s the world really real or not? Humans make that decision based on
what they see and hear. So, what happens when everything they hear
is a lie and everything they see is fake?
The Trump White House found out. They added labels to show us the meaning of the symbols on some gangster's finger tattoos. Unfortunately, they put the labels right on the image, so some conehead came out saying “Oh look, it's fake!!!” as if he thought people believed the labels were on the guy's hand.
Former President Biden's publicity agent found out too, by publishing a photo with him standing at an odd angle that makes him look like Tourist Guy. Not only is his height wildly wrong (he's apparently standing up but everyone else is sitting on the steps), the shadows are too deep for the lighting, and the guy in front has a weird detached hand crawling on his neck. In later versions, the hand is mysteriously missing.
Now you see him, now you don't There are at least two images out there. One shows Thing on the guy's shoulder and the other just shows a bunch of mysteriously discolored pixels instead. The question is: Which one is fake, or are they both fake? Maybe we should demand the 16-bit-per-channel RGB original. The other question is: what was Thing's role in the Biden White House? Which of them was really running the country?
Clearly, what happened was Thing from The Munsters got in the frame and they had to edit him out because unlike Biden, Thing is merely a fictional character. Or is it the other way around?
Hollywood celebrities found a solution to this dilemma years ago. No one ever asks why this one has caterpillars on her eyes or what the hell happened to that one's mouth. If her mouth looks unnatural, it's because she spent thousands of dollars to get that coveted socked-in-the-mouth-with-a-dead-herring look.
What to do about AI? “AI”, which stands for computer-AIded
plagiarism, is now so good it can render a face to make it look
cute or ugly as the need arises. It has now improved to the point where
it gets the number of fingers right. It even makes the iris round instead
of some wonky shape that looks like a flat inner tube (kids, look it up).
It now even creates passable eye reflections and hair.
It still makes mistakes: the pupil is supposed to be round—we are not birds!—and it has problems getting depth of field correct because it doesn't know most people aren't photographed with the camera two inches from their head.
But it means the press no longer needs to scour a video to find that one frame where the person they want to run a hit piece on appears to be sneering viciously; they can just create one with AI. And just as with everything else, they'll defy us to prove it's fake.
They're already doing it. Last week a UK paper did a story about possible radioactive ground contamination at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation in Washington state, claiming that it was a virtual Chernobyl. Their cover image was an old H-bomb test photo. (In case you don't know, Chernobyl didn't create a mushroom cloud, and neither will Hanford.)
And those stories about that big “heat wave“ coming next week with a map showing deep red and scary maroon colors, yet deep in the story they admit the temperature “might” hit 72F. And of course they do it with global warming. Maybe it doesn't matter: the news media have such low credibility it's worse than the National Weather Service.
It's not just politics. Airline pilots complain about how the media invariably get the names of parts of airplanes wrong. Scientists cringe when the media misstate basic facts of science. Skywatchers complain when they predict ‘up to 15 meteors per hour’ only to find that the meteor shower was a bust and we get 2.
A favorite tactic in academia is to go after images. Humans are programmed to see patterns in images whether they're there or not, and it's a lot easier than deciding whether an experiment was well conceived. Some science reporters get a career out of it. They think they're doing a service to mankind. Maybe they are, but in every case I've seen, those bad images had a bigger problem that no forensic image analysis can detect: the experiment was an unoriginal idea supporting a flawed paradigm. If it was a useless experiment that leads nowhere, does it matter whether they faked the result on top of it? Sure, but the real problem is the authors thought we were too stupid to notice. And that's really the core issue: people all think everybody else is too stupid to notice.
Scientists hate the whole thing because it means they have to repeat tedious, time-consuming experiments over and over. When they publish, they have to send the publisher high-res photos of everything. In one case I was called in on, some analyst crowed that two of their images of the same blot didn't line up and accused the authors of fraud. It turned out that the researcher had inadvertently rotated the blot by two degrees from one scan to the next. That kind of crap is what science has to deal with thanks to the crowd of fanatics blathering about a “reproducibility crisis.”
Princess Kate found this out the hard way. She supposedly tweaked an image of her lovely family but got her zipper wrong—something we can all relate to—and made Prince Louis's thumb too blurry. So thanks to the media feeding frenzy we may never get any more pictures of that wonderful royal family again.
Philosophers tell us humans' identity—their place in the world—is derived from what they see and hear. Their trust in authority comes from their belief that experts and authority figures occasionally tell the truth. What will happen when they discover that everything they see and hear is fake? Some will probably ignore it all and invent their own narrative. Some may decide that nothing at all, including themselves, is real. But for sure it will be the end of the news media, and they just might take the whole knowledge industry down with them.
apr 21 2025. better picture of Thing added apr 22 2025, 6:40 am
