From The New York Times
A.I. Loves Fake Images. But They’ve Been a Thing Since Photography Began
By Nina Siegal
On the cover of a German magazine from 1934, Adolf Hitler stands in his Nazi uniform while his propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels, affixes a Karl Marx beard to the dictator’s face from behind. The illustration pokes fun at Hitler’s attempts to woo working-class Germans with socialist policies and suggests that nobody should be fooled by such mimicry.
Heartfield, a German-born artist and antifascist activist, pioneered photomontage for political satire. His mocking magazine cover is probably the most overtly political image in “FAKE!,” a new exhibition at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam that opens Friday and runs through May 25. The show delves into early photography, from 1860 to 1940, to show that visual manipulation has a longer history than you might think...
That was long before the advent of Adobe Photoshop in 1990, Snapchat in 2011 or the generative A.I. breakthrough of 2023. In the course of 150 years, fakes have proliferated and now dominate our media landscape, according to Hany Farid, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley who specializes in the forensic analysis of digital images and gave a popular TED Talk about how to detect A.I. deepfakes...
Hany Farid is a professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering & Computer Sciences and the School of Information at UC Berkeley.
