#this isnt exactly my usual brand of pro AI post

[kvothbloodless]

I will say the whole "that's AI" "no it isnt" thing, the whole "AI is ginna make it impossible to tell whether a photo is real or not" thing, kinda drives me insane. Like. You remember photoshop exists, yea? This is nearly word for word the way the (only somewhat unjustified) panic about photoshop went. And its true! The existance of easily accessed photoshop Did make it slightly harder to determine whether a photo was real or not! You had to use some common sense and always retain some skepticism about anything other than a well verified image. But this didnt cause any like. Massive widescale issues.

So Im always just Baffled by this line of fear about AI cause like...this doesnt actually make the problem any worse? Photoshop is already extremely widespread and accessible? AI is probably not going to have a large effect on the number of well disguised fake images circulating, once the initial buzz runs out (alsp happened with photoshop, afaik).

Continuing with slightly more serious thing under the cut

This is also true for AI porn. Like, im not gonna get into the ethical debate about it, but regardless of anything else. Fake porn of celebrities already exists! There are in fact multiple websites dedicated to it. Using photoshop. A creep taking someones photos off facebook and using photoshop to make porn of them is Already an issue, which is why there are already policies about it, which can neatly be used with AI doing the same thing, because its functionally identical.

I cant remember the exact post, but there was one going around a while ago that essentially said "the barrier to doing [bad thing] isnt really how easy it is to do or how accessible it is, its people being willing to do it". AI is a decent step up from photoshop in terms of accessible ways to make decent quality fake images, but its a Miniscule increase compared to the one that occured when photoshop and social media became widespread. Since then, the barrier has been "how many people are willing to lie or be creeps", and AI isnt really going to have that big affect on how skeptical you need to be of important images that might be fake or how careful you should be with images of yourself online.