A.I. imagery may destroy history as we know it | Hacker News Reader

A.I. imagery may destroy history as we know it

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104 pointsdxs154 comments

Meh - I don't know. At least in the UK, "History" classes at school were less about memorising the facts, and more about questioning the who, what, why of some source of information.

One thing that stands out in my memory is multiple different teachers always drilling into us: "never trust photos" (you don't always know who took them, for what reason, and if they were real or staged or whatever)

If 12 year old kids are being taught this, I don't think future historians will be fooled by a pretty photo. It is not like people have been unable to generate imagery of non-true stuff before - CGI in films (and also games for that matter) have been pretty close to 100% realistic for some time ... no one is complaining that future historians are going to confuse the scenes from The Matrix about what really happened in the 1990s. The barrier to entry is lower now of course, but I don't think that changes the position: you cant trust a photo.

Your history classes sound a lot more useful than the ones I sat through in the US - ours was mostly delivered as a set of settled fact.

There is a local school that is dedicating 90 minutes to math and 90 minutes to english. Splitting science and history to a mere 45 minutes each.

I completely support this. Science prior to college was basically a waste. History was full of bias and axes to grind.

Don't get me wrong, teach these subjects, the scientific method is great. However, the value is low compared to the tools given in Math and English.

What tools are you given in English? And how many of the tools in Maths are you still using?

Like, I’m very happy that I got to learn probability theory, but all the differential equations that broke my mind seem entirely pointless now.

This might feel less useful for CS, but for other sciences and even engineering (mechanical, aero, materials, chem, electrical, marine) you need differential eq.

And than natural sciences in general (climate, space) also have applications there.

Subjects that feel useful post graduation, if they are being taught in high school early college the time gap makes it less useful. HS and early college classes fundamentals are needed for the specialized curriculum that needed for higher college and post graduate education.

I don't know how you could expect anyone to really understand literature without history. Imagine trying to explain Animal Farm without Stalin.

In schools where they don't teach History, Literature teachers spend a lot of time teaching History, so that they can teach Literature meaningfully.

> Science prior to college was basically a waste.

My public school biology class involved sequencing and editing DNA to make bacteria change color.

I would not call it a waste.

In fact I wish I would've had more science in school, I managed to go until college until I took my first Physics class, and physics is really useful.

I had a couple of brilliant history teachers during elementary. Both were massive drunks

We never "learnt" any facts (like who was king/queen/PM/president or whatever) - usually you'd study one very narrow period for an entire year.

So one year you'd learn about the Roman empire's withdrawal from Britain, the next it was the Russian revolution, the year after it was the Wars of the Roses or whatever.

Exam questions were always always always in the form of "The Roman withdrawal from Britain was inevitable. Discuss" or "The Industrial revolution led to the fall of the British Empire. Discuss". I.e. long-form essay answers, perhaps 2 or 3 essays within a single 2 or 3 hour exam. You never had to just recall naked facts on their own - you needed to know some to answer the essays of course, but you never just recited.

So pros and cons - I have no idea about what order the Prime Ministers were in or Kings and Queens or if the Edwardian Era came before or after the victorian era etc. I lack historic knowledge, but I guess the skills learnt were useful?

I have no idea what it is like now - my experience is a couple of decades out of date.

edit: looks like things are more or less the same still. Example paper with questions specifically asking you to critique historic sources (page 3): https://cdn.savemyexams.co.uk/uploads/2023/01/1hia-11-que-20.... Moar: https://www.savemyexams.co.uk/gcse/history/edexcel/-/pages/p...

You know, it's been a long time, but even growing up in Orlando Florida, I felt like a lot of my history was about "why" more than anything else. Maybe it's just because I had multiple history classes in a row taught by retired lawyers, but I actually felt like I got a fairly interesting perspective of history.

Funny, almost all of my best teachers seemed to be retired from something else.

There's probably a selection bias towards people who "do things because they feel like it" and "do things for the paycheck".

If you're a retired lawyer, it's likely that you're teaching just keep yourself entertained, or maybe just some supplemental income [1]. When you do things for fun, instead of out of necessity, it gives you the distinct advantage of allowing yourself to focus only on things that are actually interesting to you.

It's possible that my high school history teachers started teaching history specifically because they felt like they might have a unique take on it.

[1] I know that teachers are traditionally underpaid; however if it's just supplemental income, "underpaid" is still often better than "zero income". $36,000 a year isn't a ton of money, but if you're already largely retired, it might be the difference between "taking a trip this summer" or not.

Variance on this is very high. Where your classes landed on the memorize-think axis will swing wildly from district to district, and even possibly from teacher to teacher within the same school.

