[HN Gopher] Fake images that fooled the world
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Fake images that fooled the world
Author : sandebert
Score : 140 points
Date : 2025-04-12 07:56 UTC (4 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.theguardian.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.theguardian.com)
| drcongo wrote:
| There's some terrible examples in here, and yet no mention of
| Roger Fenton's Valley of the Shadow of Death.
| lostlogin wrote:
| And no mention of Raising a Flag over the Reichstag.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raising_a_Flag_over_the_Reic...
| djoldman wrote:
| A great example that underscores the _ordinariness_ of AI. It 's
| a tool and tools can be used for good/bad/neither and inbetween.
|
| Fake pics have existed since pics existed pretty much.
|
| Kids have been looking for ways to cheat on tests since tests
| began. If you're a teacher, you're gonna have to test in person.
|
| Fake phone calls, fake other things... yea they're of a
| different/better quality as the technology has gotten better. Is
| it so fundamental a shift that nothing can be done? I'm not
| convinced.
| blackbear_ wrote:
| The ease of cheating/creating fakes surely influences how much
| cheating/fakes are in circulation, and while we can tolerate a
| little, excessive amounts will be disruptive. So many
| technologies moved from obscure curiosities to mass adoption
| just because somebody made them easier/cheaper to use.
|
| If at some point the cheats/fakes will be cheaper and easier
| than the real thing, you can bet _that_ will be a fundamental
| shift in how we approach the world.
| tgv wrote:
| It's not only the excess, it's the ease of access. Kids can
| produce lewd pics of class mates, and make their lives hell.
| This technology is fundamentally evil.
| smegger001 wrote:
| With as easy and widespread it is I wonder how long before
| the general assumption will be that nude pics and videos
| are fakes and will loose its power. It will be just another
| ai porn on the mountain of other shitty ai porn.
| tnel77 wrote:
| While I agree that the default assumption might be that
| any given nude is actually a fake, I'm curious if it'll
| lose any power over someone. If someone generates an
| incredible AI image of a lightning strike, I don't care
| that it's fake. It's beautiful and I want to stare at it.
| I'm going to share it with my friends.
|
| I fear the same would be true for high-quality (real or
| otherwise) nude images and I'd wager this would still
| draw unwanted attention towards the subject. Hopefully
| there wouldn't be negative consequences from employers
| and schools since the assumption is the image was fake.
| Ntrails wrote:
| I know it's not the same - but I remember the "bubbling"
| phase a few years back. It was a bit messy and fortunately
| faded away pretty quick
| numpad0 wrote:
| This argument is repeated relatively often but I can't take
| it seriously. Just how???
| js8 wrote:
| > If at some point the cheats/fakes will be cheaper and
| easier than the real thing
|
| Is there any evidence this is going to ever happen? The
| evidence I see points in opposite direction - everyone has so
| many sensors and data being recorded about the real world
| that it is actually harder to fake things.
|
| For example, there used to be a widespread belief in aliens
| and animal cryptids in the 70s. Today, less so, because
| people capture everyday reality on much bigger scale than
| they used to.
| add-sub-mul-div wrote:
| So tired of this lazy argument. Projectile murder with bows
| existed before guns. Guns changed the world. A severe force
| multiplier for something bad can't automatically be handwaved
| away.
| djoldman wrote:
| Guns have little use beyond injuring or killing or
| threatening the same. On the good side: one could argue it's
| sometimes good to kill for hunting. On the bad side... well
| there is a lot of suicide, murder, and potential for the
| same.
|
| I'm not sure we understand yet how much positive and how much
| negative potential there is in AI.
| wruza wrote:
| Variations of guns (high pressure tubes with plugs) also
| shoot nails, pilings, and can quickly split hard surfaces
| like rocks or pavement. They are also natural parents of
| internal combustion engines.
|
| Not arguing, just saying.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| On the good side you can stop other people with guns.
| tgv wrote:
| What good can it be used for? Because I haven't seen anything
| that makes faking pics with AI so good we can ignore the
| negatives.
