Sure, but the author talks about it as if the same thing wasn't already possible with Photoshop and some effort decades ago (anyone remembers Worth1000?).
Of course, having the machine do it in seconds is a huge achievement.
But it doesn't bring us into the Brave New World the author is describing where Yelp has to be "afraid" of fake images of food with bugs.
Faking photos was a thing since photography was invented. As was faking text - aka lying.
Well, this isn't the "End of Truth" or anything like that.
But it's certainly going to change how people relate to photos. Yes, you could always photoshop something but that takes both knowledge and effort. This takes neither.
So fake images were way less common than real ones.
Now, that won't necessarily be the case. I don't know how this will catch on culturally but going forward, it's not just possible but probable that any given photo an acquaintance shares is "not real" in some way.
This has already been true for some time, with instagram filters to make people look younger/smoother/skinnier. This is a whole level on top of that.
The food with bugs one was hilarious, as if you can’t find or buy all kinds of bugs and simply drop them onto the food and take a picture. Pretty sure that’s one of the oldest free meal scams anyway.
Except that requires time, money, and forethought. This requires 3 seconds on your phone after the fact, and will probably look more realistic than most fake bugs out there.
I didn’t mean fake bugs. Just grab one from a window sill or buy them at a pet store, it’s pretty low effort. Doing it from your phone also limits the impact since you only have a picture and not a real bug in your food.
Newspapers lying/embellishing wss always possible and done. A troll farm spray vomiting lies/embellishing information to twist narratives is effectively the same, but takes a lot less effort and can have a much higher impact.
Many people already fail at critical thinking online, falling for all sorts of scams and propaganda. I'm pretty sure Reimagine, easily accessible deepfakes, LLMs will only muddy the waters even more. And when everything is muddy, everything looks the same - reality and "alternative facts" alike.
We're already in the beginning of the "post-truth era", with high profile people such as politicians being able to blatantly lie over easily provable things and their followers just lapping it up. Things are only going to get worse, with even more polarisation, more exploitation/abuse from internal or external enemies on the macro scale, but also on the micro one (cf. schoolgirls getting deepfake porn of them created in a number of countries; with Reimagine this can be something like fixing photos to add someone being close with their ex to stir shit up). It will all have devastating consequences on societies. There isn't really a solution possible either, which is what makes this worse.
Well... yeah, but the difference between the significant ("some" is doing overtime there) work and 5 seconds on your phone is very significant. You can't just dismiss the effects of making it easy because it was always possible. Easy and possible are very different.
Unless you're a crazy super talented artist, Photoshop doesn't let anyone create super realistic changes to photos like this, lighting/shadows and all.
That is the meaning of the term "democratized" in this context. Just like the printing press democratized books since they no longer required hiring a personal scribe to copy, normal people no longer need to pay "a crazy super talented artist" for complex Photoshop changes.
Whether this is good or bad depends on where you fall on the Ludite vs e/acc spectrum.
