Comment by mc32
2 years ago
Photo attribution is a bit of a problem. For a tornado in Kansas they may use an image from another year’s tornado in Mississippi. For the war in Azerbaijan they might use an image from Chechnya, etc.
2 years ago
Photo attribution is a bit of a problem. For a tornado in Kansas they may use an image from another year’s tornado in Mississippi. For the war in Azerbaijan they might use an image from Chechnya, etc.
That is precisely the type of editorial affordance I would expect the AI to strip. This is just another way for media organizations to distort the news. I look forward to those enhancements
False metadata for rich media is a damned tough problem to target.
Putting aside any actually truthful captions, how do I know that "image of X" is actually an image of X?
Reading some of the Bellingcat investigations, and time spent, doesn't bode well.
I guess you could TinEye and index/hash the entire web's worth of rich media, then spot discrepancies (listed as X here, but Y there), but that seems horrendous in compute/bandwidth/storage terms.
>>seems horrendous in compute/bandwidth/storage terms
Yes, but the usefulness of being able to automate that identification in near-real-time to debunk the firehose of falsehoods we get from everywhere would be astronomical
Anyone reading would have a huge edge in both being more accurately grounded in reality and being able to identify the biggest/hottest disinformation streams
2 replies →
> This is just another way for media organizations to distort the news
No, it's not. This is done because stories with images perform better, and obtaining images (& licenses) for photos of every event is not always possible.
Yes, it does distort the news.
If I read a story about a riot and the included picture is from a different but similar urban disaster scene that shows buildings on fire and windows broken I come away from the article with an internal expectation of the disaster scene including fire damage and broken glass -- but that isn't necessarily the case.
This happened constantly with the reporting around the BLM social unrest.
Articles sell better with additional sensationalism, but when the narrative being espoused doesn't conform to reality then it is a distortion, regardless of the motivating factor.
The fact something makes the article perform better doesn't mean it's not deceptive.
Indeed, a major incentive towards inaccuracy in journalism is the pursuit of impact.
'Perform better' is frequently ..not synonymous, but amounting to the same as 'distort[ing] the news'..
AI can just fabricate a new photo for any event.
It sort of becomes obvious when everyone in the photo has seven fingers and two thumbs on each hand.
True, I have a photograph taken in Kenya that has been variously described as in California, Guatemala, Colombia, Australia and South Africa.