|
| The article also seems to take the relativist stance: nothing
| new to see here, move along now. Why? For the clicks? Just
| being contrarian?
| djoldman wrote:
| Many manifestations of generative AI allow people to put
| concepts onto screens faster. It generally serves as a more
| efficient translator of "I want a contract like this one but
| more tailored to [new client]" or "I want to make a strategy
| for my [new business]."
|
| In information economy jobs, translating thoughts and ideas
| into better formal communications more efficiently is
| valuable. Be it pictures or text.
| tgv wrote:
| A cynic is a man who knows the price of everything, and the
| value of nothing.
| godelski wrote:
| The same generation process is also used for... well...
| generating anything. They are compression functions so you
| are learning an intractable data distribution (you can't
| write down the equation) and then turning it into something
| you have a bit more control over. Images were/are a great
| test platform for this since we humans can visually identify
| the outputs and verify that we've accurately learned a good
| generating function. But this process can be applied to any
| data and truthfully, variants of it are used all throughout
| since and have been for decades (arguably at least a century,
| but statistics really benefited from computers).
|
| For just the domain of image generation there's still a lot
| of useful things. Want to do any upscaling? The processes can
| help there as you're learning a more complex transform than
| something like a bicubic interpolation (yeah, there are more
| advanced algorithms, this is just an example). Same is
| actually true for downsampling. We can even talk about
| rotating images, which is a classic problem in old
| videogames. There's also typical photo editing. This is done
| widely, most notably by Hollywood. Even if your AI only gets
| you 70% of the way there it can still be helpful (if the
| first 70% isn't trivial). It is also directly used in
| compression algorithms. It is much cheaper to share an
| encoder and decoder structure which can be computed locally
| and then transmit a smaller signal. The transmission is not
| only typically the more expensive part but usually also the
| bottleneck and has the largest chance of data corruption.
|
| Yeah, I agree, most people are using the tech in weird ways
| and there's a lot of weird hype around malformed images that
| are obviously malformed if you looked at it with more than a
| passing glance (or not through rose colored glasses). But
| there are a lot of useful applications to this stuff. Ones
| that could far more benefit the world and personally I'm left
| wondering "why isn't even a small fraction of the investment
| that's going into status quo image generators and LLMs going
| into these other domains?" I'm guessing because image
| generators and LLms are easier to understand? But it is a
| shame.
| pessimizer wrote:
| > Is it so fundamental a shift that nothing can be done? I'm
| not convinced.
|
| A fundamental shift in our complete trust of technology is
| good. It encourages ignorance and obedience, and alienates
| people from each other.
|
| And the fact that AI can be used to fake pictures of your
| neighbors having sex is nothing but good. No one will be able
| to say whether any picture is real, so the public won't be able
| to destroy another young girl's life over it. I also think that
| arguing about the distribution of pretend movies of your
| neighbors having sex will have to lead to clear legislation
| regarding the distribution and sale of personal data.
| brewdad wrote:
| I wish I could be as optimistic as you with regards to human
| nature. While we may come out the other side with a world
| that solves the real problems AI will create. I fear millions
| of people will have their lives destroyed along the way. Half
| of America thinks "criminals" don't deserve Due Process. The
| guilt stems directly from the accusation. In short, people
| suck.
| latexr wrote:
| It also means less accountability, which is _not_ good.
| Suddenly anyone can also claim that real videos of them are
| faked. Tesla tried to argue just that to skirt liability.
|
| https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/apr/27/elon-
| musk...
| libertine wrote:
| You have to factor in the overall lower barrier of entry
| (little to no technical skills required, cheap tools easily
| accessible, etc) paired with distribution capacity on a massive
| scale at little cost (like you don't need to be featured in a
| local newspaper to try to picked up by national networks and go
| "viral").
|
| You can literally produce fake information at an industrial
| scale, distribute it in real time, and see what sticks at
| virtually no cost.
|
| How do you think we're at the point of breaking the world?
| robertlagrant wrote:
| > Kids have been looking for ways to cheat on tests since tests
| began. If you're a teacher, you're gonna have to test in
| person.
