Some of the most harmful applications of AI tools are not hidden on the dark corners of the internet, but are actively promoted to users by social media companies.
Instagram is profiting from several ads that invite people to create nonconsensual nude images with AI image generation apps, once again showing that some of the most harmful applications of AI tools are not hidden on the dark corners of the internet, but are actively promoted to users by social media companies unable or unwilling to enforce their policies about who can buy ads on their platforms.
While parent company Meta’s Ad Library, which archives ads on its platforms, who paid for them, and where and when they were posted, shows that the company has taken down several of these ads previously, many ads that explicitly invited users to create nudes and some ad buyers were up until I reached out to Meta for comment. Some of these ads were for the best known nonconsensual “undress” or “nudify” services on the internet.
God damn I hate this fucking AI bullshit so god damn much.
I can't help but wonder how in the long term deep fakes are going to change society. I've seen this article making the rounds on other social media, and there's inevitably some dude who shows up who makes the claim that this will make nudes more acceptable because there will be no way to know if a nude is deep faked or not. It's sadly a rather privileged take from someone who suffers from no possible consequences of nude photos of themselves on the internet, but I do think in the long run (20+ years) they might be right. Unfortunately between now and some ephemeral then, many women, POC, and other folks will get fired, harassed, blackmailed and otherwise hurt by people using tools like these to make fake nude images of them.
But it does also make me think a lot about fake news and AI and how we've increasingly been interacting in a world in which "real" things are just harder to find. Want to search for someone's actual opinion on something? Too bad, for profit companies don't want that, and instead you're gonna get an AI generated website spun up by a fake alias which offers a "best of " list where their product is the first option. Want to understand an issue better? Too bad, politics is throwing money left and right on news platforms and using AI to write biased articles to poison the well with information meant to emotionally charge you to their side. Pretty soon you're going to have no idea whether pictures or videos of things that happened really happened and inevitably some of those will be viral marketing or other forms of coercion.
It's kind of hard to see all these misuses of information and technology, especially ones like this which are clearly malicious in nature, and the complete inaction of government and corporations to regulate or stop this and not wonder how much worse it needs to get before people bother to take action.
I believe Tim means to say that the spread of misinformation can be linked to the rise of Flat Earthers. That if we can only trust what we see before us, and we see a flat horizon, we can directly interpret this visual to mean that the Earth is flat. Thus, if we cannot trust our own eyes and ears, how can future courtroom evidence be trusted?
"Up to the Twentieth Century, reality was everything humans could touch, smell, see, and hear. Since the initial publication of the chart of the electromagnetic spectrum, humans have learned that what they can touch, smell, see, and hear is less than one-millionth of reality." -Bucky Fuller
Ok, but acting like you can't trust any sources of info on anything is pretty destructive also. There are still some fairly reliable sources out there. Dismiss everything and you're left with conspiracy theories.
In the long run everything might be false, even your own memory changes over time and may be affected by external forces.
So, maybe there will be no way to tell the truth except when experiencing it firsthand, and we will once again live like ancient Greeks, pondering about things.
To be fair, I hope that science and critical thinking might help to distinguish what is true or not, but that would only apply to abstract things, as all the concrete things might be fabricated
They still seem relatively easy to filter out compared to the oceans of SEO nonsense online. If you walk into a library you won't be struggling to find your way past AI crap.
What if one day those people doctoring images like that should have a fake doctored profile photo of themselves on a dating app. Ai writes a tailored bio for victim to swipe on should that victim be on a dating app. If the match is made, the profile adds both the perps Ai doctoring attempt on the victim and the real face of the perp.