By Tyler Drenon
The machines aren’t just writing text now. They’re painting pictures and rolling film. Image generation has moved from glitchy weirdness to photorealism over the last year or so, with particularly notable advancements made over the last few months. Video generation too: from ten-second clips that used to look like a strange nightmare, we now get near-broadcast quality output, complete with realistic lighting, camera movements, and even fake human mannerisms.
Naturally, the question becomes: how are we supposed to know what’s real? There are some ideas that could serve as solutions to identifying generated content. This usually begins with a watermark, but people can easily remove those. Invisible digital watermarks or metadata signatures could accomplish the same thing without physically appearing in the content. Then there’s forensic analysis, which looks at pixel-level inconsistencies: strange noise patterns, impossible lighting, artifacts in shadows. That’s useful now, but as the models get cleaner, the “tells” get erased. The arms race favors the fabricators.So, we’re left with a reality where you might see a video of a politician declaring war, a celebrity committing a crime, or your friend saying something they never said. How do we know when to believe our eyes? The instinctive answer is “just trust the reputable sources.” But which ones?
For the complete article, Subscribe to the UniteNews Magazine. 25$ for one year.
