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Comment by int0x29 | Hacker News Reader

Accepting blindly destroying the concept of thruth should not be the hacker ethos either.

It's already possible to lie with text. Pixels are pixels. If we can't blindly believe pixels to show the truth, we will be simply back to the pre-photography era which managed to have a concept of truth regardless.

When could you ever trust pixels?

You and I did whenever we assumed the pixels were an upload of a digitized photo taken with an actual camera of, say, a historical event, or something in nature (e.g. some rare bird), a birthday party, etc.

The photo could be staged (e.g. Cottingley Fairies), it could be altered physically (like cutting or painting over, e.g. Stalin), it could be cropped intentionally to tell a different story (plenty of examples), and more recently it could be photoshopped, etc. All of these were possible, though harder than it is now, but let's not pretend we didn't "trust pixels". We all did, just as we trusted newspaper photographs. Now that era must come to a firm end, and I believe it's a tragedy.

Photoshop is older then the web...

Where did I mention the web?

For the umpteenth time, scale and ease of access and propagation matters.

A knife and a handgun aren’t comparable to a machine gun and a bomb. When you have equal access to all of those, the damage you can enact is exponentiated.

You could lie with text before, but it took effort and time and skill to do it convincingly. You could also lie with images but they took even more time and effort and skill, greatly limiting the pool of people who could do it and the possible damage.

When anyone anywhere can convincingly lie and have it do two laps around the world in a matter of minutes, the whole game changes.

It’s becoming very hard to believe that people making arguments like yours are doing so in good faith. Maybe you’re not even a person but a shill bot. That’s a very real and trivial possibility today, which is the whole point and illustrates the problem.

It's best for privacy not to do this in the first place because:

- Watermarks are optional by AI provider so bad actors will circumvent by using another provider

- GH project proves watermarks can be removed

Given these, trying to ensure "truth" is a futile effort unfortunately, and watermarking only gives companies advantage to violate privacy

It either works reliably or it doesn't; if it doesn't, it's better that everybody be clear about that.

Fair enough. While I would kind of wish AI could be reliably detected, deep down I know this is impossible and it would be pretty bad if we had, say, a prosecution that succeeded because "this 'provably-non-AI' photo places you at the scene of the crime" because only a few underground people know how to remove a watermark.

I also wonder if being able to prove that an image or video isn’t AI generated would lend credence to it, while in reality there are other methods to produce falsified video.

Well, you just have to convince the jury. The defense attorney will try to throw up all the reasons it could be falsified, but the prosecutor will say "All of that is unlikely - the defense attorney would like you to believe that farfetched story, but this is still a compelling piece of evidence." This is how it always is with any kind of testimony and evidence.

You raise an interesting point about the artificial generation of evidence used in court. In 1992, Michael Crichton wrote the book Rising Sun, which centers around the editing of security camera video footage to coverup a murder.

Not necessarily. Knowing an image for sure is fake has value, even if you can’t guarantee the reverse is true.

What stops someone from adding a watermark to an actually photographed (carefully framed?) picture to discredit it? There is no certainty either way, just suggestions from someone else about what the truth might be.

No need to theorize, this is already happening.

If you want to discredit an imagine, upload a slightly ai-edited copy of it.

For C2PA and exif, these aren't watermarks, just metadata. You could already remove them with exiftool.

AI watermarks only give the illusion of maintaining the concept of truth. The government and corporations will still have access to un-watermarked models to destroy the truth with.

The concept of truth? A bit overblown don't you think? Because some guy can make a realistic looking fake videos that destroys the "concept" of truth? How?

Nobody said that?

Saying that watermarking fake things is bad kinda strongly implies it

Stalin had no issues photoshopping images almost 100 years ago.

Stalin had all the resources imaginables at his disposal.

Now Nancy, a tech-phobic waitress who has a grudge against her coworker can make up an entire scenario with one prompt and her colleagues might blindly believe her.

Let's not pretend they're the same thing.

Gen AI is inevitable. Watermarking is likely futile. But in my opinion it is still very important to discuss how, as a society, we're going to live in a post-truth world now that anybody can, IN SECONDS, not only fabricate a story but also spread it to thousands of people through their social media.

Simple, don't trust what you see on the internet, which has been a constant since the mid 90's when it was invented.

When that idea was originated, the advice was more like:

"Don't trust what you see on the Internet. Trust instead what you read in a reputable daily newspaper, or Peter Jennings or Tom Brokaw on the nightly news, or BBC World News."

