I won’t believe it until I see it, said St. Tomasz, trusting his eyes more than the story he heard. In today’s digital reality, seeing is not enough to believe. The tools for deceiving our senses are becoming more and more perfect, and more and more people are willing to use them.
Image manipulation is not a 21st century invention. Editors of glossy and opinion-forming magazines have been competing in photomontage for years, hoping to attract confused and shocked readers. Remakes, usually featuring politicians and celebrities, often teeter on the edge of good taste. However, their exaggerated construction leaves no illusion that this is only a suggestive satire. A hyperbole conceived by the creators and understood by the recipients that cannot be taken as authentic.
Recently, photos of Pope Francis in a quilted jacket and sneakers, Xi Jinping at the equality parade, or Angela Merkel and Barack Obama building a sandcastle together have created a sensation online. At first or even second glance it would be difficult to definitively conclude that these graphics are not authentic due to their realism. Doubts, however, dispelled the absurdity of the depicted scenes.
The situation was somewhat different in the case of the AI-generated images of Donald Trump allegedly forcibly arrested by the police. The publication of this graphic on the network took place just when the former US president was actually going to court. This time, photographic realism, combined with the reliability of the context, proved deceptive for many recipients.
While Merkel and Obama running barefoot on the beach were just a playful testament to the development of AI tools, Trump’s pushing with officers is a warning that the ubiquitous development and access to AI tools should change the way we approach content found on the Internet.
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