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Comment by nabakin | Hacker News Reader

While I think the fear might be overexaggerated, being able to make realistic fake content with such ease means it's harder to know what's true and what's not. Plus this has been the claim of OpenAI from the beginning. It's possible the true objective is to keep it private to leverage for money and this is just their excuse.

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> means it's harder to know what's true and what's not

The danger for society is in not already knowing that is the case, since it's relatively trivial, without AI, to make fake content.

Well sure, I think that's dangerous too. I think more people should be skeptical of the images and content they consume in addition to it being a problem that truth is harder to discern.

Indeed, this talk OpenAI does is basically security through obscurity, and it's holding us back. Look at how often people make noise with screenshots of tweets or emails that never happened. You don't need photorealism or fancy machine learning for that, and it creates a lot of problems! If they weren't pretending that all we need is to put some yellow tape around machine learning, maybe there would be some interest in solving this type of stuff properly. But you don't need "AI" for that. You just need public awareness and some basic, pre-existing cryptography knowledge.

Photoshop is a pistol, this thing is a gatling gun.

We are already living at a gatling gun level of content, from any individuals perspective into the web.

We are way past that. If anything, trivialising and democratising the generation of fake content, will educate the masses. Perhaps, bring back the trust for science, which we need a lot.

Like every new technology that came before, it’s a tool that will be used for good and for nefarious purposes. Some tools are powertools. There will be new benefits, but be prepared for a new raft of modern problems.

And how often does this happen with Photoshopped images that aren't immediately disproven?

My grandmother once emailed my family frantically after she saw a picture of the Abraham Lincoln statue defaced with graffiti. Obviously that was a Photoshop, and in this case, even a bad one, but clearly fake images and content make it harder to discern truth

> means it's harder to know what's true and what's not.

Obligatory XKCD:https://xkcd.com/2650/

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