What the hell is a picture?

Day 290 / 366

There used to be a saying that if you didn’t see it, it didn’t happen. Photos used to be the ultimate proof. But it seems it is not the case anymore. Everything has changed with AI.

Fake photos have been out there for the longest time. Photoshop was used to doctor photos. I remember even as a school kid, I would use Photoshop to swap heads of people in the photos I took on my digital camera. But most of these doctored photos were easily identifiable. Only an expert could make a photoshopped pic that would be realistic.

But with AI, faking photos has become easier and easier. Just today I saw a demo of a feature they are going to add in photoshop which will use their AI model to automatically make poor Photoshop look realistic. Generative AI pics are more common than you think, and I myself have been fooled by many such pics online.

I think this is a bigger problem than people realise. It will soon become easy for anyone to upload any sort of fake pic they want online. We will not know what’s real and what’s not. How will it affect social media? If I post a fake pic of me at the Coldplay concert, but it looks real, then does it matter to my followers if I actually went to the concert or not?

This is a rare time when I feel that we need some sort of government regulation over these AI models. They need to add some sort of an invisible watermark so that the pics generated by AI can be identified and marked.