snegron7
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sean_s wrote:
The broader issue you are alluding to is deepfakes, i.e., the fact that, as a collective, we no longer have readily available tools to discern whether an image (or video, text, whatever) is real or not.
I worked on such technology a few years ago. The process involved the use of two models competing with each other to incrementally improve its ability to generate realistic-looking photos. There is a generator model, which generates images from random noise, slowly learning to make better details (like skin, hair, backgrounds). And there is a judge model, which looks at both real photos and fake images produced by the generator model, and tries to guess which one is real. The generator gets better because it tries to trick the judge, and the judge gets smarter at spotting increasingly tiny flaws.
There is no beating the technology, at least not with your eyes. We need social intervention. Either the law or the platforms (Flickr, FB, etc.) should require that published content be marked with invisible watermarks which monitoring software can use to flag the image as such. Google has a tool for tagging Gemini-sourced content. That sort of thing should be mandatory.
In the absence of such protections, I think photographers should focus on provenance, like how do you know what happens to your content after it gets published? Do you have any way of proving that a given photo was stolen and/or used as training material? If I'm looking at a photo on the Internet, I would like to know to what extent that image is derivative of my work. Ideally, you'd want a cryptographic signature embedded in all your photos that is robust to common edits like JPEG conversion, blurring, cropping, color shifting, etc. If you can detect your unique cryptographic watermark in someone else's photo, then you may have evidence that it is derived from your work.
Supposedly Adobe Content Authenticity fingerprints can survive screenshots and lets you request that generative AI models don't train on your content. The labs also allegedly skip training on website content with appropriately configured robot.txt files, though this is contended. There are also offensive approaches if that's your jam — for example, hosting a honeypot that serves garbage data to AI scrapers — but I digress.
We're living through difficult, strange times. To what extent one should care to take defensive precautions against deepfakes depends on whether AI is effectively stealing food from your mouth, and to what extent you care about the principles of the whole matter. There is only so much one can do. I don't think one should necessarily become a digital martyr, dedicating all their time to protecting their content, but I also don't think apathy/nihilism is the answer....Show more →
And for the reasons you stated, I plan to shoot more film for my personal work.
Yesterday I spent the good part of my day retrieving my images from both Onedrive and Google Photos. I made the mistake a few months ago of purchasing a subscription to Microsoft in order to edit some documents on Word. I unwittingly accepted permissions from Microsoft which in turn hijacked my desktop where I kept several folders wuth images I've been working on for the past year. Luckily I saved most of the images to external hardrives, but unfortunately Onedrive still was able to hijack my workflow to the point where I now have to do a factory reset to wipe out all the damage Microsoft did to my once super-fast computer.
My point is that companies like Microsoft, Google and Adobe (to name a few), are complicit in not only increasing everyone's dependence on AI, but also hijacking your personal images to the point that for the average person it's just "easier to give in to them and pay them to own all your images". Whether we choose to or not, all of our hijacked images become part of AI yraining for these big companies.
The easist solution we used to have was to back up our images on external hard drives. But, thanks to these same big companies and their AI expansion quest, buying nemory is now almost cost prohibitive. Coincidence? I think not.
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