No one’s ready for this: Our basic assumptions about photos capturing reality are about to go up in smoke.

jeffw@lemmy.world to Technology@lemmy.world – 415 points –
No one’s ready for this
theverge.com
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It doesn't matter. Any time there are any stakes at all (and plenty of times there aren't), there's someone who will do the work.

It doesnt matter if you cant trust anything you see? What if you couldn't be sure if you weren't talking to bot right now?

Photos/video from unknown sources have already been completely worthless as evidence for a solid decade. If you used a random picture online to prove a point 5 years ago, you were wrong. This does not change that reality in any way.

The only thing changing is your awareness that they're not credible.

What about reliable sources becoming less reliable? Knowing something is not credible doesn't help if i can't know what is credible

They are not reliable sources. You cannot become less reliable than "not at all", and that has been the state of pictures and videos for many years already. There is absolutely no change to the evidentiary value of pictures/video.

Making the information more readily available does not change the reality that pictures aren't evidence.

I'm not talking about evidence, i'm talking about fundamendal being able to trust anything digital at all in any context. What if you couldnt be sure if phonecall from your friend was actually from your friend or if you cant be sure about any picture shown to you if its actually about some real thing.

Things you need to be able to trust in daily life dont have to be court-level evidence. That is what abuse of ai will take from us.

It's the exact same thing. You're drawing a distinction between two identical things.

Pictures have not been credible for a long time. You shouldn't have "trusted" a picture for anything 5 years ago.

The only thing that's in any way different is that now you know you can't trust it.

I suppose the conclusion is that we need better ways to verify things

The conclusion is to learn to be comfortable with uncertainty.

The world is inherently uncertain, all the way down to the possibility of measuring subatomic particles.