You Can't Trust Your Eyes To Tell You What's Real Anymore, Says Instagram Head (theverge.com)
- Reference: 0180496395
- News link: https://tech.slashdot.org/story/26/01/01/1355226/you-cant-trust-your-eyes-to-tell-you-whats-real-anymore-says-instagram-head
- Source link: https://www.theverge.com/news/852124/adam-mosseri-ai-images-video-instagram
In a slideshow posted to Instagram, Mosseri wrote that for most of his life he could safely assume photographs or videos were largely accurate captures of moments that happened, adding that this is clearly no longer the case. He predicted a shift from assuming what we see is real by default to starting with skepticism and paying attention to who is sharing something and why.
[1] https://www.theverge.com/news/852124/adam-mosseri-ai-images-video-instagram
I've Got Some Bad News for You, Sunshine (Score:5, Insightful)
> Mosseri wrote that for most of his life he could safely assume photographs or videos were largely accurate captures of moments that happened...
That's always been a foolishly naive stance to take. Going all the way back to the early days of photography, images were routinely staged or faked. For example, the American civil war photographer Mathew Brady would arrive days after a battlefield had been cleared of casualties, so he would have his assistants lie on the ground to provide the appearance actual dead.
Technology has made fakes easier to produce, but they've always been with us. What's in shorter supply today is critical thinking. Always question media, never take it at face value. Ask yourself, what is this piece of media trying to lead me to believe? What agenda does it serve? Who is behind it?
And finally, get off Facebook and Instagram. They are two of the larger purveyors of fraudulent media on the internet.
Re: (Score:3)
But he still had to go there, had to bring a lot of people, had to get everyone to keep quiet about how they did it, etc.
In the time it's taken me to write this someone could write a prompt to create an entire video of a nuke hitting New York and sharing it all over the internet for everyone to immediately see, and in the time it took you to read it he could prompt another video for Los Angeles. There's a very massive difference in scope.
to be pedantic (Score:2)
"...most of his life he could safely assume photographs or videos were largely accurate captures of moments that happened, adding that this is clearly no longer the case."
No, it is and always will be the case that photographs are "largely accurate captures of moments that happened", in fact completely accurate. That's what a photograph is. Not all images are photographs, the "head" of Instagram should know this.
Re: (Score:2)
> it is and always will be the case that photographs are "largely accurate captures of moments that happened", in fact completely accurate. That's what a photograph is.
No. That's what a singly exposed photo negative shot through the most ideal lens possible with the best possible film in good lighting is, or as close as you can get anyway. A photograph as presented to you might be any number of things and it is extremely typical to for example dodge and burn specific regions of a photograph to emphasize or hide specific details. When I took a B&W photo class quite some moons ago, one of my most appreciated photos was of a sign. It was too dark so contrast was poor, an
Re: (Score:2)
June 1994, the identical mugshot photo of OJ Simpson... two very different magazine covers achieved with just dodge and burn:
[1]https://scpr.brightspotcdn.com... [brightspotcdn.com]
[1] https://scpr.brightspotcdn.com/dims4/default/ef25eb7/2147483647/strip/true/crop/1080x810+68+0/resize/1344x1008!/format/webp/quality/90/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fa.scpr.org%2F117993_89583ffb0f7fd0939b74d058356f30cd_original.jpg
Instagram face (Score:2)
For years, there was a concept of "instagram face". That specific set of filters that so many women chose to use that made them all look very similar.
So you couldn't trust photographs on instagram for a very long time now. This is nothing new.
Re: (Score:2)
I agree with you this is not new, I will even add Instagram never published photographs. We still can have some trust in photographs, when in the form of RAW files from a camera capable of cryptographic signatures such as the C2PA standard (Content Credentials). Of course a well-funded actor such as a State agency could hack it, but that was already the case with film photography.
Return to "normal" (Score:4, Interesting)
Its interesting to think about what an anomaly the last hundred or so years has been. Prior to easy photography and radio/telegraph virtually all information would have been secondhand and easily manipulated or misconstrued. At the founding of the US there would have been many printers in any major city, each with agendas. There were prominent "debates" held through these publications that were done by pseudonym and were often false or salacious. Realistically thats part of what lit the fire of the American revolutionary war. When you think about it, it all looks a whole lot like the modern partisan media landscape with all its manipulations.
I dont know how this all unfolds, and its entirely possible modern technology amplifies the bad aspects of this way more than in the past (its a lot easier to be fooled by a realistic image than a political cartoon, for example). But i do take a little comfort in the fact that we've been here before.
Photoshopped (Score:2)
This has been reality since the 90s, video is sorta new though if someone has enough money they could make it happen (see also Forrest Gump).
Impact on the justice system (Score:2)
I wonder how this is would impact the justice system. Courts very much rely on photos and videos as the source of truth.
Re: (Score:3)
It's a combination of the footage itself and the trustworthiness of the source of the footage. Fabricating evidence is a serious criminal offense. Anyone attempting that is taking a huge risk. The biggest change will be that footage brought by the defendant or the plaintiff or others with a lot to gain from the footage will be less trustworthy. Evidence footage from third parties will be as good as before.
Vision and hearing are out (Score:2)
But I sure can smell and taste when grey aliens have been around.
You can trust your eyes, but not photographs (Score:4, Interesting)
You can trust your eyes to tell you what's real. That's not the problem. The issue is that a photograph of something isn't that something. What your eyes tell you about the photograph itself can be trusted, but that doesn't tell you anything about whether you can trust the image represented in the photograph or whether what the camera captured was edited before it was shown to you. And even when you're looking directly at something, there's a difference between what you're seeing and how your brain interprets what you're seeing (see any number of optical illusions that mess with how you interpret what you see, eg. forced perspective).
If you keep this in mind, you have a guide for working out how much you can trust any way you get information.
Headline correction in view of headline (Score:1)
You Can't Trust Your Eyes To Tell You What's Real Anymore, "Says" Instagram Head
The problem is we don't teach critical thinking (Score:2)
Not everybody learns to think critically on their own about 40% don't and they can fuck your life up bad.
So yeah, you can tell that that picture of Donald Trump giving Bill Clinton a blow job isn't real and you know that vaccines work, but your uncle doesn't. (Although he has now come up with reasons why giving a dude a blowjob is a power move in some contexts)
Critical thinking can be taught but it needs to be taught through the humanities not the sciences or math because you need a subject that has
I have only one rule (Score:3)
Anything digital can be manipulated and has to be verified.
Depending on how much it matters, of course.
Re: (Score:3)
Has been true since any of us have been alive. The difference is the ease in which images can be generated and manipulated now, and the willingness of people to grift.