Yeah, definitely. A couple of my later teachers edged slightly into think territory, but I don't remember the textbooks structurally encouraging this, so memorization was the easy path. Which is a shame - since rediscovering history through podcasts that discuss this stuff in depth, I realized that I actually love history - it's kind of the study of how big groups of people act and interact with systems, which is super fascinating, and super relevant to engineering, finance, civics, politics, and life in general. I just wish I'd realized that earlier, and not wasted so much time in school absorbing a useless dehydrated version.

What school did you go to??? History classes were all about learning dates and being able to recite or write the True History of the Righteous British Empire.

That was how history was taught before Michael Gove came along and decided history was really about chronology, at least..

Agree that we've had plenty of ability to fake photos and documents before. I mean, some of the most famous historical photos of the Soviet Union are famous because of who was removed from them!

You must have had the privilege to attend a very good school, possibly private.

Yeah, the ”post-truth era” is a weird catchphrase which has been going strong for the last 5 years or so at minimum, yet the described dystopia has never arrived and never has been on track to arrive.

Related: Peter Jackson's They Shall Not Grow Old [0] is a great counterpoint to the general idea put forth here.

If you've not seen it, do yourself and ANZAC Day treat and watch it this evening. It's from just before all this AI stuff went off.

Jackson (of LoTR fame) is a huge WWI buff and was approached by the Imperial War Museum and the BBC for this film. He takes old archival footage and then uses a lot of computer massaging and hard work to 'update' the old footage. It really gives a good feeling of the life of a Brittish solider in the first war.

He puts the camera speed at modern fps, he colorizes the black and white, he puts sound in, de-jitters it, etc.

I managed to see it in theaters, and the moment when it goes from black and white to color is just amazing. The whole audience just gasped. Really. These boys jumping around, walking like penguins, grainy and burned, silent, on the old archives, they become people, real people again.

I'm not watching a 'historical' thingy in school anymore, I'm watching a real boy march along in the toxic sludge of Passchendaele, staring at this new fangled camera thing.

That feeling, that moment, anchored to the horrible reality of the footage, but made better and somehow more real, that is what AI can give us on a mass scale for all this old evidence.

Jackson's hard work paved the way to treat this new genre of lovingly updated historical footage. AI will take it all the way.

Really, this ANZAC Day, go watch it [1]. You will not regret it.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/They_Shall_Not_Grow_Old

[1] https://www.amazon.com/They-Shall-Not-Grow-Old/dp/B07PMNNGVH

I'm with you. Black and white footage feels fake. The colored stuff was mind boggling. The worst part was that the footage was taken during mostly peaceful moments and re-enactments for obvious reasons.

The stuff in Ukraine on head mounted cameras is something that has surpassed all.

Yeah, I'm waiting for film makers, like Werner Hertzog, to take all the Ukraine footage to the cinema. 'Cleaning' it up to get past the artifacts and jitter and confusion to a real message. Editing all those hours of gopro will be massively helped by AI, I think.

I totally agree that _They Shall Not Grow Old_ was an excellent use of AI, but I don't think it is a great counterpoint to this article. The article is predominantly arguing wholly AI generated imagery rather than restoration and that has very different ramifications to restoration of historical footage.

My biggest complaint was actually that the portion with the original footage went on too long.

One thing that surprised me was that they did the transition from original to enhanced footage so abruptly; I'd expected a smooth transition over a couple of minutes where you don't even realize it happened until after the fact. The abrupt transition didn't get a crowd reaction when I saw it, but maybe that collective gasp was the goal and it just didn't work out in this showing.

they also hired skilled lip readers to try to make sense of what the troopers were saying. not just color but discussion.

We've been living in the (golden age?) of crowdsourced information for a while now.

AI-generated content at scale (especially if it has marketing dollars behind it trying to influence future models) may well cause a resurgence of curated / authenticated information services.

We didn’t stop trusting “authenticated sources” because of “crowdsourced information”.

We stopped trusting “authenticated sources” because they constantly lie to fit whatever agenda is being pushed.

I can say with certainty that genie is not going back in the bottle no matter how much censoring websites past their prime implement.

eyeroll

I read the economist on a weekly basis and can confidently say that that form of curated professional journalism is much better than random partisans on twitter loudly shouting about everything

This is somewhat hilarious because the Economist is famous for its unsigned articles and IIRC lacks citations, such that you have no way to verify whether the person writing them has any expertise in whatever they’re spouting off about. It’s effectively a middle-brow subreddit in print.

While I agree that the Economist is infamous for having the occasional-to-frequent terrible take under a common pseudonym, I think you're wildly overselling the quality of most mid-brow subreddits (Or have a definition of "middle brow" that only includes the top 90th percentile).

I’ve read the Economist and its depth of insight is equivalent to your average top comment on r/Neoliberal (and I don’t mean that as compliment the subreddit).

