[Nick Zwar]

Yes, I’m aware of the problem. It’s basically new (and “new” in terms of “in recent years”, which in terms of governing is legally, socially, morally, etc. is “five minutes ago”).

On the one hand it’s true that A.I. just “absorbs” anything if can, on the other hand, that’s actually what artists do as well, absorb all kinds of novels, symphonies, pictures, etc. that have been done, and then creating producing something new. So it’s really not as simple as it looks.

Obviously, a red elephant jogging on the beach is not real, but just 10 years ago, everybody would have known it’s animated. CGI imagery is nothing new, except now anyone can type into a prompt the type of image they want to have generated.

The thing with A.I. is: A.I. doesn’t know anything, but it can absorb everything. And in absorbing it can recognize patterns. So let’s say it’s seen a million pictures of unicorns (obviously, all of these were done by “artists” in some way), millions of pictures of a bank, and millions of pictures of cats, and it knows lots of concepts, and now you prompt it now to create a cat that’s just done a Bank robbery and rides away on a Unicorn… so it can mash these things together… I just did this:

The funny thing is, I had quite an argument with the Azure Image generator about this. It did not want to do the image, because “it cannot depict felonies”. I argued with it, WTF, I just want a cartoony image of a cat escaping on a unicorn with sacks on money in its paws from a bank, but the A.I. refused. However, I tricked it to provide such an image nevertheless.

However, the problem is clearly that it will be increasingly difficult to rely on visual and audio-visual media as “evidence” for anything… since anything can be faked. Funny elephants on the beach are at least something that’s not deceiving anyone, of course, we’re at the beginning of a new era. And I mean that, this is basically just “starting”. We’re at the dawn of an age were photorealistic audio-visual imagery can be created of anything by anyone, which will obviously severely impact the trustworthiness of such imagery. The source will become more important than the image.