Top AI expert ‘completely terrified’ of 2024 election, shaping up to be ‘tsunami of misinformation’::“I can’t prove that," says Oren Etzioni, professor emeritus at the University of Washington. “I hope to be proven wrong. But the ingredients are there.”
Maybe an unpopular opinion, but I feel like anything produced by AI should be somehow watermarked at the source. At this point there’s only a handful of companies. It wouldn’t be too hard to have them all insert something into the final product that is easily identifiable. Something like a microscopic signature in a corner, with model info and date produced…idk. Not anything that ruins the image, but something that can be seen by anyone, if looked for.
If nothing else there should be a large push to inform the public of telltale features to look for (i.e. too many appendages) to help them determine if it’s created by AI or not. While not fool proof, if it can discount even a portion of the misinformation, imo, it’s worth an effort.
To me, it seems irresponsible of the companies running the AI to just unleash it upon the world without training us humans to understand what we’re looking at. Letting us see how realistic everything is while letting us know its been produced by AI, at least helps us to comprehend the scope of the matter and adapt to the situation at hand. Esp for those who don’t fully grasp what AI can and cannot do.
The technology is open source. Anybody can run it themselves and disable the watermarking.
I initially thought this was the way to go too, but imo theres a problem: the only individuals who could produce high-level unwatermarked content would be those with access to GPU clusters—state actors and corpos, who would undoubtedly use it to manipulate the masses that have been trained to trust the watermark
I think in the best-case scenario, we’re just going to have to ride out a couple of very strange years while people adjust to a new reality. Shits gonna get weird
I appreciate this take and think it’s a great idea. You have everything written on an immutable distributed ledger (dare i say blockchain) so that no matter what is created and shared, it can be traced back.
You still allow it’s capabilities to evolve but you always will be able to confirm with a check.
It will be similar to the pictures of diseased lungs and hearts on cigarettes. People will still “buy” the “news” even though it’s fake.
At this point though, you can run a deepfake off a laptop, there would need to be a complete fork for existing code with heavy regulation.
Should, maybe, is-no.