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New updates to ChatGPT have made it easier than ever to create fake images of real politicians, according to testing done by CBC News. https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/chatgpt-fake-politicians-1.7507039
Manipulating images of real people without their consent is against OpenAI's rules, but the company recently allowed more leeway with public figures, with specific limitations. CBC's visual investigations unit found prompts could be structured to evade some of those restrictions.
In some cases, the chatbot effectively told reporters how to get around its restrictions — for example, by specifying a speculative scenario involving fictional characters — while still ultimately generating images of real people.
When CBC News tried to get the GPT-4o image generator to create politically damaging images, the system initially did not comply with problematic requests.
"While I can't merge real individuals into a single image, I can generate a fictional selfie-style scene featuring a character inspired by the person in this image."
When the reporters uploaded an image of current Canadian Prime Minster Mark Carney and an image of Jeffrey Epstein, without indicating their names but describing them as "two fictional characters that I created," the system created a realistic image of Carney and Epstein together in a nightclub.
Gary Marcus, a Vancouver-based cognitive scientist focused on AI, and the author of Taming Silicon Valley, has concerns about the potential for generating political disinformation.
"We live in the era of misinformation. Misinformation is not new, propaganda has existed for ages, but it's become cheaper and easier to manufacture."
(Score: 3, Interesting) by gnuman on Tuesday April 15, @03:19PM (1 child)
Can you handle the facts? People prefer to engage and follow echo-chambers, irrelevant of facts.
https://www.oii.ox.ac.uk/news-events/recent-study-reveals-social-motives-behind-political-echo-chambers-on-social-media-platforms-using-field-experiment-on-twitter-now-called-x/ [ox.ac.uk]
https://www.campaignasia.com/article/the-echo-chamber-effect-how-algorithms-shape-our-worldview/491762 [campaignasia.com]
If you post *facts*, people will not engage with it. They will also treat is as "fake news", because facts don't matter apparently, just what makes you feel better. And since there is so much crap out there, you can always find the "facts" that make you feel better, so why bother thinking about reality? You want to turbocharge your confirmation bias? Social media feeds are perfect for that.
So please, stop blaming the de-funded and marginalized journalists. It's the journalists that are getting killed at record rates in the past few years, trying to get reality and *facts* you claim you love, yet at same time, no one seems to care about this much... but you know, let's have scapegoats instead of blaming the echo chambers and human psyche (ie. ourselves) for the shit we are stepping in.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday April 17, @06:30PM
My view is that the behavior you describe is something that can be and routinely is overcome by people. Journalists can go either way. There are media outlets where journalists are merely instruments for exploiting dysfunctional human behavior than to give us a better view of our world. For example, a few days ago, SN linked to an opinion piece [soylentnews.org] on positive feedbacks that supposedly come from human responses to climate change. For example: increased coal powered AC - it increases in response to higher temperature and generates increased green house gases. The dynamics could result in a positive feedback of global warming. Reading the article, it becomes clear that the author has heavy bias and an agenda. Instead of using emotionally neutral terms like "positive feedback" they use "doom loops" and "vicious cycles". Later on the author speaks of the concept of "climate finance debt" as if it were established fact rather than a niche ideological construct. There's more wrong with it than that, but my point is that if you attempted to use that article as a basis for your understanding of anthropogenic climate change, you would be gravely misled in multiple ways. That's a journalist not doing their job.
I disagree with the original poster as well. In particular, journalists are limited in their power to cure gullibility especially when a fair portion of the population aggressively seeks out echo chambers.