator's sunglasses?) Rather like verbal lying, it's difficult to keep your story consistent.
To take Ajay's point, a lot of absolute weirdos will post any old slop and put some other text over it and that's enough. This is the technology of the Cottingley Fairies, at the bottom of it. Extremely basic editing, cutting and pasting you could do with literal scissors and paste.
You have no reason to panic heebie, because it's always been the case that the only way to tell if something is true or real is by your instincts. You have good instincts heebie, so you will be fine.
I'm not personally worried about being suckered! I'm worried about all the suckers.
2: well, "easy" for people who do a lot of this sort of thing. Not easy for the normal audience. I suppose "feasible" would have been a better word.
And, as Alex says, we've had this happening for a while; back in 2004 920 years ago!) there were faked photos of British troops abusing prisoners, and the Daily Mirror under its then editor Piers Morgan published them on the front page. They weren't even very convincing fakes but they were good enough to convince Mirror journalists. But the trick is finding people who are ready to believe your obvious fakes, as Alex says, not wasting time trying to convince the sceptical.
Is the Daily Mail or the Daily Mirror the one that still just makes things up?
9: Moby ate my hamster.
[You see? All British media sources are untrustworthy]
Should I check or should I just give you an answer with certainty in my voice?
This will the a second golden age of Big Foot sightings.
7: No sense in worrying about that! Suckers gonna suck.
I used to worry more about this, and have for a while - AIMHMHB, at the very beginning of my undergraduate career we read The Reconfigured Eye: Visual Truth in the Post-Photographic Era and played around with Photoshopping various kind of fake images.
But as described above, the technology to do it well isn't even necessary. I'm reminded a little bit about sci-fi worrying about people becoming entirely absorbed in realistic virtual reality environments - and then it turned out that you can get people just as obsessed with infinitely cruder materials (I'm thinking here about MUDs as the very lowest level where I've personally known people to get sucked in and fail out of school as a result).
It's everything I wish I didn't know.
The best way to not panic isn't to convince yourself that the future isn't bad, it's to remind yourself that the past was also bad in most of the same ways (and worse in others).
This doesn't always work, for example social media is just bad, but like people were perfectly capable of finding insane misinformation by AM radio back in the day. And it's still the case that Joe Rogan audio matters a lot more than fake photos.
I think the problem is that Rogan is such a dumbass he'll easily be taken in by fake photos and videos (if he wasn't already.)
You'd think the word would have gotten out on this kind of thing, but apparently not: https://www.courthousenews.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/attorney-sanctioned-for-using-ai-hallucinations.pdf
I frequently see AI generated images on FB purporting to be Glacier NP or other places in Montana, and they are clearly fake. I have no idea who makes them and why.
Yeah. I get the same kind of fake images of Pennsylvania parks.
I'm more worried about tracking being reported. I get annoyed when my watch encouraged me to track an outdoor walk, because I don't want an employer to analyze my exercise habits.
I'm also worried that the Trump administration will figure out a way to deport people and generslly harass others using cell phone data.
The advice I've seen is if there are any anti-Trump protests don't bring anything that sends pings- phone, watch, earbuds. If you have RFID cards put them in a Faraday bag.
Speaking of, is there still something like the old school PDAs. An electronic calendar/notebook that doesn't connect to someone's cloud?
22: Do you know anything about brands? I just google and there are a bunch. I am hoping to do some protesting. If you, put a phone in airport mode, is it untraceable or do you need to turn it off?
Airplane mode usually leaves Bluetooth on. If you manually turn off Bluetooth, WiFi, and cellular- I don't know, maybe? I think there's still some tracking that can happen around Find my phone.
I don't have any shield bags or wallets myself, but the technology isn't terribly complex (metal mesh lining basically) so probably many good options.
Ok, what about the second link scenario, where government entities are revising the official record? Isn't that wild about Alicia Keys??
I guess the point stands: government has been able to revise the official record for years. But making it extremely easy does seem worse.
I'll argue the heebie side of point one: "flood the zone with shit" has always been the baddies' strategy, but up until now there was a cost/benefit calculation that led them to only invest in the easy suckers, because fooling the heebies was just too expensive to pull off well. But if instead of investing 100$ to get one semi-convincing photo/video, you can now invest 1$ and get 100, you can overwhelm all the smart wikipedes or independent analysts or whatever; there just won't be enough of them to catch all the smart fakes.
Surely there should be cases, seeing as we've been having rounds of Concerned since about 2014.
1. Use of faked CCTV/bodycam/etc footage to frame or alibi* people. Severe problem without rapid judicial/legislative action.
2. There's been chatter for years about efforts to use blockchains to generate relaible chains of custody for AV.** I'd much appreciate anyone who's paid attention chiming in.
*Acceptable as verb? I'm not convinced.
**Something involving Leica? Involving the NYT?
Isn't "blockchain" just a synonym for "fraud, but with more greenhouse emissions"?
2. There's been chatter for years about efforts to use blockchains to generate relaible chains of custody for AV
The blockchain is unnecessary fluff, but it is possible to cryptographically sign any piece of media to ensure that any subsequent alterations would be detected. But that does nothing - blockchain or no - to guarantee the media that gets cryptographically signed was legit at the time the signature was made.
It struck as a rare case where the distributed ledger part of blockchains could actually be useful. Though not of course a total solution.
People have been trying to make it useful for over a decade and a half. No luck so far.
That's what they said about me in the late 90s.
It seemed rude for me to ask what the answer was.