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Fake News Photos Threaten Democracy
At the end of February 2022 I wrote a Dutch article for Marketingfacts where I warned about how fake “news photos” threaten our democracy. This morning I saw a picture of former president Donald Trump who was arrested. Totally fake, but it clearly demonstrates in what kind of future we will be living. It’s a future that I think looks bleak.
A couple of artists are now using Midjourney v5 that clearly demonstrate the point I’m trying to get across.
“As of march 2023, anyone can leverage Generative AI to produce content that for most will be indistinguishable from “real” content. In this series Lysandre met with current en former political figures and asked them to bring their spirit animal.” Artist Lysandre Follet wants to create awareness for the fact that “our society is entering an evident trust crisis. Having conversation about the implication of such technology on our society is important beyond the amusement and distraction.”
Artist Tim Brodin created an experiment “This Band Photo Doesn’t Exist” where he blends artistic expression and AI innovation. With the help of Midjourney he has generated “captivating band portraits that strike a chord with the future of creativity.”
Are They For Real? South Korean Girl Band Offers Glimpse Into Metaverse
“At first glance, MAVE: looks like any other idolised K-pop band – except it only exists virtually. Its four members – SIU, ZENA, TYRA and MARTY – live in the metaverse, their songs, dances, interviews and even their hairstyles created by web designers and artificial intelligence.”
Glaze Protects Art From Prying AIs
“The asymmetry in time and effort it takes human artists to produce original art vs the speed generative AI models can now get the task done is one of the reasons why Glaze, an academic research project out of the University of Chicago, looks so interesting. It’s just launched a free (non-commercial) app for artists (download link here) to combat the theft of their ‘artistic IP’ — scraped into data-sets to train AI tools designed to mimic visual style — via the application of a high tech “cloaking” technique.”
You can check out project Glaze here.
AI Love
Generative AI technology, which relies on algorithms to create text and images, has drawn a frenzy of interest because of its ability to foster remarkably humanlike interactions. But what happens when the chatbot stops loving you back?
The Stupidity Of AI
“The belief in this kind of AI as actually knowledgeable or meaningful is actively dangerous. It risks poisoning the well of collective thought, and of our ability to think at all. If, as is being proposed by technology companies, the results of ChatGPT queries will be provided as answers to those seeking knowledge online, and if, as has been proposed by some commentators, ChatGPT is used in the classroom as a teaching aide, then its hallucinations will enter the permanent record, effectively coming between us and more legitimate, testable sources of information, until the line between the two is so blurred as to be invisible. Moreover, there has never been a time when our ability as individuals to research and critically evaluate knowledge on our own behalf has been more necessary, not least because of the damage that technology companies have already done to the ways in which information is disseminated. To place all of our trust in the dreams of badly programmed machines would be to abandon such critical thinking altogether.”
Welcome To The Big Blur
“The question will be simple but perpetual: Person or machine? Every encounter with language, other than in the flesh, will now bring with it that small, consuming test. For some—teachers, professors, journalists—the question of humanity will be urgent and essential. Who made these words? For what purpose? For those who operate in the large bureaucratic apparatus of boilerplate—copywriters, lawyers, advertisers, political strategists—the question will be irrelevant except as a matter of efficiency. How will they use new artificial-intelligence technology to accelerate the production of language that was already mostly automatic? For everyone, the question will now hover, quotidian and cosmic, over words wherever you find them: Who’s there?”
Machine or human? That’s the question.
The Age Of Infinite Misinformation Has Arrived
“We already face a problem with echo chambers that polarize our minds. The mass-scale automated production of misinformation will assist in the weaponization of those echo chambers and likely drive us even further into extremes.”
