Stalin famously ordered people he had killed erased from photos.
Imagine what current and future autocratic regimes will be able to achieve when they want to rewrite their histories.
Stalin famously ordered people he had killed erased from photos.
This checks out, here’s an article about it: https://www.history.com/news/josef-stalin-great-purge-photo-retouching
So why are you downvoted? Maybe because your view is too optimistic? And the problem isn’t only with autocratic regimes. But much more general.
How do we validate anything, when everything can be easily faked?
Probably just because some people really like Stalin, and have become convinced his accounts are the truthful ones and everyone else lies about him.
With AI video also getting increasingly impressive and believable, I worry that we will soon live in a world where you could have actual video evidence of a murder, and that evidence being dismissed or cast into doubt because of how easy, or supposedly how easy it would be to fake.
“Photoshopping” something bad existed for a long time at this point.AI generated images doesn’t really change anything other then the entire photo being fake instead of just a small section.
I’d disagree. It takes, now, zero know-how to convincingly create a false image. And it takes zero work. So where one photo would take one person a decent amount of time to convincingly pull off, now one person can create 100 images or more in that time, each one a potential time bomb that will go off when it starts getting passed around as evidence of something. And there are uncountable numbers of bad actors on the internet trying to cause a ruckus. This just increased their chances of succeeding at least 100-fold, and opened the access to many, many others who might just do it accidentally, for a joke, or who always wanted to create waves but didn’t have the photoshop skills necessary.
It changes a lot. Good Photoshopping skills would not create the images as shown in the article.
Wikipedia page on the dude: Nikolai Yezhov
I can Imagine such regimes novadays to develop some sort of cryptographic photo attestation, so any photo not signed by them is going to be shown as untrusted, regardless if it’s fake or not. And all the code from processor to camera app would need to be approved by their servers in order to get a sign.
Oh wait! Our great friends at Adobe, Intel, Google and Microsoft are already working on just that: https://c2pa.org/