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Comment by enumjorge | Hacker News Reader

I get what you're saying, and I do think we should start preparing for a future where images are not something we can trust because I think we'll inevitably get there, but images are different than text. They are information dense and can elicit an emotional reaction much faster than text can. Think of the fake images that showed Trump being violently arrested. Something like that can become viral much more easily than text.

As for a world where we all learn to distrust images, I don't think we will fully get there. You still have people falling for email scams that by now are very clearly documented. Even a small percentage of people who are living in a different reality can be problematic for the rest of us.

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Trends that will mitigate harassment done with stuff like this are already underway, but they're mostly ones that run contrary to the original spirit of the internet:

* don't accept unsolicited messages or images from people you don't already know

* don't leave your corporate-moderated walled garden of choice to search for stuff on the open internet

* don't put too trust much into any information distributed primarily online

I think these things will all be necessary but they are far more dystopian than the internet that I once hoped for.

I wonder how much of that is innate and how much of that is because we're not used to fake pictures on a scale AI will allow yet

Most of it is innate. We've known photos can be faked for a long time, it was a lesson in my history textbook in high school. We've known that anyone could fake a photo using a computer for a long time too, image editing software got good in the 1990s. And so on.

Rationally, we know all this. But biologically, we're wired to react first and think later; our reactions often shape our behavior more than logic. That's one reason that advertising and propaganda work; repetition trumps rationality. Add in the fact that large numbers of people are gullible fools who can be trained to uncritically repeat and spread untruths that appeal to confirmation bias.

I disagree. I've known photos could be faked my whole life but I doubt I've ever been presented with a fake photo of somebody I know, and I'm confident nobody has ever faked a photo of me that I've seen. A world where anybody can fake a photo of anybody else with nothing but a laptop and a text prompt is radically different.

It's not the abstract knowledge that something is possible that influences our gut reactions, its our experiences. When your friend group chat is chock-full of little jokingly-made fake images of each other, then your behavior of reacting to realistic photos as though they were real will dull and eventually go away entirely.

A photo of Trump being violently arrested provokes a reaction because we assume it captures a real scene. A painting or a political cartoon showing the same scene would not, even if it were quite realistically painted. Before the camera was invented, paintings and engravings like that were the best anyone could do to transmit a scene, and now that AI can generate fake photorealistic images, photos will gradually have to be seen the same as a skilled painting. It might capture reality, or it might not.

> and I do think we should start preparing for a future where images are not something we can trust

I'm not sure we can entirely 'trust' images/photos anyway right now. Even a 'genuine/undoctored' image, paired with partial/misleading info or outright lies has an impact on what we take from an image anyway.

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