One of the most interesting challenges facing journalism – and society in general – is how to distinguish texts and images generated with artificial intelligence (AI) from those created by humans and reflecting reality.
The robotics engineer Kate Darling, one of the world-wide references in this field, explained this summer in La Contra that no matter how human a robot can seem, “at some point you catch something subtle, which worries you, it disturbs you”. And he added: “It’s almost imperceptible, it makes you shudder, bewilder and unsettle”. That perception, sometimes unconscious, that something doesn’t fit gives rise to a feeling of rejection that experts call the “uncanny valley”.
Perhaps this is what reader Gerardo Contreras detected when he saw the image – real, but too treated – published in the newspaper last August 21 of a meeting between Johan Cruyff and Armand Carabén at El Prat airport 50 years ago , when the legendary player was signed by Barça. “As a daily reader of your newspaper for more than twenty years, I would like to know why La Vanguardia slipped us readers on Monday, August 21, a fake photo generated by artificial intelligence without warning and as if it were real ”, he wrote to me a few days later. Contreras was right that the image had tones and definition (also in the hands and faces, as he pointed out) typical of AI-generated images.
The newspaper’s production team oversees that photographs published in the print edition have the right quality and tones for the sensitive web printing process, as a photograph that looks perfect on a screen can be very dark or blurred on the press paper. In this case, the original had insufficient resolution and an image processing program was used, but the end result was an excessive contrast and even a distortion of certain points that created an aura of unreality. As the engineer Darling would say and some readers detected, there was the “uncanny valley”.
In the digital edition, the image has already been replaced by the original and the production team has decided not to use again the program that distorted the photograph in this way.