|
| Access is important. Yes you could hire a scholar to write for
| you, but that's far more expensive, and detectible by your
| parents, than asking ChatGPT. Now every student has access to
| some of the best cheat software on the planet.
| lm28469 wrote:
| People have been killing each other since people exist yet an
| M30A1 rocket filled with 180k tungsten beads exploding above
| your city is much more effective than a a dude silex knife.
| Should we give people military grade weapons ? They're going to
| kill each others anyways right ? Would you argue they're just
| the same and not fundamentally different ?
| vfclists wrote:
| What!!?? No mention of the Apollo 11 photos?
| mcphage wrote:
| Or the round globe!
| a3w wrote:
| Or Hillary Clintons green scaly skin
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| And 12, 13, 14, 15, 16 and 17!
| vunderba wrote:
| uhhh...
|
| To quote sesame street: "One of These Things Is Not Like the
| Others".
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| Okay, but there are still photos ... maybe not from the
| surface of the Moon, ha ha.
| fransje26 wrote:
| We're whalers on the Moon, we carry a harpoon! But there ain't
| no whales so we tell tall tales and sing a whaling tune!
| the_af wrote:
| I agree photo manipulation has always happened, to various
| degrees of perfection, since the dawn of photography.
|
| I suppose the real difference is that before it took a more
| artisanal, time-consuming process, and now -- increasingly -- it
| takes far less time to create something convincing enough. Same
| with video: you could fake a video, do editing, etc, but it took
| time, skill, a location where to shoot, etc. Now it's becoming
| easier to do for everyone. And it's not perfect yet, but are we
| sure it won't get there? And it doesn't _have_ to be perfect
| anyway, it just has to fool most people in a given window of
| time.
| excalibur wrote:
| Surprised the article makes no mention of the 2023 AI-assisted
| enhancement of the Patterson-Gimlin Bigfoot clip. It's definitely
| a guy in a gorilla suit.
|
| https://www.indy100.com/science-tech/bigfoot-footage-ai-sigh...
| the_af wrote:
| Is there any doubt it's a gorilla suit? I think the article is
| disingenuous in not stating this clearly.
|
| The article claims the suits of the apes in Planet of the Apes
| were "unconvincing", but they are _just_ as convincing as the
| Bigfoot image, which is to say: they are clearly (nicely made)
| costumes.
|
| We didn't need AI to "prove" what was already evident. And let
| me assure you -- this won't convince conspiracy theorists and
| Bigfoot fans, because above all, like Mulder, they "want to
| believe".
| icameron wrote:
| Why does stabilizing the image make it any more or less
| apparent?
| the_af wrote:
| I think it just means it removes the distractions of the
| grain and shaky camera.
|
| But really, it was always evident it was a guy in a gorilla
| suit.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| You can see the link I posted (https://youtu.be/Vsj0vK8LjVk).
| To my eye it makes it more clear that it is just a dude
| walking like any human in a costume would.
|
| I don't recommend it, but there is an image-stabilized
| Zapruder film out there that makes the Kennedy assassination
| a good deal more shocking/gruesome. You've been warned.
| drooby wrote:
| What if Bigfoot just happens to walk similarly to how
| people in gorilla costumes walk?
|
| I mean after all.. Bigfoot is a humanoid..
| sandworm101 wrote:
| How could AI not make it look more like a man? Was the AI
| trained on lots of bigfoot footage? Or was it trained on lots
| of pictures of people? Give it enough leeway and it will
| probably render bigfoot as a man in a Barney costume, if that
| better confirms to the training data.
| CharlesW wrote:
| AI wasn't used to generate the clip, but to add some
| (hallucinated) detail and extend the background. FWIW, in
| pre-genAI stabilized examples from the 2000s it's also
| clearly a guy in a gorilla suit.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| Here is just an image-stabilized version (from 12 years ago if
| the YouTube date is assumed to be correct). No AI required.
|
| https://youtu.be/Vsj0vK8LjVk
| the_af wrote:
| The article is interesting, but I think it conflates two things:
|
| "Things that never happened in the real world, and have been
| either created synthetically or with visual trickery"
|
| - Man jumping into the void.
