People have been creating and posting realistic looking fake celebrity nudes for quite literally decades now, but now they’re using AI and its suddenly a problem?
I’m not sure if you noticed, but people who write for a living have suddenly started writing quite a lot about how technology that can write and generate media are bad.
Which is so silly, because AI writing still needs a human editor. I write for a living and there tons of work that involves using AI as a tool to increase productivity rather than to replace writers completely… like photoshop didnt put photographers out of business it just changed the work flow.
I work in a clinical setting where some Doctors are trying an AI program for generating their clinical notes out of the casual conversation between them and the patient. It’s way off its mark for what we demand in quality. It requires significant editing from the healthcare provider, and if the note is very robust it quickly becomes more of a chore than modern voice transcription. Our review is not great so far.
It’s because a person can crank out a deep fake in 3 hours, and a crappy one in one. It never cropped up because… well lets be real it was a couple of weirdos that were doing it, unless it bubbles up from the dark corners of the internet you risk the Streisand effect by bringing attention to it.
AI can crank out 40 in a minute. 7200 in three hours. That’s an entirely different beast. The sheer mass and volume ramps up the odds of any image bubbling up from the dark corners of the web falling into the limelight and now this problem that wasn’t big enough to merit thought is rearing up it’s ugly head right in front of us.
You can generate unique pictures of Taylor Swift faster than even Taylor swift can generate pictures of Taylor Swift. Within one hour of Taylor swift being seen with a man (and you have enough images of the man) you can create a dozen images of her on a date with that man and attempt to sell them to paparazzi.
The problem is volume. Just like how email made everyone connected and allowed the Nigerian Prince scandal to occur.
I don’t think many have gone viral on social media before or took less than 5 minutes to create. My uneducated guess is that previously this stuff would be in some niche forum in the recesses of the internet
Damn look at that, been accessible for decades
The tools are accessible. I wish this place wasn’t full of weirdo ai tech bros sometimes.