I've started becoming a militant pest on anyone who posts an AI image on Facebook. Yes, I'm on Facebook - I share with family on friends what I'm doing, and use Marketplace, unapologetically. Sometimes I use it under the banner of 'know your enemy' - you can't knock something if you don't know how it works. Sometimes I think I use it just because I like to remind people they shouldn't be sharing AI images without accrediting the image to the artifical intelligence - my Aunty Diane, the old woman on the mushroom group in Tasmania, my cousin on the east coast, some random posting a beautiful off grid home in an Off Grid group I now no longer follow because it's full of AI images.
How can we be sure that the created AI world won't supersede the beauty and extraordinariness of the real world?
Most of the time I get a thumbs up or an outright defence of why they shared the image.
'It's still cute,' they'll say.
'I didn't mean any harm', they'll apologise huffily.
'It doesn't matter, does it?' they'll refute.
Of course it matters, I retort.
We need proper disclosure more than ever.
The very fact people are sharing it without knowing it's AI is a case in point. If they're doing that now, what will they do when it's a deep fake of a politician in order to change people's minds about them? We've lived in a world of misinformation and propaganda forever - but it's going to get exponentially worse if we can simply prompt an image or a video to sway public opinion.
If people can't figure out what is human and what is AI, how can we trust anything we read online?
What if we believe an indidivual or an organsiation that has been faked and therefore are misled into sharing our bank details or other private information that can impact our reputation?
If we believe everything we see, what implications does this have for politics, economics, and social landscapes?
What if our likenesses and voices are used without our consent to spread lies and misinformation?
How can we know what is genuine and what is synthetic?
Are we happy to be in a world where the machine creates for us, and our powers of individual expression are lost or diminished?
Are we happy to support businesses that choose AI over paying artists to create images for them?
Are we happy to lose our own ability to write in favour of the machine?
Because if we lose our ability to express ourselves, we lose our power entirely.
We should be asking these questions instead of blindly sharing images without knowing where they came from.
We're being led into a world that many of us don't have a choice about. AI is proliferating without the checks and measures that it should have and we have so very little power over what this future might look like.
We need responsible AI practices at the individual level. If the image looks so unbelievable, amazing or extraordinary the chances are that it is artificially generated and we need to check. A reverse image search or Google lens may bring up similiar AI images that give it away, or may show the original 'author' - and if we can't find the source of the image to show us it's authentic, then we should assume it's AI and not share it.
For the record, I loved creating AI images. I found it extraordinary. Yet having critically thought about the questions above, and seen where we're headed, I'm more and more resistant. I encourage you to be critically analytical - it absolutely matters.
With Love,
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