|
| - Stalin's edited photos (Stalin didn't walk without Yezov at his
| side).
|
| - North Korea's photoshopped/cloned hovercraft.
|
| - The Cottingley Fairies, Loch Ness monster, "saucer" UFOs:
| visual trickery or props employed to simulate the existence of
| beings or vehicles that don't exist in the real world.
|
| - Pope with jacket is of course completely faked with AI.
|
| And
|
| "Things that happened, but are staged or misrepresent
| reality/mislead the viewer".
|
| Examples:
|
| - The UK soldiers abusing a prisoner. The claim was probably
| false (in the sense in this particlar photo these weren't British
| soldiers) but it's true they were soldiers from _some_ country
| abusing a prisoner. To my knowledge no-one claimed the photo was
| staged, just that it was misrepresenting the situation.
|
| - Capa's Falling Soldier photo. This actually happened, it's just
| that it's likely staged.
|
| They are not the same thing, and require different levels of
| skill!
|
| AI facilitates creating _anything_ , especially completely
| synthetic and fake. You don't even need to go to the location to
| take a photo and edit it.
| david-gpu wrote:
| And some of the photos are labeled as "fake" with zero evidence
| that they are, indeed, fake.
|
| I personally don't believe in Bigfoot, but the article presents
| no evidence of that particular shot being altered or staged in
| any way.
| mcphage wrote:
| They don't know specifically how it was done--but it is, in
| fact, fake.
| the_af wrote:
| I mean, it's obviously a guy in a gorilla suit. It walks
| like a guy, nothing about its "gait" is animal-like. A
| gorilla suit is well understood technology, it's just that
| this one was nicely made and not a cheap costume party
| suit.
|
| Same with the guy who made saucer-like UFO photos. This is
| obviously dishware, only people who "want to believe" would
| be puzzled by the photos.
| david-gpu wrote:
| There is a difference between beliefs substantiated by a
| gut feeling and beliefs substantiated by evidence. Like
| you, I have a gut feeling that it is, indeed, a person in a
| suit, but I do not have any evidence for that. The
| distinction is important in my mind.
| the_af wrote:
| I agree it's not evidence, but even then, going by the
| principle of parsimony (which does not provide evidence,
| but is a reasonable way of thinking about this) the most
| likely explanation is also the less extraordinary or
| convoluted: a guy in a gorilla suit. Why reach for
| anything else, unless one _wants to believe_?
|
| The existence of yetis is an extraordinary claim that
| would require convincing evidence by their proponents, of
| which this video isn't one (since it's trivial to film a
| guy in a suit, etc).
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| I understand your logic. I just find I don't have
| patience to split hairs any more for an academic stance
| like yours. To do so these days is too overwhelming.
|
| As xkcd has pointed out, there are cameras everywhere
| now. I think we can comfortably put Big Foot and the Loch
| Ness Monster in the bin with the Fairies.
| foldr wrote:
| >The UK soldiers abusing a prisoner. [...] To my knowledge no-
| one claimed the photo was staged, just that it was
| misrepresenting the situation.
|
| These photos were staged AFAIK. I don't think anyone believes
| them to show real instances of abuse.
|
| https://www.theguardian.com/media/2005/dec/09/iraqandthemedi...
|
| https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/sorry-we-were-hoaxed-5...
| the_af wrote:
| Wow. Thanks for the correction, I didn't know this.
| vunderba wrote:
| Thought it might be a fun exercise to see how little time it
| would take to create similar approximations of the original
| deepfakes using GenAI models.
|
| https://mordenstar.com/blog/historic-deepfakes-with-ai
| 0dayz wrote:
| I'll admit did not expect a wild Michael Phelps.
| tumnus wrote:
| That is interesting, although the originals are more
| convincing! Not least because (as you point out) the grain and
| blur of the original photos aren't matched.
| vunderba wrote:
| Shame that CivitAI doesn't have a Soviet Union propaganda
| LoRA. :)
|
| Though there is this:
|
| https://civitai.com/models/877883/soviet-era-ussr-retro-
| futu...
