The Age of the Feelgood Fake Image Is Here
It was a banner week for weird fake photos of world leaders and the future looks to be more banal than we could possibly imagine.
The first thing you need to see is a video of a massive KFC order being dropped off at the Moscow hotel that housed Chinese President Xi Jinping and his delegation last week.
XI was in town to talk with Putin and solidify relations between China and Russia. Among other things, the two countries promised to trade nuclear secrets. So who ordered the KFC and why? We don’t know and never will. The video first appeared on Ruptly, a state-owned news agency in Russia, and spread like wildfire after that. No one that I could find was able to chase down who, exactly, was so hungry for American fried chicken in Moscow.
The video struck me for two reasons. One, it reminded me that KFC—and some other U.S-based businesses—are still very much operating in Russia despite making a lot of noise about leaving a year ago. Two, it was an unverifiable video that went viral, not because of what it said concretely about anyone or anything but because it was a little weird and a little funny. It’s fun to imagine Xi in bed in Moscow eating massive amounts of KFC.
“It might not be true,” you might say. “But wouldn’t it be funny if it were?”
It was a banner week for fake viral photos that made people feel this way.
A Disinformation Expert Banned For Generating Disinformation
Which brings me Eliot Higgins. Higgins is the founder of Bellingcat, an investigative journalism outlet that uses open source intelligence to report on war zones, disinformation, and human rights abuses. It’s a great outlet doing good work.
Higgins spent no small amount of time last week using the AI art program Midjourney to make photorealistic images of former president Donald Trump getting arrested. He said he did this just for fun. Midjouorney has been around a while but recently launched “Version 5” which includes a number of updates that smooth over some of the telltale signs that an image was generated by AI. It tends to handle hands better than previous versions, something AI art generation has long struggled with.