> Here are 5 prompts YOU NEED TO KNOW BEFORE AI REPLACES YOUR JOB

I think this is what is going to cause me to delete twitter.

Whatever the cause, I doubt you'll regret it.

> The hands are often a tell-tale sign of the incompetence of an A.I. program.

Curiously prescient: it was the hands of the robots in the original film, Westworld (1973), that were a tell-tale sign that they were not living.

There's also a technique for lucid dreaming where you make a point to look carefully at your hands throughout the day until it becomes an unconscious habit. The idea is that they won't look quite right in a dream, and you'll therefore realize that you're dreaming. I wonder if there's any particular significance to hands beyond them being conveniently accessible, or if any similar ritual would work as long as the individual believed that it would. In other words, are hands inaccurately constructed in dreams without people noticing unless they're specifically looking for it, or does the lucid dreaming technique cause the distortions because the dreamer is expecting them?

Any similar ritual works. The dreaming brain is super bad at consistency. If you know something really well, like looking at your hands, wristwatch, or something else. You'll see obvious distortions and other weirdness while dreaming.

I think the distortions are always there. We are just not in a state of mind where details matters when dreaming.

Which goes with the very topic of Christopher Nolan's movie Inception (2010, with Leonardo DiCaprio et al)

Playing around with Stable Diffusion yields a lot of images that are kind of dream-like. The pictures can be fascinating, but a lot of the details are weird or inconsistent, or somehow "off". I suspect this isn't a coincidence. Neural nets are modeled after organic brains, and the mechanism that produces our dreams may have similarities with the noise generation functions in AI image models.

Yes, exactly I remeber when I was younger and experimenting with lucid dreaming, when I spotted something weird I checked my hands and told myself "ten fingers, not a dream" every time. And trully when I was dreaming my hand was deformed, so if I paid attention to it I could start lucid dreaming. So maybe we are not that much off with NN

How did you forcefully lucid dream?

You don't really forcefully lucid dream, you learn techniques that help you determine whether you are dreaming or not.

Some examples are not being able to turn a light on or off (because lighting in a dream is often fixed) .. or trying to focus on text (often in dreams you will read words or numbers, but it's your brain telling you what something says .. if you actually try and focus on text it often is just squiggles)

Once you start to apply these techniques in dreams, the real trick is not waking yourself up once you realize you're dreaming.

I used to do the finger-count check routinely, thinking I was interested in lucid dreaming. One time, I had eleven fingers, realised I was dreaming, freaked right the fuck out, and woke up. I now avoid counting my fingers even during the day.

If you don't count your fingers, how do you know you don't have eleven fingers right now?

Count the fingers. For god’s sake, remember. If you want to live, count the fingers.

No. History was never about a single artifact. Any item considered primary needs to be taken in context. What is the physical substrate used? Who was the author? What other items like it were produced? What other literature was written in the time? What were the social/political views at the time of the recording? What other artifacts corroborate this source? Etc.

What it will do is continue to provide fuel for confirmation bias. What we, as humans, will have to figure out from here on out is how define and deal with constructed information. Currently, the chaos being generated is too valuable to small, but significant, group of political activists; however, I suspect Gen Z will eventually have the power to require restrictions (a la food labels) and penalties for using unsubstantiated information.

The days of using the Internet as a general information source is coming to an end. There will be value in curated data sets again, like we used to have with Encyclopedias.

> There will be value in curated data sets again, like we used to have with Encyclopedias.

The problem being, we destroyed all the infrastructure around this and it will be hard to rebuild, lacking any underlying economy in the first place.

If you use these artifacts of models encompass everyone in a single ahistoric present narrative where they no longer believe anything because the images and stories they hear are filtered through a fear of being misled, you have reduced them to captives, or something lower and much worse.

Destroying history wasn't unique to the 20th century either. From burning the library at Alexandria to the Church's destruction of mesoamerican culture, it's a common tactic of dominion. The march of that ideology through Russia and Asia was designed to erase the history and identity of those people as a means to subjugate them as well, so while AI is a powerful technology, this is nobody's first rodeo.

The antidote to the AI/simulation/mental prison problem is the same as it ever was. Perhaps even with higher quality reasoning now that we can see the sophistication of something that is just a material language model. It is a material artifact, not alive or conscious, and whose products are simulacra. Even with access to all our data, what can an AI know of the experience of a being that created it, and what would it mean for our own ontology if we incorporated this knowledge as an analogy for our own experience?

That said, after I read some philosophy and religion, and some of this AI safety and simulation hypothesis stuff, I almost became a vegetarian because it wasn't so much the cruelty of eating veal I could no longer bear, but the irony.

A.I. has quickly become part of our digital history but at an enormous emotional and commercial cost to those who still prize the individualism and creativity of image-making.

