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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   3298 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for April 2, 2023

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That picture of Pope Francis in a puffer coat got me thinking:

AI generation of highly realistic images is a problem. Ideally, we would want a reliable way to distinguish truth from lies. So we train another AI to spot the difference. Then someone trains a different AI to fool both humans and AIs.

Will this be an endless arms race? Will one side win?

This is basically what the GAN architecture is--generative adversarial networks.

One, the generator, is being trained to generate e.g. photorealistic images. The other, the discriminator, is being trained to classify images as real or generated.

At first, the generator sucks and the discriminator is unsophisticated. But they co-evolve in an arms race. Afaik this architecture was developed in order to make it less costly to produce the generator (requiring less human grading of outcomes), but it turns out the trained discriminator might be handy as well.

To me, though, it seems that the discriminator's job is intrinsically harder. With infinite training resources, I don't see any way to avoid ending up in a situation without lots and lots of false positives--real images categorized as fakes.

Well, the question is what is the difference between real imagine, and a fake image that is visually indistinguishable on a technical level from a real one? (Assuming you do not have an external knowledge about the subject matter in the image.)

I have been wondering about this in the context of historical record-keeping. How will our descendants be able to tell the difference between real and fake historical documents, images, and videos if convincing forgeries are so easy to produce? The space of false information is much larger than that of true facts, so this problem will grow exponentially over time. My impression is that there might be a solution to this combining blockchain and Canticle for Leibowitz-style orders of historian-monks who vet everything and check each other for accuracy, but that may still be a concerning level of centralization.

I have been wondering about this in the context of historical record-keeping. How will our descendants be able to tell the difference between real and fake historical documents, images, and videos if convincing forgeries are so easy to produce?

I THINK, and it is really a fumbling guess, that they'll at least be able to make inferences based on the volume of separate accounts and recordings of particularly notable events (say, a Super-Bowl halftime show), and then be able to cross-reference the events they have 'high' confidence about with those that they have lower confidence about to reach a hopefully coherent unified view of how the past likely unfolded. This counts on it being much easier to analyze the mountains of date (including 'junk' data) being produced now sometime in the future.

Simple example: we, currently, can be quite confident that Elvis Presley existed. We know this because there are large amounts of video, audio, photographic recordings from the era he allegedly lived, far more than could be reasonably faked at the time. We can also be pretty certain he died on August 16, 1977. We 'know' this because tons of newspapers, of which we can find existing physical copies, reported this death. So any stories of the world that rely on Elvis not existing OR Elvis still being alive after that date are automatically going to be mostly discounted by any serious historian. At a bare minimum this should prevent future historians from being thrown off by tabloid stories claiming Elvis is still alive.

Side note: this is actually why I take the simulation hypothesis somewhat seriously. If society 100 years in the future (having survived whatever catastrophes we expect to face) gets curious about how some underdocumented event really transpired, and they can't trust the veracity of the records, one (probably the ONLY) solution is to run a high-fidelity simulation of all of human civilization up until the moment of said event and then observe what the simulation believes were the most probable outcome.

There are many historical events or people that I know I am curious about, so I can easily believe even as humanity gains more technological power they might still be interested in what their relatively primitive ancestors got up to.

The only winning move is not to care.

Seriously, I don't know how we overcome that problem from a technical standpoint, so we as a society need to evolve away from scandal.

I don't know how we do that either.

I don't know how we do that either.

That'll happen by itself when anyone can create a fake scandal with little effort. "That's fake" won't just be a believable excuse, but everyone's default assumption.

Yes but the times getting there will surely be tumultuous. I wonder how quickly we’ll adapt.

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