The issue with AI and why it'll remain a polarising subject
Trust. Our society is built on it, and it’d be difficult for anyone to deny that. Sure, we sign contracts and deals, but at the end of the day, we trust that the other party will deliver the service we’ve signed up for. We trust our partners to love us and act in a way that won’t bring us harm. We trust our parents to do all that’s best for the family. We trust our friends with our secrets.
For years—decades even—we’ve learned to trust photographs and videos as the ultimate proof of life. You could take a video of the man who robbed your house to court as proof. You could submit photographs of your damaged car to an insurance company as proof. You could show your friends and family photos from that dream trip you finally took as proof.
I feel like all of that started to shift recently. What sparked this? It’s a worry that I’ve had ever since I saw the Pope in that white winter jacket. Remember that one? Recently, however, YouTube recommended this video to me (and yes, I am a die-hard Marvel fan), and it really made me realize that we’ve already made a wrong turn somewhere.
The above video is supposedly the main trailer for the upcoming Thunderbolts movie, but once you start reading the description, and once you start looking at some of the questionable shots and frames from previous trailers and old movies, you’ll realize that it’s a fan-made video, created using 'clever' editing techniques and a lot of AI-generated footage. I’m a 3D artist; I look at stuff like this every day, so I know and can tell which frames exactly are fake. But if you take a second and look through the comments, you’ll notice how many people have no idea that this is not real. This account has over a million subscribers and, I’m sure, is making quite the income from selling all those cheap T-shirts. It’s business; I get it. What disappoints me is that this is only the beginning of AI, and people’s trust is already being abused on a daily basis. Imagine where this will go. Have you seen Sora, the AI video generator by OpenAI? It is incredibly good and very convincing, even more so than the stuff in the video above. I fear that we’re slowly arriving at a point where we won’t be able to trust photos and videos. And my question is: what then? What will happen to that incredibly vital piece of CCTV footage with the face of your partner’s killer? Will it still be considered a 100% real representation of reality? Will the judge trust it?
Will you?
