A picture is worth a thousand words. The old saying, rather than a truth, reflects a way of feeling reality. There are things that, no matter how much they tell us, we don’t quite believe them or don’t fully understand them until we see them with our own eyes. But almost a century ago Stalin decided that he could change reality by removing the victims of his purges from the photographs. More recently, programs like Photoshop have perfected the art of adulterating images, and social media has become the perfect platform to take photos and videos out of context and give pranks unprecedented reach.
The artificial intelligence revolution poses the latest challenge that threatens the boundaries between the real and the fake. In addition to the already famous ChatGPT language model (capable of reasoning in a manner often indistinguishable from that of a human), programs such as Midjourney, previously praised for its graphical creativity, have evolved to be able to produce with their extreme realism photo algorithms based on a simple written request. This week users of this platform have created fake snapshots of the arrest of Donald Trump (which has not yet happened) or of Emmanuel Macron fleeing from a mob enraged by the pension reform (an also unreal situation).
Francesc Bracero, journalist from La Vanguardia specializing in technology, analyzed the phenomenon on Thursday in a column entitled AI (already) escapes us. The readers’ comments in the digital version gave a sample of the impact they think it can have on journalism.
“You will disappear”, said one. “Can newspapers deceive us with fake photos? I imagine that at least you, at La Vanguardia, don’t. Journalism plays a lot because, if I don’t trust it, I’ll think twice about the subscription”, pointed out another. “You only have to see the comments on social networks to see how many people swallow and share nonsense, so with something much more elaborate I don’t even want to think about it,” said a third. On Twitter, a user responded to the newspaper’s profile: “Take advantage of the opportunity and create a space to validate the photos that emerge. We need reliable sources of validation”.
Indeed, as these readers point out, the value of the credibility and reliability of the quality press acquires in this context more relevance than ever. It was so when gossip and rumors were spread by word of mouth or in incendiary pamphlets and it must remain so now, when technological advances are able to challenge what we see with our own eyes.
