Fake AI Photos Are Coming to a Social Network Near You
On Tuesday in Paris, a popular Twitter user posted three images of French President Emmanuel Macron sprinting between riot police and protesters, surrounded by billows of smoke. The images, viewed more than 3 million times, were fake. But for anyone not following the growth of AI-powered image generators, that wasn't so obvious. True to the user's handle, “No Context French” added no label or caption. And as it turned out, some people believed they were legit. A colleague tells me that at least two friends in London who worked in various professional jobs stumbled across the pictures and thought they were real photos from this week's sometimes-violent pension reform strikes. One of them shared the image in a group chat before being told it was fake.
Social networks have been preparing for this moment for years. They've warned at length about deepfake videos and know that anyone with editing software can manipulate politicians into controversial false photos. But the recent explosion of image generating tools, powered by so-called generative AI models, puts platforms like Twitter, Facebook and TikTok in unprecedented territory.
What might have taken 30 minutes or an hour to conjure up on Photoshop-style software can now take about five minutes or less on a tool like Midjourney (free for the first 25 images) or Stable Diffusion (completely free). Both these tools have no restrictions on generating images of famous figures.(1)Last year I used Stable Diffusion to conjure “photos” of Donald Trump playing golf with North Korea's Kim Jung Un, none of which looked particularly convincing. But in the six months since then, image generators have taken a leap forward. Midjourney's latest version of its tool can produce pictures that
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