In the past few weeks you’ve probably seen this photo of a little girl holding her puppy during the flooding from Hurricane Helene. You probably also know that it was AI-generated.
This type of thing seems like a growing problem, and it is, but I was surprised to see how far back the problem of fake images goes. A recent post on Techdirt dives into the history of fake photos, going back more than a century! There was actually a bill introduced to the Senate in 1912 that was “to prohibit the making, showing or distributing of fraudulent photographs“, but it never got passed.
Just a year after that bill was proposed, a fake photo of President William Taft went around that showed him riding a Carabao and “it was thought to have been part of an effort to buy goodwill with a nation seeking independence from the United States”.
Photoshop brought editing to the masses, and AI is taking it a step further, but this is not new at all. Passage of the 1912 law would have helped in some ways, but crimes are still crimes. As they point out in the article, attempts to “legislate against fake nude images would be unneeded – those would be illegal already“.
The future of fake photos will get very interesting in the next few years. The image of the girl and her puppy at the top of this post is easy to spot as being AI-generated, but the “easy to spot” will be disappearing very soon as the tools get better. Determining real vs fake will becoming increasingly difficult, and I don’t know how it will be solved, but it was very interesting to me to see just how long this has been a problem.
I encourage you to check out the full article from Techdirt to learn more.
