I am annoyed, not for the first time, something that Altman himself said. But this time this is because I am nervous how much I agree with what he says – although I think his statement is a kind of nonsense.
In a recent interview, journalist Cleo Abram asked Altman how people would be able to say what is true and what is not at the age of conviction of the content generated by AI. In particular, he refers to bunnies. You know the ones I mean: Caught in some films from the camera from the yard, discovering and jumping on a trampoline. So sweet! So vigorous! So completely generated AI! The film became viral, almost certainly, before people like and shared it, they realized that it was AI.
What happens when the technology improves and the AI content is everywhere? How will we know what is true? Eh, we can not, it seems that Altman speaks. For example, he points to something that I spend a lot of time thinking about: telephone cameras.
“Even a photo that you take from the iPhone today is mostly true, but it’s not a bit,” he tells Abram. He speaks so much processing between photons hitting the image sensor and the final image, and what we end is a kind of optimized version of reality. And of course he is right. Each elderly digital camera makes a million decisions about the stage: contrast, sharpness that pixels should be red and which are green. The telephone camera goes much further, combining data from different frames, deciphering what is earth and what is heaven, and brightening faces look a bit more flattering.
Altman is such that we accept this level of manipulation as “real”, even though we know that more is happening. Because the content of AI is becoming more common: “I think that the threshold of how true should be considered true, it just moves,” he says. Then I started to tighten my jaw.
At the beginning there is a gigantic difference between the photo, which begins with photons hitting the sensor, and the one that is made from scratch with generative artificial intelligence. If they exist in the spectrum, it is a damn gigantic spectrum. I also think most people they are not Aware of what kind of processing happens when they take a photo of the phone and is not as liberal as his statements suggest. Your iPhone camera is not intended to change the details or add things that have not been. Even if it seems to do something fucking, the explanation is usually quite elementary. Sure, sometimes A demonic face is happening. Ai Moon is one thing, and the Gen-Ai Gen-Ai tools can be wild. But I have not seen the evidence that the cameras themselves are gathering and added elements that have not been in the last five years of testing each gigantic phone on the American market.
Calling the processing of the telephone as an example of the permissible unbelievability is annoying, but I think Altman is essentially right. Our understanding of what is true and what has not changed when Photoshop started. I know that all kinds of staging and edition go to the photo from the cover of the magazine, but I still accept the photo of Sarah Jessica Parker on the cover Fashion as “real”. This understanding has already changed in the AI era when we look at the photo in social media, advertising or on the list of products – and this will only be. But Altman suggests that our definition of “real” or “real” is changing, we will appreciate it just like something that we see with our own eyes. In the end, we like science fiction movies, even though we know they are not real, he emphasizes.
But I think we will continue care Whether something is true or not and calibrate our pleasure accordingly. The film with bunnies on the trampoline is much less pleasant when you know it is not true. The whole assumption of The Thing is “Look at the funny thing that these rabbits did.” It’s just amusing, if it’s real! If social media become flooded with sweet, but unreal films, I don’t think I will stop taking care and just enjoy them. I think I will stop enjoying this application on social media. Who knows Maybe I will spend more time with LTE smartwatch and less time with my phone in the future.