This is going to be a monumental issue when the fact that we can't trust any photographs fully takes hold. Maybe watermarking will help with that. More likely people will develop tools to circumvent watermarking technology (either on the imprinting side, or on the verification side).
> people won't believe what they see now, but also won't believe actual revenge porn. It simply ceases to be a problem.
This may be a comforting way to think about it, but it won't work in all cases. Consider instead of revenge porn, the case of CSAM – that will never be a solved problem until 100% of it is wiped from the face of the earth and it is never produced again. Making it less believable because there is so much AI-generated equivalents out there is a not a solution to the problem, it exacerbates the problem.
> when the fact that we can't trust any photographs fully takes hold
Full faith in photography was never a thing. If anything, the advent of photography came alongside yellow journalism. Trust is an institution. You can't build institution on solely technology.
Good context. But the fact is, a great many people – perhaps even the majority of people – are quite used to looking at a photograph and fully trusting that it depicts something which actually happened. As they say, seeing is believing.
Even with CGI being what it has been since the 70s, it's still appropriate to apply Occam's Razor in many cases, and to simply say that because it looks real, it probably is.
This is going to be a monumental issue when the fact that we can't trust any photographs fully takes hold. Maybe watermarking will help with that. More likely people will develop tools to circumvent watermarking technology (either on the imprinting side, or on the verification side).
> people won't believe what they see now, but also won't believe actual revenge porn. It simply ceases to be a problem.
This may be a comforting way to think about it, but it won't work in all cases. Consider instead of revenge porn, the case of CSAM – that will never be a solved problem until 100% of it is wiped from the face of the earth and it is never produced again. Making it less believable because there is so much AI-generated equivalents out there is a not a solution to the problem, it exacerbates the problem.