| Reasoning wrote:
| "By the 1940s, the image without the groom had become the
| standard version, and it created the enduring visual signs of the
| strongman leader - when Nigel Farage makes a speech atop a tank,
| or Vladimir Putin displays his bare chest, both are drawing on
| iconography developed by the Italian fascist."
|
| Ah yes, equestrian portraits, something famously invented by the
| fascists. Someone should dig up Jacques-Louis so we can tell him
| he's a fascist now.
| antod wrote:
| Saying Mussolini developed iconography involving equestrian
| portraits is not the same as saying he invented equestrian
| portraits.
| OisinMoran wrote:
| Surprised the 2008 Iranian missile fake didn't make it in! This
| was one the demo images we used to show off our forgery detection
| software in the early days of Inscribe before we focused in on
| documents as a company.
|
| https://www.npr.org/2008/07/11/92442928/photo-of-irans-missi...
| quantadev wrote:
| It was actually just yesterday when I decided youtube shorts are
| no longer a fun way to kill time. There's a lot of amazing stuff
| to watch, but it's no fun any more, because anything you see that
| seems amazing is likely to be AI Generated which, for me, ruins
| it. You're not watching videos of reality, you're basically
| looking at digital art at this point.
|
| Photos, Videos, and Audio are longer "proof" of anything. Any 10
| year old kid can generate basically anything he wants. I love AI,
| but it's sad to be living in a world where now 'Authenticity'
| itself is permanently dead.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| Old issues of Playboy are popular for a reason. (I'll just
| leave it at that. Sorry.)
| quantadev wrote:
| Yeah, I'm a big fan, ...but only for the articles.
| thedanbob wrote:
| > It was actually just yesterday when I decided youtube shorts
| are no longer a fun way to kill time. There's a lot of amazing
| stuff to watch, but it's no fun any more, because anything you
| see that seems amazing is likely to be AI Generated which, for
| me, ruins it.
|
| And the ones that aren't AI generated are badly clipped scenes
| from movies / TV shows with the same 5 royalty-free songs
| playing over them, which might as well have been produced by
| AI.
| degamad wrote:
| What qualifies the Jennifer in Paradise photo being in there?
| That photo reportedly is real, even according to the description
| given.
|
| It was used as a demonstration photo in a famous photo-editing
| program which was used to fool the world, but the image is
| ostensibly a real photo, not a fake image.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| Nothing. Nothing qualifies several of them; the photo of
| Filippa Hamilton is noted in the blurb as immediately drawing
| ridicule from the public.
|
| Or take this description of the edited image of Elvis:
|
| > the United Press agency decided to create a mock-up of what
| the king of rock'n'roll might look like with the typical GI
| hairstyle, retouching a photo of the singer to remove his quiff
| (and leaving him with a somewhat disfigured head). "Not all
| manipulated photographs are intended to deceive," notes Mia
| Fineman, a curator at New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art
|
| Only the headline says "images _that fooled the world_ "; the
| article is about something different.
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| you can be fooled by something without anyone intending to
| deceive you, if people believed that is actually what Elvis
| was going to look like they would have been "fooled" whether
| anyone had that intention.
| k1t wrote:
| The fact that there's two of her.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| I'm pretty sure "hey, look what I can use this software to do
| to my photo" is about as unlikely to fool anyone as you can
| achieve. It was a tech demo.
| k1t wrote:
| It's an article about images that have been manipulated (to
| fool people).
|
| Photoshop is such a popular tool for image manipulation
| that it is a verb _" to digitally alter (a photograph or
| other graphic) using image-editing software such as
| Photoshop"_.
|
| Inclusion of one of the first ever photoshopped images in a
| list of famous fake images, even if just a tech demo, seems
| entirely reasonable.
| bsenftner wrote:
| The article is a fine example of empty journalism, not intended
| to inform, just entertain, and then lightly. No effort to be
| definitive or authoritative, their choices expose casual
| effort, it is really just "hey! Here's something interesting."
|
| I'm a scholar in this area, and that article is shit.
| ur-whale wrote:
| https://archive.is/H02yP
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