Forging photos before Photoshop was the work of nation states - and skepticism was low, a fabricated truth was readily accepted.
Photoshop _should_ have destroyed that, but the skill and time to fabricate truth was still high; skepticism remained low.
Now, with AI, the cost of fabricating truth is rapidly approaching zero. Within the last year, nearly everyone I talk to is skeptical of nearly everything. They see an image, or read an article, and wonder if they're being bamboozled.
I see this as a net positive. We are counterintuitively rediscovering skepticism by democratizing nation-state propaganda.
I believe this is a printing press moment, where truth will be spoken to power once again. I just hope we avoid the bloodshed that that the printing press wrought.
Forging photos before Photoshop was the work of nation states
That might be a bit of an overstatement. There were plenty of non-nation states doing image manipulation before digital image manipulation. Double exposure, piecing together negatives and retouching for example was done early in photography's history.
Just one example from ~1850:
Henry Peach Robinson [...] was an English pictorialist photographer best known for his pioneering combination printing - joining multiple negatives or prints to form a single image;
Indeed. At summer camp at age 8, I brushed my face into a photograph of the Grand canyon, by making a mask with an air brush and double exposing it into the photo paper sitting in emulsion.
I see this as a net positive. We are counterintuitively rediscovering skepticism by democratizing nation-state propaganda.
I think you've just described converting a high-trust society into a low-trust one, and I am inclined to think that this is not a good development. That might result in some healthy scepticism of authority, but it'll also get you a thousand Alex Jones and two thousand No Plane Theories.
I believe this is a printing press moment, where truth will be spoken to power once again. I just hope we avoid the bloodshed that that the printing press wrought.
I, too, would like all of the possible good things and none of the possible bad things from any given technological change. Hoping for that won't help much; it might be good, might suck, or somewhere in between and we find some way to muddle through.
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That sentence hit me hard too.
Forging photos before Photoshop was the work of nation states - and skepticism was low, a fabricated truth was readily accepted.
Photoshop _should_ have destroyed that, but the skill and time to fabricate truth was still high; skepticism remained low.
Now, with AI, the cost of fabricating truth is rapidly approaching zero. Within the last year, nearly everyone I talk to is skeptical of nearly everything. They see an image, or read an article, and wonder if they're being bamboozled.
I see this as a net positive. We are counterintuitively rediscovering skepticism by democratizing nation-state propaganda.
I believe this is a printing press moment, where truth will be spoken to power once again. I just hope we avoid the bloodshed that that the printing press wrought.
That might be a bit of an overstatement. There were plenty of non-nation states doing image manipulation before digital image manipulation. Double exposure, piecing together negatives and retouching for example was done early in photography's history.
Just one example from ~1850:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Peach_Robinson
Indeed. At summer camp at age 8, I brushed my face into a photograph of the Grand canyon, by making a mask with an air brush and double exposing it into the photo paper sitting in emulsion.
I think you've just described converting a high-trust society into a low-trust one, and I am inclined to think that this is not a good development. That might result in some healthy scepticism of authority, but it'll also get you a thousand Alex Jones and two thousand No Plane Theories.
I, too, would like all of the possible good things and none of the possible bad things from any given technological change. Hoping for that won't help much; it might be good, might suck, or somewhere in between and we find some way to muddle through.
Or children: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cottingley_Fairies
I don't want "democratized" flat-earther GenAI slop being given equal billing as Hubble or James Web imagery (aka NASA propaganda)
Smallpox. Authoritatian Populism. Etc.
This is why credentialism matters. Some things are good to be skeptical of. Others, not so much.