COMMENT

This is not a photo, but AI can pretend it is

AI is now able to generate photo-realistic images of human hands. It can now take images like photos and make them realistically detailed. With this new technique, the possibilities of what AI can do are endless.

Rashmee Roshan Lall

Mar 21, 2023 — 3 min read

AI is now able to generate photo-realistic images of human hands. It can now take images like photos and make them realistically detailed. With this new technique, the possibilities of what AI can do are endless.

H ard to believe but all those clever artificial intelligence (AI) image generators were once stumped by human five-fingered hands.

No longer.

Midjourney AI v5 has cracked that challenge, apparently, ushering in a new world, a universe littered with fake photos.

Semafor reported the news recently, alongside a photo of Joe Biden and Donald Trump laughing on the golf course together. It’s a golden day. What could possibly be wrong?

These are not photographs; they were generated by Midjourney v5. | CREDIT: LINKEDIN/SCOT PANSING

All of it. It’s a fake photo and Semafor helpfully helps us navigate to the LinkedIn account of Scot Pansing, a creative technologist, who specialises in “AI Prompt Generation” and formerly worked at Google, YouTube, Disney and Capitol Records.

Mr Pansing explains the implications of what we’re seeing when we look at that image of Mr Biden and Mr Trump:

🗨️

“These are not photographs; they were generated by Midjourney v5. The rate of improvement in these tools is astonishing, and as a society we need to be prepared for AI’s accelerating affect on:
— Election propaganda
— Fraud/scams
— Fake news
— Content farms
— Medical/safety misinformation

These images were made with simple prompts such as ‘joe biden and donald trump laughing and playing golf together, mid day, natural direct sunlight, photography, eye level shot’.#ai #artificialintelligence #generativeai #midjourney #safety #policy #deepfake #technology #misinformation #propaganda”

The mind boggles, now that AI has managed to overcome the problem with human hands. (In case you’re wondering what that’s about, here’s ChatGPT’s explanation to John Walker: “Rendering realistic human fingers is challenging for AI because they are highly articulated and have complex shapes and textures… capturing the subtleties of how light interacts with skin, nails, and wrinkles requires advanced modeling and rendering techniques.”)

But AI is past that now, so be prepared.

— AUTHOR —

▫ Rashmee Roshan Lall, Journalist by trade & inclination. World affairs columnist.

Sources

▪ Text: This piece was originally published in Medium and re-published in PMP Magazine on 21 March 2023, with the author’s consent. | The author writes in a personal capacity.
▪ Cover: AI generated picture. (Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.)