Media Enhanced by Artificial Intelligence: Can We Believe Anything Anymore?
Ramin Skibba · Engineering · 2020
While messages, letters, or photographs could be altered to change both content and intent, people generally assumed they were not because it was not easily done.But this is no longer true in today's digital world.Tools for altering photos and other media quickly became available with the advent of computers, the internet, and, most recently, smartphones and social media.Now, artificial intelligence (AI) is further transforming digital media, with far more sophisticated programs that can be used to almost seamlessly manipulate video, photographs, audio, and text for a variety of purposes.''Manipulating photographs is as old as photography itself," said Siwei Lyu, professor of computer science and director of the Computer Vision and Machine Learning Laboratory at the State University of New York at Albany.''The recent twist is the application of AI, where you can scale up the manipulation.It used to be something that required a lot of time, effort, special training and equipment."With a powerful computer and enough knowledge to run the algorithms, Lyu said, manipulating video can now be done on a much greater scale.Computer engineers are also working to perfect AI systems for ''natural language processing" that can generate text and speech that closely approximates human language.For example, in early 2019 the San Francisco-based research laboratory OpenAI announced they had developed a state-of-the-art text generator called GPT-2, which could write coherent sentences in English