Did you call the police when the AI researchers broke into your studio and stole your camera? No? Well, the cost must not have been that enormous, then.

Really getting tired of all the whining from the "artists" among us. Whining is boring. Come up with something new. You're an artist; that's your job.

But history is already pre destroyed? Roman emperors rewriting there predecessors into monsters, empires spewing nonsense to justify atrocities, the little lies the powerful on all ladder steps of societies tell themselves. Thats why historians have to be such detectives and goto sources who will not lie, like graveyards, drill cores and ancient cesspools. Cause the (re)written word, is almost always of no value when getting to the truth.

Let me get my broken record out to say that "trust" in certain institutions, as well as cryptographic signing, will become even more indispensable over time. Webs of trust where items and documents are signed by trusted organizations to be authentic/unaltered, since we won't be able to trust our eyes or ears.

How will you know the crypto hasn't been broken by "AI"?

I think at that point we'll be well and truly screwed.

But what I'm confused about is that we're supposed to be using AI to do, cancer research, solve all diseases and the mysteries of the universe, but some how cryptographically signed photos are out out the question?

I mean if we're at the point where an AI has cryptographic knowledge unknown to humanity and is using it maliciously, verified images will be the least of our problems.

What do you mean?

I don't argue that it will be impossible in the long term. Right now, though, AI doesn't seem to be able to solve fundamental new problems - only to see patterns that humans can't yet see. I don't know if it is yet expected for AI to do fundamental new research on algorithms.

I also don't think the person above you suggested it's not possible - but their point stands, AI is going to really fuck society up if there is literally no way to communicate further than seeing/hearing distance between humans without knowing if the message is genuine. We'll have solved cancer and reverted to the 1700s.

The solution might be as simple as paywalls and user verification and accepting anything in front of a paywall is just AI generated spam trash. Also teaching history out of a history book, or possibly a walled garden online platform instead of wikipedia/youtube.

I agree. As well as creating new impetus for governments to push towards RealID, I think generative AI will accelerate the rate at which websites start to wall-off behind logins and we see a resurgence in private communities.

I'm reminded of Facebook's progression over the past 5-6 years, where, in its established markets at least, most of the good stuff happens in private Facebook groups or private WhatsApp chats, not on the 'public' newsfeed/wall.

HDCP lasted... I think it might have been three years, the second time? Or maybe four years, I can't recall.

Why would any kind of camera photo signing algorithm fare better?

> Why would any kind of camera photo signing algorithm fare better?

You probably wouldn't even have to bother. If you want to fake history, just launder your images: setup rig where an SLR camera can telecine the images off a high resolution screen. With some optics you could probably also adjust the other camera parameters (like focus, f-stop) to make it more convincing.

You could imagine a timestamp being built into the signature, and maybe even gps coordinates, although I agree it wouldn't be a complete solution.

> You could imagine a timestamp being built into the signature, and maybe even gps coordinates, although I agree it wouldn't be a complete solution.

Both those things can be faked. IIRC, they make chambers right now that simulate GPS signals for testing receivers. If you can fake GPS, you can fake the time, too.

You assumed a specific instance of signing when I was talking generally.

Reporters attesting to their newsroom the authenticity of a photo, libraries and museums having stronger chain of custody and documentation of the state of their collections, etc.

As far as hardware signing, perhaps PKI and per-camera keys could be issued. HDCP was encryption with global symmetric keys, no? This would be a different case.

BS. Fake history is far older than "my brother knocked over the pot and broke it!".

This is not a historian. It's some guy who's into wet-plate photography. His style can now be easily replicated. His wet-plate work is now just an unimportant hobby.

I never thought of hobbies as having importance to the outside world. I think the whole point is that it brings you joy and can take your mind off of other things. Not every aspect of life is competition.

So as everyone's photographic style becomes easily replicated, that means all of photography will become an unimportant hobby?

Maybe it does mean that.

I'm really looking forward to the great humbling that AI will bring artists who for some reason feel their craft is sacred and thereby should be gatekept and protected.

Don't get me wrong, I love art and think it's important. But so is medicine and plumbing.

That happened to musicians years ago. "Laptop bands" were once a joke, and now they're normal. Celebrity DJs now get more attention than most musicians, and most of what DJs now do is semi-automated.

This annoys lower-tier boomer musicians, for whom Being In A Band was a big deal. That died when there were several million bands listed on Myspace.

I haven't met many artists who think that way, if anything, they work extremely hard for almost nothing at all(although that has often been the case through history). Almost no one goes into the arts to make money, some do happen to find it. But the arts evoke a very human part of ourselves, and when that is replaced with unending generated content by a computer, have fun living in a society exclusively consisting of corporate drones and homeless people.

It is good I saw photos of platypuses before Stable Diffusion.

