It was ever thus:

A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on.

Winston Churchill

And trust me, these generated images are getting scarily good.

I have to agree, I would not be able to spot a single one of them as fake. They look really convincingly authentic IMO.

the cat is out of the bag. every nation and company is racing to invent the most advanced AI ever. and we are entering times when negative impact of AI outweighs the positive use of it.

I am really feeling uneasy about the uncertain times ahead of us.

The article opens:

When I first started colorizing photos back in 2015, some of the reactions I got were, well, pretty intense. I remember people sending me these long, passionate emails, accusing me of falsifying and manipulating history.

So this is hardly an AI-specific issue. It's always been something to be on guard for. As others in this thread have pointed out, Stalin was airbrushing out political rivals from photos back in the 30s. Heck damnatio memoriae goes back as far as history itself does. Ancient Pharoahs would have the names of their predecessors chiseled off of monuments so they could "claim" them as their own work.

We'll now need AIs to spot AI fakes. AI wins!

The past we know is a carefully crafted and curated story and not at all accurate as it is. It is valuable to learn and understand but also be skeptical. I don't really think wide spread forgery changes that. Historiography is a very important field.

Any serious historical research will have to verify the physical copies exist or existed in a documented way to be admitted as evidence. This is called chain of custody and is already required.

From the article...

The real danger lies in those images that are crafted with the explicit intention of deceiving people — the ones that are so convincingly realistic that they could easily pass for authentic historical photographs.

Fundamentally/meta level, the issue is one of is; are people allowed to deceive other people by using AI to do so?

Should all realistic AI generated things be labeled as such?

AI is creating fake XY, and that is problems, problems, problems everywhere...

During the last decades, IT guys and scientists have always dreamed about using AI for good things. But now AI has become so much better at creating fake things than good things :-(

"statement headline" + "and here's how you should think" = fuck right the unholy toe fungal hell off.

When I read the title I sarcastically thought "Oh no, why is AI deciding to create fake historical photos? Is this the first stage of the robot apocalypse?" I find the title mildly annoying because it putting the blame on the tool and ignoring that people are using it to do bad things. I find a lot of discussions about AI do this. It is like people want to avoid that it is how people are using and training the tool is the issue.

So AI really is a seminal paradigm-changing technology. For the worse.

Compare to the "Cottingley Fairies" photographs of 1917.