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AI-generated imagery: you might never be able to trust the internet again
AI-generated art by Midjourney and Stable Diffusion is just the tip of the iceberg
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Ever since the rise of deepfakes, citizens and governments have gotten increasingly concerned about fake photos and videos. Everyone seemed to be in danger: people with the right to vote might be target of political disinformation campaigns using deepfakes; people in court might be unable to distinguish a false piece of video evidence from a true one; people with jealous partners might find their faces appear in a porn clip — and struggle to explain that they never made that clip.
Some technologists dismissed the huge danger that deepfakes posed. Pictures have always been tampered with, they said, so what would make deepfakes more dangerous than Photoshop or the film industry in Hollywood?
The answer is their scale. Prior to the existence of deepfakes, editors had to spend hours to modify a single photo or video in a convincing way. Now, a computer can generate a deepfake in a matter of seconds.
This opened the floodgates for disinformation campaigns. Most recently, a deepfake got widespread attention in which Ukrainian president Zelenskyy told his soldiers to lay down his arms. It was quickly dismissed; but…