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No one’s ready for this: Our basic assumptions about photos capturing reality are about to go up in smoke.

www.theverge.com No one’s ready for this

The photograph is now meaningless as evidence. We are not prepared.

No one’s ready for this
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  • This is only a threat to people that took random picture at face value. Which should not have been a thing for a long while, generative AI or not.

    The source of an information/picture, as well as how it was checked has been the most important part of handling online content for decades. The fact that it is now easier for some people to make edits does not change that.

    • Your comment somehow just made me realize something: When we see/read news, we have to trust the one who's telling them to us. Since we weren't there in person to see it with our own eyes. Therefore, it's always about a "chain of trust".

      This is true no matter whether photos can be manipulated or not. People have been able to lie since humanity exists. Nothing has really changed. Photography, just like globalization, has only brought everything closer together, making it easier to have a more direct, straightforward relationship to other people and events. With the beginning of AI, this distance between you and an event is going to increase a bit, but the core mechanics are still similar.

      I kind of wonder, how do we really know that something is true? Do atoms actually exist? What if we're being lied to by our authorities. You say "of course not". But what if? I mean, if we blindly trust authorities, we end up like the republicans, who believe everything that fox news tells them. How, then, do we discern truth?

      How, then, do we discern truth? I guess we have to give "proof" for everything, in the sense of mathematical proof. Something that everybody can follow, using only their fundamental assumptions and deduction. I guess that is what science is all about.

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