New artificial-intelligence (AI) products like ChatGPT have gotten a lot of attention in recent months (including here on this blog) for their ability to do things like writing articles and term papers, or even creating new programs. It\u2019s been talked about as a momentous turning point in technology, equally celebrated and dreaded.
Yet ChatGPT\u2019s visual equivalents, image-generation products such as Stable Diffusion, DALL-e and Midjourney, have so far gotten relatively less attention. That\u2019s surprising because, if anything, AI images have the potential to be even more disruptive. Let\u2019s take a look at how these products work, what they can do and what it might mean for you. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
ChatGPT and its competitors, like Google\u2019s Bard, are known as \u201clarge language models,\u201d or LLMs. That means they\u2019re trained on huge swathes of text, so they can \u201clearn\u201d and replicate how humans use language. The big players in the industry are vague about which source texts they\u2019ve used, but they\u2019ve included things like published books and articles, and plain old social media chitchat. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
AI image-generation products apply the same basic technique to images, by analyzing billions of them to identify everything from the subject matter (coyote, peony, human child) to subjective descriptors (moody, beautiful, somber, tall). A fully-trained model can then use what it\u2019s learned to generate new images (hence the term, \u201cgenerative AI\u201d), by combining all of those elements in different ways. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
To create that image, you\u2019d simply type in a text description of what\u2019s wanted, which can be anything imaginable, such as: <\/p>\n\n\n\n
You can then tweak the output until it\u2019s exactly what you want. The end result can be impressively realistic, looking \u2014 at its best \u2014 like the work of a professional graphic designer (to be clear, graphic designers\u2019 skills are hard to replicate, and most AI output will fall short of that mark). <\/p>\n\n\n\n
All of this sounds innocuous enough. It\u2019s amusing, and will doubtless unleash a wave of creativity in people who have good visual ideas, but lack the skills (and the years of training they represent) to create images conventionally. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
The problem is that humans are a pretty visual species, and we tend to put a lot of trust in what we see. How often have you heard people say things like: <\/p>\n\n\n\n
OK, people don\u2019t say that last one very much anymore, because we all know the camera does<\/em> lie. Faking photos used to rely on clumsy tricks in the darkroom (literal cutting and pasting), which were relatively easy to detect. The arrival of Photoshop and digital photography made fakery easier to do and harder to detect, and \u201cdeepfakes\u201d in both still-image and video form are now a growing problem. <\/p>\n\n\n\n AI takes that problem to a whole new level by stripping away the barriers (costly software, skilled users) to the creation of fake imagery and putting it in the hands of anyone and everyone. Adobe\u2019s own AI product, Firefly, can even be used by non-technical users to automate previously difficult tasks in Photoshop<\/a>. Given our instinctive trust in what we see, this raises a whole host of issues with potentially troublesome outcomes. This is why Microsoft president Brad Smith has described deepfakes as his biggest concern<\/a> about AI (Microsoft is a large player in the AI field). <\/p>\n\n\n\n Let\u2019s take a look at one of the first AI-generated images to generate headlines, the now infamous faux-photo of the Pope in a puffy white jacket from Balenciaga. It was widely shared on social media, despite many signs that the image was faked<\/a>. It was all in fun \u2014 the creator just thought it would be funny<\/a> \u2014 and was originally shared on a subreddit explicitly devoted to AI art, with no intent to deceive. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Others can be more political, like the AI-generated fakes of Donald Trump being arrested<\/a> or the one of Trump kneeling in prayer (which, in fact, the former president himself released). Some just straightforwardly seek to stir up trouble and confusion, like an image claiming to show an explosion at the Pentagon<\/a> that briefly went viral in May 2023. While that one was quickly debunked, it did cause stock markets to dip while the rumor was spreading. <\/p>\n\n\n\n It\u2019s a sobering reminder of the adage that \u201ca lie can circle the world before the truth has its boots on.\u201d There\u2019s a very real risk of malicious (or misguided) use of the technology, with the deliberate intent of crashing markets, clouding policy debates, strengthening political divisions or targeting specific public figures. It\u2019s something we need to be aware of and prepared for as a society. <\/p>\n\n\n\n You might well be intrigued by Stable Diffusion and its competitors, and they do hold a lot of promise for legitimate use. If you have a small business and don\u2019t have the kind of budget that includes graphic designers, you can use these tools to create usable advertising and sales materials. It\u2019s also a tremendously capable playground for anyone who\u2019s artistically-inclined, but lacked the time or training to seriously entertain that kind of a career. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Yet there are several potential downsides to this technology, as well. You\u2019ve probably seen stories of people who were \u201csextorted\u201d by criminals<\/a> after their racy private images were stolen. Well, now those images don\u2019t even have to exist in real life, because it\u2019s trivially easy for an ill-intentioned person to create them by mashing up a few photos you\u2019ve shared on social media with the bottomless well of pornographic images available on the internet. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Similarly, divorcing spouses could hypothetically fake images of each other cheating or engaging in dubious behavior in order to influence negotiations or court proceedings around custody and division of property. There\u2019s even a possibility that your own photos could end up becoming raw material for others to use within the imaging model, which is a whole other issue. <\/p>\n\n\n\n There are a couple of ways your own personal photos might end up (or might already have ended up) among the images used to train one or more of these emerging AI tools. Those images were scraped from a range of sites<\/a>, from Pinterest and WordPress accounts to existing image-sharing sites such as Flickr and DeviantArt. Some of those sites explicitly license their images as freely available for reuse, but that\u2019s not the case across all of them. So if you\u2019ve ever hosted photos on Flickr, or shared pictures of your family on Pinterest, those may be among the data sets used to train the major AI models. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Another potential privacy issue arises from actually using the model yourself. The Terms of Service on these AI products typically gives them the right to continue refining and training their software by learning from its users\u2019 work \u2014 which means your own efforts and your own images. If you\u2019ve used one of these AI tools on pictures of yourself and your family, for whatever reason, you may have inadvertently put your images into the bank of material the app draws from. It could mean your face showing up in someone else\u2019s artificially-generated image. <\/p>\n\n\n\n These models also make an Application Programming Interface (API) available so that third parties can use them to create their own applications. It means developers can come up with all manner of exciting new ways to leverage the underlying AI product (whether that be Stable Diffusion or DALL-E or Midjourney), but it also means each developer can apply its own Privacy Policy and Terms of Service. Not all of them will necessarily be completely ethical and aboveboard in how they handle your data. <\/p>\n\n\n\n A final risk \u2014 if you use an AI image product for business purposes \u2014 comes from their still-murky legal status. Many of the images used in training these products proved to be copyrighted<\/a>, and their creators were neither paid nor credited for the use of their work. The thorny question of how intellectual property rights apply to AI-generated images will take years and much litigation to sort out, and in the interim there\u2019s a remote but non-zero chance your own business might be faced with take-down notices or even a civil suit. <\/p>\n\n\n\n So what\u2019s the bottom line, if you\u2019re intrigued (or maybe frightened) by this new technology? Well, there\u2019s definitely potential for misuse. The ability to generate and animate AI images, and even to realistically fake your voice<\/a> after capturing it from a recording, means anyone with a grudge could generate realistic images, videos or audio clips that appear to show you saying or doing things that are uncharacteristic, hateful, embarrassing or downright sexually explicit. And they\u2019d be convincing. One high-profile tech site even suggested that it might be time to take down whatever photos you\u2019ve posted online<\/a>. <\/p>\n\n\n\n We\u2019ve previously discussed the idea of making your social media private<\/a>, wherever possible, but pulling down all of your photos isn\u2019t easy or practical (how many have your friends and family members posted?). It may not even be necessary: Major industry players have a vested interest in making sure AI respects users\u2019 privacy, and are introducing new measures to help identify their images and videos as AI-generated, through digital \u201cwatermarks\u201d and embedded code that identifies them as AI creations<\/a>. <\/p>\n\n\n\n There should soon be consumer-ready tweaks to your cell phone cameras and social-media apps that will let you proactively \u201cimmunize\u201d your photos from misuse. Researchers at MIT, for example, have demonstrated one such technology that they\u2019ve dubbed \u201cPhotoGuard.\u201d It\u2019s not yet ready for widespread use, but it points to where the technology is headed. <\/p>\n\n\n\n These AI image-generation products certainly merit some wariness on your part, because of their potential for misuse, but unless you\u2019re a prominent figure you probably don\u2019t have a lot to worry about just yet. So go ahead and enjoy using these tools, if you want to. Just be wary about using them with your own photos. <\/p>\n\n\n\n New artificial-intelligence (AI) products like ChatGPT have gotten a lot of attention in recent months (including here on this blog) for their ability to do things like writing articles and…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":112,"featured_media":26694,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[612],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-26693","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-guides"],"yoast_head":"\nHow AI Images Can Be Problematic<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
How AI Imagery May Affect You Personally<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
AI, Privacy and Intellectual Property<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Is Stable Diffusion Safe? <\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Sources:<\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\n\n
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