That’s the headline that greeted me when I opened the latest copy of Der Spiegel this week. And that headline was not only right, it pointed out what our future is going to be like. A future where you can’t believe anything you see, read or hear.
The article featured photos on the cover that have no basis in reality and more inside like King Charles in a very unflattering suit drinking a cocktail, Elton John as a child, and a picture of a dejected looking Trump in a prison jumpsuit cleaning toilets in a jail bathroom. Every photo was, of course, a fake created some some kind of AI software. And every photo was so realistic looking that the average person who was unaware of the existence of this software would have believed they were real.
It is so ridiculously easy these days to make fake photos, fake videos, fake sound tracks, etc. that you can’t really trust anything any longer. That bowl of fruit there on the right? That doesn’t exist. It took all of maybe a minute for an AI to create that image from my written description. Adobe even has a beta version of Photoshop that I’ve been playing with which incorporates the same technology.
The AI “revolution” as I heard someone call it should, frankly, scare the hell out of you. We already have media outlets firing their staffs and replacing their writers with AI generated content. One of the reasons the actors strike is going on right now is because the movie studios and television production companies wanted to right to scan in images of actors to be able to use their physical appearance to use those images to create new content without the consent of the actors and without compensating them for using their images.
I guess maybe I’m sounding paranoid. There are scientists and others out there who claim that AI is the best thing ever and it’s going to improve our lives.
But think about this for a moment: How are we going to survive in a world where we can’t tell lies from the truth? Where every photo, every video we’re shown has to be considered suspect? They used to say that “a photo is worth a thousand words”. That statement is no longer true. These days a photo can be worth a thousand lies.
grouchyfarmer 
Hell, my friend … we are already at the point where it is hard to tell the difference between the truth and a lie but I do have one workable solution to that problem and my solution is this: “Follow the very truthful axiom that says “Every word that proceedeth forth from the mouth of a right winger is a lie because they are the children of darkness and there is no light in that darkness and they know not the truth; neither have never known the truth and are, in fact, incapable of recognizing truth if it were to bite them on the a**.”
I would like to try that AI image making thing out… it would solve the problem of getting pictures for blog posts without having to worry about copyright issues.
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I like that axiom of yours. There are far too many people out there who can’t tell the truth from fiction.
As for the program I use, it’s an app on my iPhone called Draw Things. The images it makes are on the small side but it turns out some surprisingly good drawings. It takes a lot of storage space. The program itself isn’t big but you have to download at least one database. There are several that support different styles. Those puppies are huge, over 1 gigabyte in size. It needs a fairly high end iPhone to work well. I have the 13 Max and it’s reasonably speedy. Takes about a minute or so to generate an image.
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Yeah, agreed. It’s definitely something that we all should be concerned about and monitor closely.
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Late to this post, but for some reason, I find AI fascinating. It’s as if the beings (that are probably all artificial too) that invented our particular simulation we are “living” in have planned for us to “evolve” to make more artificial life that can be used in other simulation programs. It’s all turtles up and down…
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