Who manipulates the past in the eyes of the masses controls the future of these masses. So it has always been and so it will be. Only now it's much easier.

And nothing else happened for the most part. Just another new technique for "hyper retouching" and fake reality generating.

Authentication and stuff won't help because it's a mass "unique product" for mass consumption, no matter how strange it sounds.

AI will destroy every field it's applied.

People are smart enough to know it but nobody wants to admit it, so every time an article like this pops up somewhere, you can see how much people are in denial because everybody tries to minimize the impacts of AI

Is there really an incentive for people do that? I mean the effort it takes would need to be more than a few joes pumping out “George Washington in a hoodie” photos and to also drowning out all literature that was before it

I mean outside of the two World Wars, practically all the history I was taught in high school was pre photography.

Surely you’re not going to be fooled by a photograph of Julius Caesar.

Well, just like

Printing press had destroyed history, religion, culture, literature, and etc.

Radio had destroyed music industry.

Cassette player had destroyed music industry the second time.

Internet had destroyed music industry the third time.

...

Internet killed the video store.

Even Randy Marsh would agree to this

I will argue that mass media (print and broadcast) has been the most devastating force against culture in the world. You could count preaching in this category, as in the past the broadcast was a person traveling to spread a message and then a weekly church broadcast.

People used to have different customs and culture in different towns and regions. What are today's nation states used to be a rich conglomerate of different people. But countless oral traditions and stories were lost forever, or altered permanently as monotheistic culture gobbled them up.

When radio later came about, mass media became a tool of total control, and almost instantly the world was thrown into war and upheavals, as those who mastered the new medium could play the masses.

The same with TV as a propaganda tool. Those nation states that destroyed the tribes and took in them are now themselves getting quickly destroyed by a global monoculture.

Sure, there will be some traces left of the old, but a lot is lost every day.

Faking images to try and change history is as old as Stalin: https://www.history.com/news/josef-stalin-great-purge-photo-...

No, it's way, way older. As in "Hapsburg portraits" and "Ming Dynasty scrolls" old.

And let's not forget the last time a technology came around that could "fool history"; how many people still believe the moon landing was shot on a sound stage?

The notion that historians only care about images, without caring about their provenance, is absurd.

I don't know how many, but I know I do.

That's like comparing horse and carriage to a modern day truck though, no? This can be fully automated, generating photoreal content on its own. You couldn't airbrush a photo via a cron job like how you can now automate some model generating thousands of images of people rioting/looting for authoritarian purposes. Who will go through the effort of verifying every one of them? Other language models with precision issues?

> You couldn't airbrush a photo via a cron job like how you can now automate some model generating thousands of images of people rioting/looting for authoritarian purposes.

I get how this could be a problem, but it seems to me that it would only be marginally effective instead of exponentially as some assume. The reason I think this is because we already have this kind of thing going on without AI [1]. And while it does work, it's not clear to me if making the fake more realistic actually does anything for the kind of people who get worked up about this. If you want to claim Seattle is burning and it's not, just grab a picture of another place burning, and you're good. Narrative achieved.

If you can pass as authentic a photo from a different place taken at a different time, then what does it matter if you can generate a new one? Are you going to trick more people? Maybe. But I have a feeling the people who are most likely to get tricked, would have been tricked by far more mundane fraud.

[1] https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/fox-news...

People aren’t divided into “most likely to be tricked” and “least likely to be tricked”.

When you generate “photos” of Big Ben burning and throw it on Twitter, you will grab the attention of many more Londoners than you could with a random image of a burning house or whatever, many of which would at least take the time to verify. Just look at the Balenciaga Pope images.

By grabbing the attention of those you are essentially stepping into the realms of “historical alternations”.

But you recognize the difference in economic costs of forgery – and thus the probability of this happening?

> Faking images to try and change history is as old as Stalin: https://www.history.com/news/josef-stalin-great-purge-photo-...

Maybe so, but up until now forging photographs was far, far more expensive than creating real ones.

It won't be too long now until someone will be able to generate in a weekend a convincing self-consistent alternate-history series of Wikipedia articles about the second term of the Trump presidency... and stuff like that's going to fill up the historical databank of the colony ship that the last humans use to flee the dying Earth.

> history, itself, will become unalterably altered

Is ‘unalterably altered’ not a contradiction? Or does it just mean there’s no way back?

They mean no way back.

Photos have been staged / forged for a long time. The big difference is the ability for AI to create fake photos in seconds which could inundate future historians unless there was an equally quick way to spot a fake photo.

It seems that the author is not aware that previous pictures were also used as propaganda tools...

On the flip side, I'd really like to see AI make pictures of historical things that were only written about in detail.

It will forever be impossible to see these, but these would be a chance to make historical moments feel real. Its too easy to forget there were real people living through them.