Today, the Internet, especially the part which is not trustable, has nearly finished killing most of the "trustworthy" news sources, by outcompeting them for ad dollars - by being way better at targeting ads (e.g. Meta) and by scientifically perfecting addiction (e.g. TikTok). What remains is mostly controlled by governments and has far from a perfect record of being fact-based and impartial.[1] There are a ton of independent people out there in good faith posting facts on the Internet, but we just agreed that we shouldn't trust what we see on the Internet.

So doesn't this become "Don't trust anything"? And doesn't that, in practice, get implemented as "Don't trust anything that challenges what you believe to be true"? This feels like a really, really bad change to our society - and I'd argue it's already completely happened.

[1] https://apnews.com/article/bbc-gaza-documentary-hamas-sancti...

This isn't just ads, trust in the mainstream media, itself, is very low [1], deservedly so in my opinion. The continuous lies by omission, the outright incorrect headlines/articles that they edit after a day, the lock-step messaging, alignment, and avoidance of topics, pushed by their respective political parties/billionaire owners (6 companies own 90% of media [2]), made me switch to more independent journalists.

[1] https://news.gallup.com/poll/695762/trust-media-new-low.aspx

[2] https://www.businessinsider.com/these-6-corporations-control...

As bad as it is, is still miles better than Internet posts by randos.

Which independent journalists do you like?

> switch to more independent journalists.

I have no objection to this -- I follow a few that I would say meet that definition well and which I trust. But boy do I worry that for 90% of the population, this translates to picking a bunch of enthusiastic propagandists whose bias is far worse than MSNBC, Fox News, or CNN ever were. I assume our craven and corrupt political parties will increasingly focus on propping up "independent journalists" who repeat their talking points for them.

Growing up I was told the newspaper is only good for reading the time.

Adequately implementing solves one problem (the making up a story because of a grudge), but creates a whole new set of likely much worse problems: how does one maintain a democracy / civil society? It's not just the trust of "social media" that you've eroded, you've almost certainly killed trust in traditional news reporting as well, especially considering just how much of traditional media is discovered via social media.

Effective democracy requires an informed voter base. Society requires its constituents to be invested in its continuity. Neither of those is achievable when we completely discard trust.

Not simple because plenty of people do. It's not what you do per say, it's how it effects society.

People will just become numb to images and video and trust nothing: this is already happening.

Yes, it's happened. Except a lot of people do have an exception - they'll trust the slop that reinforces their existing biases, or even if they know in their hearts it's not true, viewing their side's lies regularly still has an effect on the way they think.

Good point. Sometimes I wonder if social media, just almost every aspect of it, is the real cancer. Allowing just about anyone (globally) to anonymously deploy information warfare via the social media vector just seems bound to have horrible outcomes. It's just as bad with text as with images or video. Because of social media, we've trained at least 3 separate generations to self-sort into camps with customized ideological info sources that have incredibly-low standards for fact-checking and every incentive to tell their audience (1) exactly what they want and (2) whatever will enrage them most.

AI kind of makes this worse, but also only barely. Because most people really ought to know by now that almost any content could be AI, a video of, say, Trump kicking a baby or violating a goat wouldn't convince anyone that those acts happened (unless they already believed they happened).

Thing is, we're so flooded in biased BS, and no one has any incentive to produce non-sensational, factual news. I absolutely see 'post-truth' as the inevitability. You can't "weed a garden" when it is 100% weeds. The term "news" will cease to mean facts, and just become a branch of entertainment. Kind of the way "Reality TV" went from being supposedly a documentary (e.g. COPS) to just being a flavor of entertainment, where nothing needs to be real.

Generating realistic video of arbitrary things and people at scale is quite a bit of a different game than retouching photos

A good example why fake images are bad.

Do you want to make it easier for the next Stalin?

The genie has been out of the bottle for 100 years, it's delusional to think that some voluntary watermark is going to stop that.

In reality, all images will cease to be trustworthy and there's nothing that can be done about this.

Why are humans powerless to do anything about this? Aren't we making the technology? It's kind of a big problem for the future of the justice system and politics.

Because local models exist and you can't take them away.

Drugs are banned, they still exist. Many torrents flourish (that violate copyright laws), humans can't seem to stop those.

Generative AI has too much commercial utility to ever be "snatched back" at this point through legislative means.

> It's kind of a big problem for the future of the justice system and politics.

People will adapt, but this "big problem" is going nowhere.

Before the invention of photography, all we had were paintings and drawings. You wouldn't trust a painting to faithfully represent the truth.

We already have the problem of people blindly trusting shit they read on the Internet.

Stalin controlled the state. The state controls companies. Companies control watermarking.

This sort of solution to the fake image problem, makes it easier for stalin not harder. If everyone can make fake images that is one thing. If only the dictator can, well that is much worse.

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