the cat is out of the bag. every nation and company is racing to invent the most advanced AI ever. and we are entering times when negative impact of AI outweighs the positive use of it.
I am really feeling uneasy about the uncertain times ahead of us.
So AI really is a seminal paradigm-changing technology. For the worse.
Automatic spam generator.
The past we know is a carefully crafted and curated story and not at all accurate as it is. It is valuable to learn and understand but also be skeptical. I don’t really think wide spread forgery changes that. Historiography is a very important field.
Any serious historical research will have to verify the physical copies exist or existed in a documented way to be admitted as evidence. This is called chain of custody and is already required.
That’s for historians and professional researchers. It may not sway the field at large, but it’s still a huge risk to public opinion. I shudder to think of the propaganda implications for rewriting history in a near indistinguishable way.
Public opinion can be swayed with a TV advertisement by a game show host and real estate developer. We are all so insanely propagandized now it can’t be more so.
The article opens:
When I first started colorizing photos back in 2015, some of the reactions I got were, well, pretty intense. I remember people sending me these long, passionate emails, accusing me of falsifying and manipulating history.
So this is hardly an AI-specific issue. It’s always been something to be on guard for. As others in this thread have pointed out, Stalin was airbrushing out political rivals from photos back in the 30s. Heck damnatio memoriae goes back as far as history itself does. Ancient Pharoahs would have the names of their predecessors chiseled off of monuments so they could “claim” them as their own work.
I mean, the ability to churn out maybe amounts of these fake photos with no effort on the part of the user, causing them to pollute real Internet searches (also now “augmented” by MLB themselves) is definitely AI specific.
Also, colorizing photos is not the same thing as making fake ones.