A lot of our conceptions of various historical events are based on artistic interpretations and maybe this will happen at a larger scale. I.e what do you think Washington crossing the Delaware or the Last Supper looked like?

We'll make a note on that.

... the same way fiction did.

This can be easily fixed by camera creators.

How?

Digital signatures on photos, with each camera certificate signed by the manufacturer. Not sure why they don't do it at scale yet.

Given how much AI processing is done to images on-camera (well, on-phone more often) these days, I'm not sure this could provide valid "proof of genuineness".

For an example of on-phone manipulation, search for the Samsung moon incident.

And then comes Google Photos and applies a filter, goodbye signature (in this case, the phone's). Or I have an old-fashioned film camera... I guess this idea would work only with DSLRs, which aren't that popular anymore nowadays thus we won't solve that much of the original problem.

It wouldn't even work with DSLRs, as barely any image taken is used without tuning parameters or retouching.

If a digital signature would stay valid after retouching, there's no value in having it in the first place. If the picture would be re-signed on editing, what's the purpose of that signature...?

You need to have the original raw. Who cares what some mongrel does to your photo in a basement?

Pictures are used in a million ways that would make them lose the digital signature. The point is having an original that is verifiable so if it’s ever called into question, there’s evidence of truth.

Which solves what exactly?

A digital signature would basically be an EXIF that doesn't survive editing. If every photo shot in the past decade would have a certificate added by the camera, still none of the photos you see today would be signed, as they were either modified after the shot or are anyway older than a decade...

You, the creator, have the original (like a raw cr2) image, so you have proof of evidence that is was created by you, by that camera. Plus sensors have quirks that already uniquely identifies cameras...

This is trivially broken by taking a picture of a high enough resolution screen, or printout.

That’s why it needs more than just time stamp. GPS would be important too.

GPS spoofing is pretty cheap these days for a single device in a faraday cage.

First, develop cameras that timestamp and digitally sign all the photos they take.

Second, use your time machine to go back to 1800 and ensure all historical photographs are taken with such a camera.

Then when you see something that purports to be a historical photograph, you simply validate the signature and timestamp.

How is that going to help for existing historical photos?

Well, that's the archivists' job.

Nailed it. How companies line canon and Nikon haven’t jumped on this already is absolutely mind blowing.

They have to be colluding to drip-feed features. It can't be a coincidence that they are this bad.

You can take a picture of a fake picture.

Cameras designed for this purpose can mitigate the issue, but "solving" it is not easy.

Cameras can digitally sign photos to authenticate provenance. You can add timestamps and GPS coordinates to the signature, though you may be able to subvert those with enough effort. You still need to trust that whoever held the camera when it took the photo was pointing it at an actual event, not at a screen.

Rewriting could be worse. I hope there are safeguards against that, but then misinformation is already trying to do that.

Reminds me of the plot line of Metal Gear Solid 2. It seemed so goofy and far fetched at the time: a machine with ubiquitous access to digital information capable of rewriting history and news such that it controls the narrative.

Yet we see examples of informational and societal manipulation all over now. Kojima might have been about out there on the details, but on the general thesis, he was dead on.

I am tired reading shitty click bait articles from people that don't work in the field but believe they know what will destroy it. AI is tiresome not because of AI but because of attention grifters.

Anticipating the social consequences of a technology only requires understanding what that technology is capable of, not how it works. This author understands, correctly, that AI can generate realistic looking images and realistic sounding bullshit very cheaply. At that point, expertise in the social science becomes more relevant than expertise in engineering.

> Shane Balkowitsch is a wet plate collodion photographer. (…) His life’s work is “Northern Plains Native Americans: A Modern Wet Plate Perspective” a journey to capture 1,000 Native Americans in the present day in the historic process.

> Herbert Ascherman (b. 1947) is Cleveland, Ohio’s, most prominent portrait photographer. (…) Herb has a library of 2,385 books on photography. (…) Throughout his career, Herb has lectured to more than 350 organizations internationally. He has exhibited in more than 150 venues throughout the US, Europe, India, Australia and Japan.

They may not be from your domain, but they are experts in what the article is about.

They are photographers and not historians.

Mind that this is about the public image. (They expressly state that it is not the historians, those with expertise in fine detail and congruence with out-of-frame context, who they are worried about. It just happens so that they have devoted their lives to capturing and archiving and communicating such images.)

Hmmm, experts protecting the poor befuddled masses sure looks an awful lot like hurried moat building.

Hmmm, non-experts saying "Of course my mother knows everything about computer security, don't even think about telling her about the risk of viruses on the modern internet"

At least try to have some nuance here.

> I am tired reading shitty click bait articles from people that don't work in the field but believe they know what will destroy it. AI is tiresome not because of AI but because of attention grifters.

