AI-generated images now appearing in Google image search results
AI-generated images now appearing in Google image search results
Found it first here - https://mastodon.social/@BonehouseWasps/111692479718694120
Not sure if this is the right community to discuss here in Lemmy?
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Just wanted to point out that the Pinterest examples are conflating two distinct issues: low-quality results polluting our searches (in that they are visibly AI-generated) and images that are not "true" but very convincing,
The first one (search results quality) should theoretically be Google's main job, except that they've never been great at it with images. Better quality results should get closer to the top as the algorithm and some manual editing do their job; crappy images (including bad AI ones) should move towards the bottom.
The latter issue ("reality" of the result) is the one I find more concerning. As AI-generated results get better and harder to tell from reality, how would we know that the search results for anything isn't a convincing spoof just coughed up by an AI? But I'm not sure this is a search-engine or even an Internet-specific issue. The internet is clearly more efficient in spreading information quickly, but any video seen on TV or image quoted in a scientific article has to be viewed much more skeptically now.
Provenance. Track the origin.
Provenance. Track the origin.Easy to say, often difficult to do.
There can be 2 major difficulties with tracking to origin.
- Time. It can take a good amount of time to find the true origin of something. And you don't have the time to trace back to the true origin of everything you see and hear. So you will tend to choose the "source" you most agree with introducing bias to your "origin".
- And the question of "Is the 'origin' I found the real source?" This is sometimes referred to Facts by Common Knowledge or the Wikipedia effect. And as AI gets better and better, original source material is going to become harder to access and harder to verify unless you can lay your hands on a real piece of paper that says it's so.
So it appears at this point in time, there is no simple solution like "provenance" and " find the origin".
Humans will need to use digital signatures eventually. Chains of verifiable claims from real humans would be used. Still doesn't prove anything by itself, but it saves a ton of effort. That, plus verifiable timestamping.
And as AI gets better and better, original source material is going to become harder to access and harder to verify unless you can lay your hands on a real piece of paper that says it’s so.
One of the bright lines between Existing Art and AI Art, particularly when it comes to historical photos and other images, is that there typically isn't a physical copy of the original. You're not going to walk into the Louvre and have this problem.
This brings up another complication in the art world, which is ownership/right-to-reproduce said image. Blindly crawling the internet and vacuuming up whatever you find, then labeling it as you find it, has been a great way for search engines to become functional repositories of intellectual property without being exposed to the costs associated with reprinting and reproducing. But all of this is happening in a kind-of digital gray marketplace. If you want the official copy of a particular artwork to host for your audience, that's likely going to come with financial and legal strings attached, making its inclusion in a search result more complicated.
Since Google leadership doesn't want to petition every single original art owner and private exhibition for the rights to use their workers in its search engine, they're going to prefer to blindly collect shitty knock-offs and let the end-users figure this shit out (after all, you're not paying them for these results and they're not going to fork out money to someone else, so fuck you both). Then, maybe if the outcry is great enough, they can charge you as a premium service to get more authentic results. Or they can charge some third party to promote their print-copies and drive traffic.
But there's no profit motive for artistic historical accuracy. So this work isn't going to get done.
Seems like it will be a bigger issue for wikipedia and journalists than google.