Adobe sells fake AI-generated Israel-Hamas war images – then the news ran them as real Violent AI-generated photos fictionalizing the ongoing deadly Israel-Hamas conflict are not only being sold via Adobe's stock image library, some news publishers are buying and using the pics in online articles as if they were real. Last year, the Photoshop titan announced it would host and sell people's images produced using …
Curious how this "metadata" survives a social media (re)post or reproduction in physical media or on other online publications' websites.
Of course, conscientious publishers show their sources for images - but that doesn't translate in social media well. One just has to consider all the "sponsored" posts by "influencers" that neglected that tidbit.
By stating the source is "AI Generated"... kinda ruins the point of using the photo for a real article about a real event. No one sees "artist's rendition" from either of the Iraq wars. Court room illustrations stand as a counter-example... but those are clearly not life-like.
And this also requires the readers to read the fine print, which I find many people don't do. It seems to be a lost art these days.
Hell, even this website's articles seems to have recently added a bold banner for older articles (or at least I just started to notice it). Perhaps because people find it difficult to care to look at an article's date of publishing, which tends not to be in the largest of fonts.
And this also requires the readers to read the fine print, which I find many people don't do. It seems to be a lost art these days.
The problem is that real journalism today virtually doesn't exist and reading articles to the last word is a waste of time. "Journalists" have an agenda that is set by the shareholders / owners / spooks and government and they have to keep things in line if they want to keep their jobs or life.
In the grand scheme of things, these "news" are irrelevant to most people anyway. You can't change what's going on, so you might as well free yourself from reading about it.
Current news is a busted flush as the saying goes. I am getting very old and once had a job that took me to many communist countries and a good few others. Another commenter abobove mentions, "Just browsing the news feeds". I have been doing that for years now. If I spot an obvious blunder I will leave a comment to put matters right but all in all it is a pointless task.
Years ago you could just move to the next parish and be safe. Before that you could move to another country and be safe but now you would have to move to another world and there arern't any available.
There are two news organisations that could uswefuly be shut down. The BBC and let's call them, "The St Petersberg fiction writers (aka, Russian Propaganda)
Yeah, you probably already know that one. It won't. The first thing most websites that take user submissions do is strip the metadata and replace it, then slap a copyright tag on it and claim they own it. Literally baked into the business model of the stock photo sites.
We can't count on GAN's to identify themselves reliably, and we can expect people to try to trick us using it.
So the answer is to get the people you want to trust to get in the game and use some 25 year old technology to start signing their bloody work. Sony, Canon, and Nikon own the majority of the professional photojournalism and video markets right? At least two of those companies have offered cameras with some form of cryptographic signing for years. They can start making that a baseline feature in their gear.
A full solution has a few extra layers, but those three are enough to get something pushed through. The problem is, none of those companies should be trusted to design the standard, especially Sony. And getting the three to co-operate and not start another standards war is exactly why we DON'T have a standard now.
So we need to get a good old fashioned NIST encryption protocol competition going. It works. AES and Eliptic curves are in all the modern devices, they all work together, and people at large don't even have to think about it. Let a real brain trust of neural players work with NIST and the big three, then push it from there to the rest of the market, including cellphone, TV, and browser makers.
It's hard going on impossible to reliably detect fake images and text, but it's computationally intractable to break a good signing system. Trusted journalists generate signed content with gear that provides a level of attestation, pass it to a trusted publisher who counter signs the content. User devices can decide to trust a publisher, and their device can flag up content with warnings or sourcing info.
We recently had a vote on new constitution amendments. If you read it, it will not raise taxes and it will make the world a better place.
One of the amendments was about water for a specific county. After it passed, they then told everyone that they voted to create a new tax entity called a water board, and it was for 6 counties and they will be soon footing the bill so real estate developers would not have to.
I studied this before voting and totally missed it because there was no fine print.
There should be a law that requires them to put in plain words what the amendment is for or it is void.
Their ML tech is crap. The big throbbing brains are working for real companies, and they are using someone else's LLM. So the black box just does what it does.
So the great thing is that it will constantly do things that nobody at Adobe wanted, and they won't be able to make it stop without pulling the plug, which they will not do even if it gets someone killed.
But by steali.. I mean licensing all that high quality trainging dat... I mean art, it can make some pretty pictures right?
There is nothing wrong with creating these images, nor is there anything wrong with using them.
What IS wrong is misrepresenting them.
One example might be telling a true story about the sinking of the Titanic. As you are telling your story you include images of the ship... her sailing along in the sunshine before the collision, then the ship and iceberg, and finally the open ocean with a few life rafts.
As long as somewhere it's made clear that the images are not actual photographs there is nothing wrong with using them.
In telling a story about the current unpleasantness in Israel and Gaza again, there is nothing wrong with showing the image of a street of destroyed buildings, again, as long as you make it clear it's representative of what is happening and not an actual photograph.
Good storytelling (fact or fiction), often includes images these days, and you pick ones that best illustrate the story you are trying to tell, but if you are being honest you have to make clear they are just that, illustrative.
In the generative society the "generated" news and media has already started to eradicate all trust we can have about anything.
The previous internet cycle had "fake news", now we have 99% pure bulls*it.
It is a huge democracy threat that the generative technologies + advertisers + special interests just spew so much info that no one can be sure of anything.
As an old timer it is so sad to see what the internet have become - the internet that was supposed to democratize the access to knowledge for all, is just becoming a huge stinking pile of trash!
Twenty years ago I knew someone that worked for a reputable British news agency. Their job was "cleaning up" the footage sent in by reporters to make it fit for broadcast. This included adding special effects, like the flashes of distant explosions, smoke, the sound of gunfire, because the reporter was often on the balcony of their hotel in a safe zone many miles from the action. Even if the correspondent is on the front line in the thick of it, these things aren't always caught on camera or don't look dramatic enough. It is somewhat deceptive, but on the other hand, trying to get good quality footage during the heat of battle is incredibly difficult and dangerous work, and you don't get a retake if you miss the shot.
The only new thing here is that the images are modified by AI rather than regular video editing software.
When all trust is lost then you can trust no one and the elites have you.
Money looks after money and keeps anyone else out of the loop for fear of diluting the money pot.
Information is power and when only one set of people have the information and the rest have the BS then we have lost and may never get back.
This AI frenzy could very easily lead to a collapse of the western democracy system.
Presumably you will get the usual non-reply about how deeply they care and how serious they are about x, y, z, and how HARD they strive and how they make every effort (not to laugh all the way to the bank). All they care about is money and that they don't fall out with the law, because falling out with the law might cost them money which goes agaist higher profit, they don't give a flying about anything else. Everything has a price, and 'decency' is 'business cost' which can be approximated. Unless you can re-classify it as 'investment' which appears to carry next to nil value these days. Get rich now, fuck the world.
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