I am tired of reading shitty, low effort comments complaining about people thinking about the implications of "AI."

This article isn't click bait, unless you're under the mistaken impression that everything topical is click bait.

Article is pretty thin though and seems to exist only to show off the fake Native American photographs.

> Article is pretty thin though and seems to exist only to show off the fake Native American photographs.

So? Your comment does even less than that, and yet you still posted for us to read.

We are discussing whether the article has content or not, clickbait is a particular type of low information content on the internet which I think is an incorrect characterization of this article however I do agree it's low information, and basically the premise of the article was reverse engineered by a writer that thought "wow these photos are cool."

If you find my comments on the matter also low information, I can live with that.

I think, it's about the kind of fascination with an image that connects us to a greater narrative that is our identity. The notion that these generated images do fascinate, while connecting us to a non-existing narrative, is neither out of context nor just superficial, nor is so the exhibition of these images. The fascination emanating from these images (thanks to the transfer of textures and hints of authenticity) is pretty much the point, which is framed in a particular context, namely that of narratives and identities. I.e., we may be on the verge of a second colonialization, to repeat what colonial rewrite has done to local histories and identities.

Provenance, patina, narrative all of these live inside your head and have nothing to do with reality. It’s the perverse motive of the collector seeking unchanging authenticity. Everything and everyone evolves and changes over time. You can’t stop the clocks.

>Provenance, patina, narrative all of these live inside your head and have nothing to do with reality.

They that control the narrative control the future.

If you believe you are right and you can do no wrong, you are going to have a much different interface with reality then a person that realizes they've made mistakes in the past. The best way to prevent making a mistake in the future is learning from ones past. Of course that past has to be real to correctly learn from it.

Mind that this about none of these. It is about what images mean to us, how we are accustomed to read them, and how this may be thus invalidated, or, even worse, how these simulacra may produce a false vector pointing towards us, including any notion of change or variety, as they are universally deemed to (pre)serve a narrative of how we became what. No clocks involved. (As for the public image, as opposed to historians and their curated interpretation, think of them more as a talisman for reality than a record of reality, it just happens so that these aspects currently/still tend to overlap.)

PS: I'm pretty sure, at least Shane Balkowitsch, as someone producing in the ancient process of wet plates, is quite aware of the aspects of the image as a produced image, produced by certain processes, under certain circumstances of production, as an opus operatum bearing all the marks – and what goes with this. What does it mean to extend this lineage to modern captures, to incorporate modern imagery into this ancestry? Surely, there's an intend and some understanding. What does it mean, if the image isn't anymore an opus operatum in the traditional sense, but just a generated one, generated by an imperative prompt, if its depiction isn't the trace of a real subject (as in likeness), but extracted from a compressed semantic field built from a biased aspect of assorted imagery and controlled by a REL instance trained to select pleasing images? What does this mean to us, when the photo loses its quality as an index? Or, worse, if we still pretend that there should be such an index, just because we're accustomed to this – and the texture feels like it?

The guy was fascinated by a prompt of native americans and that's it there is nothing with merit behind this article. Your comment is also pretty much passive agressive low effort garbage.

Remember when photoshop was going to rewrite history? I do.

It didn't happen.

> Remember when photoshop was going to rewrite history? I do.

> It didn't happen.

I actually don't. My recollection is quality photoshops were always a rarity.

But that's going to change, and quantity has a quality all of its own.

I didn't read the article solely because of the headline. Any statement like this made about any new tech development is automatically false.

Funny, I feel the same about blanket generalizations.

AI imagery destroys our pre-conceived notions about the rigid nature of history. It enables us to question the concept of history as we’ve been taught.

> AI imagery destroys our pre-conceived notions about the rigid nature of history. It enables us to question the concept of history as we’ve been taught.

Say what now?

Kind of like dragons destroy our notion of biology and natural selection, you mean.

I'm open to the idea that history does involve narrative spinning, and frequently facts arrive not from primary sources but inferences from said primary sources and can be incorrect.

With that said this is about completely fabricated facts/evidence. Pretty different. Imagine a future where AI generated fake moon landing photos outnumber genuine photos and large swathes of the internet population believe with certainty the moon landing was faked as a result.

Maybe a crypto person would know more, but couldn't some DAO be incentivized to verify the authenticity of current known historical documents/images and create a block chain of agreed upon authentic historical imagery? The longer it takes for us to do that, maybe the more likely falsifications can slip in, but I have a feeling that the real world nature of many history books and libraries means we can have a pretty strong head start.

you still have the issue of "junk in, junk out". Being on a block chain does absolutely nothing to ensure that the information on the chain is correct. There isn't really any reason to use a DAO for this vs a standard database.

