But it's even more true for non-famous people getting bullied in their social groups, both online and offline, and that's more what I was responding to (the "asshole friends" in the original comment).

E.g. crypto wallets, hardware signing tokens, etc.

We could imagine an imaging sensor chip made by a big-name company whose reputation matters, where the imaging sensor chip does the signing itself.

So, Sony or Texas Instruments or Canon start manufacturing a CCD chip that crypto signs its output. And this chip "can't" be messed with in the same way that other crypto-signing hardware "can't" be messed with.

That doesn't seem too far-fetched to me.

* edit: As I think about it, I think more likely what happens is that e.g. Apple starts promising that any "iPhoneReality(tm)" image, which is digitally signed in a certain way, cannot have been faked and was certainly taken by the hardware that it 'promises' to be (e.g. the iPhone 25).

Regardless of how they implement it at the hardware level to maintain this guarantee, it is going to be a major target for security researchers to create fake images that carry the signature.

So, we will have some level of trust that the signature "works", because it is always being attacked by security researchers. Just like our crypto methods work today. There will be a cat-and-mouse game between manufacturers and researchers/hackers, and we'll probably know years in advance when a particular implementation is becoming "shaky".

We will learn to trust sources (cryptographically signed) rather than just what we see.

I hoped this would happen with social media. Everyone says stupid shit online and everyone has past beliefs they’ve outgrown. So what’s the big deal?

Instead we went the opposite way. Everyone is super self conscious and censoring at all times because you never know who’s gonna take it out of context and make a big deal.

If I take your photo and photoshop (very well) different surroundings. Is it a real photo if you?

If I photoshop your face (very well) onto a different body. Is that real?

If I feed your photos into a model that can create realistic versions of those photos in different poses or with different facial expressions. Is that real?

They all start with something that is very definitely a real photo. You can’t (yet? ever?) generate a realistic photo of a specific person from a textual description. The machinery needs a source.

Yes, by that definition, most photographs already aren't real.

What if I use no digital manipulation at all, but play around with focal lengths or perspective to produce the desired effect. Is that a real photo?

For example from covid reporting: https://twitter.com/baekdal/status/1254460167812415489

Just because the photo is real, doesn't mean it's free from deception. I could take a "real video" of gorilla suit^W^W bigfoot and it'd still be deceptive.

Hell, just changing focal length makes a bigg difference to what your face looks like: https://imgur.io/gallery/ZKTWi no digital manipulation required.

Which of those faces is “real”? They’re all just recording photons hitting the camera, but look very different.

It gets even worse when we start talking about colors. For example: it took cameras decades before they could accurately capture black faces. Where accurately means “an average person would say it looks right”

https://www.vox.com/2015/9/18/9348821/photography-race-bias

Edit: here's a fun example of how journalists use perspective and focal distance tricks to support their desired story angle. No digital manipulation https://twitter.com/baekdal/status/1254460167812415489

No, because the image itself doesn't matter. What matters is how much the public wants to hate someone. If t he public is primed, any remotely plausible incriminating image will do as an excuse.

Fortunately, these images are actually far than what someone can cook up with Photoshop. Unfortunately, it's a part of a bigger trend where we get more and more tools to produce, manipulates and share information, while the tools to analyze and filter information are lagging by at least half a century.

I don't generally like his style, but this novel really captivated me. Without spoiling the plot (much), the end-result of everyone being able to spy on anyone anywhere at any time is a kind of societal disinhibition, especially related to sex, nudity, or similar taboos.

Yep! Individual images, and individuals in the first place, absolutely loses significance as supplies increase.

> Will Norms and values around sex/body shaming change?

The bar skyrockets! Look at TV stars from before 1995 - they should already appear below-average amateurs to modern eyes.

Think things like forged evidence in trials.

Don't you think?