Take a quick look at the picture a friend of mine shared on social media:
Now be honest - did you assume it was an output from a generative model? I certainly asked myself if it was.
After spending a moment to scrutinize my reaction, I started thinking about what it meant for the trust I still put in images and videos I see in the media, both traditional and social.
The cost of generating compelling fakes is going to only decrease, drastically. In a year (or five - it doesn’t really matter), we will be able to create a fictional, realistic depiction of anything we can imagine, completely offline, on our phones, just for the creative fun of it.
Unfortunately, the same technology is going to supercharge generation of misinformation on an industrial scale.
Forget about obviously fake Twitter accounts or bot farms pumping nonsense directly into Reddit’s comment sections. Think big - like entire, professionally looking “news sites” with made up videos, pictures, articles, user comments and author bios linking to equally bogus LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook and Instagram profiles. Targeting real users with tailored feeds based on data extracted from their social media accounts.
Add quality branding, on the level of that used by CNN or BBC, and have everything generated based on a set of prompts, on demand, according to the desired style and narrative, fully believable and without a shred of authenticity.
Imagine large scale, fully automated misinformation, orders of magnitude grander and more persuasive than what we are already facing.
Without public, open processes for establishing a chain of custody and trust, it is going to be increasingly difficult to maintain the good skepticism that helps us question our sources and think independently, and easier to be taken over by the bad kind - the one that leads to questioning of absolutely everything. Leaving us without a sense of shared reality, not able to make a sound judgement about what is real and what is not.
I am not sure what solutions could there be. A decentralized repository of vetted digital assets, maintained by a federation of public institutions (archives, libraries, universities) and media companies would be an option. The underlying technology could involve some implementation of a blockchain-based ledger, but this is besides the point. Most importantly, if we are to make it, it will require cooperation, technology and collective will to establish, by legal custom or regulatory enforcement of standards that define what constitutes a trusted source [1].
By the way, the picture is authentic, and depicts an ostrich jockey on a street in Brussels, in 1933. Originally black and white, it was professionally colorized.
The issue is not new, also in the context of blockchain: https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/blockchain/articles/10.3389/fbloc.2024.1306058/full ↩︎