TechScape: AI-made images mean seeing is no longer believing
A strange thing happened last week when you searched for “tank man” on Google.
Tap on image results and instead of the usual photos of Tiananmen Square in Beijing, and the iconic image of a brave protester staring down a convoy of tanks that was captured in 1989, the first result was the same historic moment – but from a different point of view.
For a time last week, the first result on Google Images for “tank man” was instead an AI-generated image of the same protester, taking a selfie in front of the tank. The image was created by Midjourney, and was at least six months old. First reported by 404 Media, a new tech journalism startup set up by former Vice News staff, the emergence of the tank man selfie – which Google subsequently removed from search results for “tank man” – highlighted one of the main fears that Eddie Perez, Twitter’s former head of election integrity, highlighted to me in a recent podcast interview: it’s now possible, with the use of AI imagery, to create alternative history. And that has huge ramifications not only on our lives, but also our elections.
When he spoke to me, Perez was concerned about the deliberate use of AI imagery to hoodwink voters into believing alternative facts: disinformation. But the tank man incident was an example of AI misinformation – content posted innocuously, within a context that made it clear how it was made, but which was then shorn of that context and presented as something else.
Images are such a powerful, scary tool for AI to grapple with because of a handful of old maxims. One: a picture tells a thousand words. The other? Seeing is believing.
It’s easy to discount a story if you’re only reading about it. If you see it with your own eyes, and see the images included in it, it immediately becomes more credulous. This is an issue I highlighted six months ago, when AI-generated images, of Donald Trump being arrested went viral on social media. In a pre-ChatGPT era, when the tools weren’t available to all and sundry, we’d call them “deepfakes”.
Back then, I asked the creator of the series of images, Bellingcat journalist Eliot Higgins, whose job it was to poke holes in the disinformative qualities of Russian propaganda, whether he worried he was contributing to the issue of fake news. At the time he wasn’t, reckoning that there were always giveaways that would highlight an image was the product of AI.
Today, he’s still not worried about people playing about with the tool on social media, but is concerned about politicians using AI tools to create photos that damage their opponents. (Ron DeSantis’s campaign has already done this.) “I guess we’ll see as the US election progresses how bad it gets,” he says, “but I don’t think Trump supporters would be shy about using AI generated imagery.”
By the way, there’s a certain irony in the AI tank man tale.
For months, Igor Szpotakowski, who researches Chinese law at Newcastle University, has spoken about the way China’s version of generative AI tools are responding to exactly the same threats of rewriting history – in this instance, in ways the ruling Communist party might not like. Szpotakowski has screenshots of how an image generation model developed by Baidu, a giant Chinese tech company, will create images in response to a prompt asking it to depict “dictatorship”, but won’t when asked to show “democracy and freedom”. “That tells us a lot about their training data,” Szpotakowski says.
On your marks, set, fake
The backdrop to the tank man debacle is the increasing pace in AI image development, meaning this kind of misrepresentation (perhaps it’s better put as misinterpretation) is likely to become more common as the ability to put artistic skills in the hands of the least skilled increases.
I’m no artist, and never have been. But give me Midjourney, DALL-E or any other AI image generator, and a few minutes to fine tune my prompt (the bit of text that sets an image generator going) and I can produce work that would never be possible in my wildest dreams otherwise.
Just as generative AI text tools are improving every day, so are the capabilities of AI image generators are. One of the biggest, OpenAI’s DALL-E 3, will be rolled out to paying subscribers to ChatGPT Plus in the coming weeks. I’m one of those subscribers, and I’m excited to see what it offers. Twitter seems to have already made up its mind that DALL-E 3 is the match of and better than Midjourney, which has previously had supremacy in making images – so much so that they even release a monthly magazine of its best bits.
Yet there are rumours within the AI community that in response to DALLE 3, Midjourney will also release a massive update that advances its capabilities even further. Could DALL-E 3 be a ChatGPT moment for generative imagery? Whatever happens, it seems likely that many more people will have access to such tools shortly.
One thing that we haven’t yet touched on is the impact that has on artists, many of whom allege that such AI image generation models are trained on their data without permission. Last week, for a future episode of the Article 19 podcast Techtonic, I spoke to Karla Ortiz, an artist who has sued a trifecta of companies touting AI image generators. You’ll have to wait for the episode to learn what she said, but in the interim, her July 2023 testimony to a US senate subcommittee about her fears for copyright in the age of AI is worth reading.
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to my deathbed, it will be the party we went to in a small village called Dargoog,” says Sohonie. “Jantra was playing these hypnotic loops, sending people into a literal trance. There’s no alcohol there but people were going crazy. Someone pulled out a sword and was waving it in the air and then somebody else pulled out a handgun. He let a shot off, firing a bullet hole into the tent’s roof, but the beat was so loud you could barely hear it. No one was fazed by it – this is the kind of frenzy that’s being created.”
“People have weapons but it’s to celebrate, not to harm anybody,” says Jantra. “This energy allows me to keep playing. Sometimes up to eight hours non-stop.” His music pours out of powerful custom-built Sudanese sound systems, via keyboards that have been customised at a specialised market to incorporate Sudanese timbres. “I make the rhythms, tones, percussion, everything,” Jantra says. “Everything is on a USB but if you plug that into a keyboard that has not been made to work for Sudanese music, it will not sound the same.”
Sohonie may of course be biased, given that his label is releasing the record, but he’s bursting with passion about the music coming from this territory. “New York, London, Chicago, Berlin – these once great citadels of electronic music – are not where the most innovative music is being made,” he says. “It’s being made in places like Sudan, in rural areas by largely unheralded acts.”
The making of the record was not without its challenges. The team arrived in the country in 2021 after a military coup, with soldiers in the streets, major roads and bridges blocked, and power cuts for hours at a time. Also, due to Jantra’s unique style of playing, sticking him in a sterile recording environment was not going to work. “I cannot sit in a studio and just play,” he says. “I have to be surrounded by the right crowd.” He doesn’t have songs per se, instead playing constantly improvised, ever-shifting music. “I just play,” he says. “I never learned to make songs – I just go in search of melodies.”
This meant a unique recording approach was required to capture the intensity and spontaneity of Jantra’s music, with the crew staying up until 4am extracting the individual melodic patterns, rhythms and Midi data from his keyboard as he performed at places such as the gun-toting Dargoog party.
While Jantra is still without a vinyl copy, he has managed to listen to it on YouTube. “It is an honour,” he says. “Praise to God that my music can travel outside of Sudan and that people know we are making special things in this country.”
And, according to Sohonie, this is just the beginning. “He’s got more albums up his sleeve,” he says. “Every show he plays, he produces new melodies on the fly. He reminds me of the footballer Ronaldinho because every time you saw the man play football, he did something different. He freestyled his way through his entire career, and Jantra is the same.”
• Synthesized Sudan: Astro-Nubian Electronic Jaglara Dance Sounds from the Fashaga Underground is out now on Ostinato Records