The other day, I came across a tragic photograph accompanying a story from the horrifying winter of 1944-45 in Budapest, when the Arrow Cross ruled the streets and their units murdered Jews by the thousands, often lining them up and shooting them into the icy Danube. The victims were first ordered to remove their shoes: leather was valuable! (Today, their fate is memorialized by a row of bronze shoes marking one of the locations where these murders took place.)
The story was about a mother, already barefoot in the snow, who managed to convince her son to run. Supposedly, the son survived (I cannot vouch for the authenticity of the story but there were harrowing stories of survival during the Arrow Cross’s deranged murder spree.) Accompanying the post was an old black-and-white photograph showing the moment this supposedly happened. Except that it wasn’t an old black-and-white photograph. It was an image generated by Google’s AI.
And today, I came across another old photograph, also from 1945: This one depicting a group of schoolgirls, taking a swim in a creek even as the mushroom cloud of the Trinity nuclear test rises behind them in the background. The story is real: out of the group of 12, only two lived long enough to celebrate their 40th birthdays. But the photograph is a fake. Trinity took place in the dark, at 5:30 AM. The campers were too far away (50 miles) to see the mushroom cloud. They were exposed to radiation hours later, due to fallout.
Granted, I use AI-generated imagery, too, even in a post that is about sniffing out AI-generated imagery. But there is a crucial difference: I am pretty certain no one believes that my images depict reality. They are intended to illustrate, even if whimsically, not to deceive.
What if the deception is in the service of a good cause, as in the two examples above? Doesn’t really matter, unfortunately. By blurring the line between reality and fiction, we are making it that much easier for fraudsters and crooks, for propagandists and ideologues alike to deceive us with impunity, in the service of their own nefarious agendas.