A Dogs Tale

 

Image by the RSPCA

After my last post, three or so weeks ago, talking about the increasingly blurring lines between what we regard as real or AI fake photographs, another image made an appearance in the news that was questioned over its authenticity. The above image of these beautiful dogs is, sadly, real.

It was taken by an RSPCA officer, during a dog rescue of 250 poodle-cross dogs crammed in a living room. The image does have a good ending as most of the dogs have been rehomed, with a few with the Dog's Trust needing some extra looking after, but the image initially did come under scrutiny. 

I can slightly understand why it was doubted. It's not often that you'd get that many dogs in one photograph! A few years ago, though, there would have been no question of whether it was real or not. Maybe the way we can easily create and view AI generated images is starting to have a bigger influence on the way we see all images. 

So a sad and very real photo but a good outcome for the dogs. The only slightly worrying thing is that we may be heading in the direction where every photograph is judged fake until proved otherwise.

The Authenticity War

 

This headline, along with the powerful image, got my attention last week. I guess it was meant to. It turned out that the schoolgirl graveyard image was real, although a number of sources incorrectly said it was not. Is it real or AI? has become an increasingly frequent question when viewing an image. I just fear that the lines blend too much so we start not knowing which is fake and which is real!

AI arrived and it seems the development pace of the technology has ramped up  a notch or three. The skill level and equipment requirements to create a faked image have dropped substantially leaving us with a great resource that can, and is, heavily abused. Creating a fake narrative has never been easier. What would have taken hours with Photoshop thirty years ago is now done with a click or swipe.

We are at a crossroads when it comes to how images are created and used. There have probably been other images before the one of the schoolgirl graveyard that have raised questions but it does seem that AI images have reached new levels of technical quality.

Just recently some very authentic looking images of US actress Zendaya marrying fellow actor Tom Holland had many people fooled. The quality of the fakes was impressive. The disclaimer "artistic recreation" contained in a caption with the images was missed by many viewers.

We appear to have a perfect storm. What is real seems increasingly irrelevant to media and politicians, emotional content draws more hits than factual, and we are attention spans are narrowing. News moves at lightspeed these days with rolling news behaving much like a social media stream.

So what to do about it? Personally I think the genie is out of the bottle and the only real defence is educating people about how to spot a fake. Maybe we start in schools, but certainly we need the skills for critically viewing media to be taught, so that people can at least try and work out what they are looking at, and why someone wants them to see that information.