As a crypto person, I don't think a DAO would really add anything here. Individuals or traditional organization "signing" their endorsements of contents authenticity will become a bigger thing in the future. It's not that different from SSL. When you access a website using modern cryptography the content is effectively endorsed by that organization as authentic.

Some people feel threatened by AI because it makes their skills or creations seem outdated, and they blame AI for their problems. They see AI as the enemy. It's hard for them to accept, but AI is here to stay. Eventually, they will have to come to terms with it. Once they let go of their pride and stop focusing on the wrong things, everyone will realize the incredible benefits AI can offer humanity. It's worrisome that some individuals would rather hold onto their own importance than embrace the potential of AI to help everyone. This mindset is unfortunate.

You've begun the conversation, but what is the next step? You've identified that people feel threatened. Why do you think that is? It strikes me that pride is rarely a defensive response. What are the things they should be focusing on? In a system defined by one's ability to capitalize on one's individual importance, what less unfortunate mindset should be taken?

You've answered your own question: Change the system.

If we get too good at automating jobs there should be a social safety net so we can all enjoy the fruits of AI.

I guess my attempts at leading the conversation where I wanted it to go were not as subtle as I had hoped.

I absolutely agree the system is in dire need of some attention. I think a lot of the reaction you see around this new iteration of technology comes from people who worry that that attention will not be given. People who suddenly feel as insecure as all the other people in history left behind by growing automation. It's less pride, and more fear. And I don't feel like it's unjustified fear, given our track record.

Some people have an unfortunate mindset of wanting to shut down AI systems because they feel their art or job is threatened. However, I believe that the benefits of AI for society far outweigh these individual concerns. We must acknowledge that there may be issues with companies preferring AI over human employees, leading to potential unemployment. But, businesses wouldn't benefit from having poorer consumers, so it doesn't make sense to increase productivity at the cost of consumer power.

Society must adapt to allow AI technologies to flourish and relieve humans of mundane tasks. We should identify tasks that only humans should manage, differentiate between human-made art and AI-generated art without banning generative processes, and find a way for everything to work together. AI can even help in building a new society based on these principles, possibly leading us towards a resource-based economy where money becomes less important.

> businesses wouldn't benefit from having poorer consumers, so it doesn't make sense to increase productivity at the cost of consumer power.

I think your logic is impeccable here, and yet we frequently see businesses making decisions that do exactly that. The growing wealth gap seems to be indication enough. I can posit all sorts of explanations for why that might be but I'm much more curious as to what you imagine a fix for it might look like, from your model. Or do you think it will simply fix itself once things "bottom out" as it were (and not to present a false dichotomy).

> relieve humans of mundane tasks

In the economy/system we currently have, mundane tasks are entire classes of jobs. Jobs not frequently pursued out of passion, but necessity since it is very difficult to survive without a source of income, and a baseline of health insurance. And even more difficult to grow. So while I love the vision of that future, I'm much more interested in what the bridge to getting there looks like. Because traditionally we haven't built those bridges, we've just hoped enough survivors will learn how to swim.

> resource-based economy where money becomes less important

In the current society/economic system, money is a proxy for the abstract concept of resource. Do you mean a more direct resource foundation, like a barter system? An economy that moves without the lubrication of a finance industry using the abstraction of money to provide liquidity? Something different?

Won't somebody think of the benefits!

> Once they let go of their pride and stop focusing on the wrong things, everyone will realize the incredible benefits AI can offer humanity. It's worrisome that some individuals would rather hold onto their own importance than embrace the potential of AI to help everyone. This mindset is unfortunate.

Yeah, people. Let go of your pride, come to terms with your newfound uselessness, and accept your newfound poverty like a man. It's called progress. You should be happy that AI helped capital (i.e. everyone that matters) save the money it used to have to pay to feed you.

People should believe in themselves because they will always be useful. Many jobs will go away, but new ones will appear. The key is to work with AI, not against it. Everyone must start working together with AI to find their place in the future world.

> People should believe in themselves because they will always be useful.

Some people may always be useful, but that doesn't mean you will be useful.

Every change looks good if you insist on looking at it through the eyes of the winners, however small that group may be.

> Many jobs will go away, but new ones will appear.

Maybe there will be new opportunities for prostitution, for people desperate enough.

> The key is to work with AI, not against it. Everyone must start working together with AI to find their place in the future world.

A sanguine platitude, but what if your place in the future world is at the bottom, in poverty? The arc of the most recent waves of automation have included increasing inequality that has caused a lot of bitterness and loss.

I'd argue, their argument is that their skills will be now needed more than ever. But this isn't exactly about individual careers. It's more about identity (who are we, where do we come from, how do we know?) and the system embedding media (and its economies) as a whole. IMHO, bothering about such things isn't just unfortunate.

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