Trump was arrested – footage proves that

Did you see the arrest of Donald J. Trump? These images ! An army of NYPD officers attacked and handcuffed him, so brutally that the former president nearly fell. Subsequently, the press managed to enter the prison. Trump dressed in his orange uniform, playing basketball with his new friends – unforgettable.

“It’s indistinguishable from the real thing, isn’t it?” my photographer Hilary said last week when the images were posted on Twitter. We crossed together Silicon Valley, capital of the American technological world. The photos then go around the world. Trump was not arrested, of course: the photos were taken with the help of artificial intelligence.

At Hilary’s application groups with photojournalists talk only about the risks of this new technology. Photographers are concerned and not just because they make their living with images. After all, they know better than anyone the danger of cobbled together images creating their own realities in a polarized society.

Americans receive so many conspiracies all day long – on television, in the supermarket, on social networks – that it becomes more and more difficult to distinguish the true from the false. Artificial intelligence is now giving wings to this problem. More and more people are sharing their concerns about this.

“You only see an image,” Shirin Anlen, who works for an NGO that deals with images and human rights, told the PBS news channel. People don’t see much difference between news photos of a fake arrest and what they see in real news photos. “Once you’ve seen something, you can’t erase it.” The images linger.

Experts warn that these photos herald a new era in the spread of misinformation. The technology is so advanced that it looks like the photos were distributed by news agencies. It’s only when you look very closely that you see that Trump has three legs in one of his arrest photos. .

spicy that the photos of Trump were taken by Eliot Higgins, founder of investigative journalism collective Bellingcat. He did so after Trump announced he would be arrested. “It wasn’t my intention to do smart reviews or anything like that,” he told Buzzfeed last week. Higgins had explained in a Twitter thread that the fifty photos were fake. Some photos look like the real thing, others – three legs! – just unrealistic and fun.

But, over time, they were shared by many others without explanation or explanation. One such post on Instagram received 79,000 likes.

“The United States has the best information technology in the world,” Israeli historian Yuval Noah Harari wrote Monday with two colleagues. The New York Times, “and yet Americans cannot agree on who will emerge victorious in the election.” If we don’t address the dangers of artificial intelligence, the software will be abused by people hungry for power and money. “If we wait for chaos, it will soon be too late to deal with it.” He and his co-authors suggest that all world leaders start tackling the dangers – mastering AI, before AI is our master.

“Do you believe Biden is real?” In countless conversations with Americans, I have noticed how powerful conspiracy thinking is. Zhe I just had a good conversation with a Democrat or a Republican about something as important as inflation, and all of a sudden I get a question like this: “Do you think the President exists Really ? I think it’s a clone of someone who died. What should you answer then? Especially if that person soon fishes out AI news photos from a phone with two Joe Bidens: one alive and one dead.