Images of Spain's floods weren't made by AI. Trouble is, people think they were

theguardian.com

11 points·edward··6 comments

The only way to solve this is to have publishers you trust to label every source. If you hang out on platforms that tolerate or even encourage generated content without proper attribution, of course everything will be in doubt. I don't know how people can remain stuck in such an ugly place.

Can't this be solved by having cameras cryptographically hash images concurrently with their generation?

Even easier with video: Hash each frame in a way that's dependent on the previous frame. A hashchain, if you will.

Totally impossible with text, of course. AI text can be, in theory, genuinely undetectable.

> Can't this be solved by having cameras cryptographically hash images concurrently with their generation?

No. This can be only solved by having "integrity", something very few journalists have.

What happens after someone extracts the hashing key off of the camera?

Well then you have >>definitely real<< AI generated picture. I don't think that problem has a technological solution, but a regulatory one - each generated picture must be somehow marked (i.e. via a watermark invisible for human, but difficult to delete by a program) that it is AI generated. If a person or a company fails to do so, massive fines are on their way.

I feel like that horse has already fled the stable.

Stable Diffusion has been kicking around in the wild for a couple of years now, and probably a million people are running it. You can't really criminalize that.

But key generation and storage can be in a hardware module, and tied to a unique device, so it would be quite difficult to hijack -- and, if you did, you'd only get very limited use out of it. So there might be a technological solution. Maybe not a perfect one, but one that's at least plausibly useful.

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