Fakes,, Deepfakes, Firehoses
Tim Harford wrote a thought provoking piece on the many similarities, lessons and warnings from a form of fake’ness that’s been around for far longer than social media – art forgeries. He bases this on things said and done by a master art forger named Eric Hebborn. In his autobiography, he declared that a Brueghel painting in the New York Mets Museum was a fake that he’d created. The museum wasn’t happy: “We don’t believe it’s a forgery, and we believe that the story told by Mr. Hebborn in this book is not true.” Was the museum lying because it didn’t want to admit it had been conned? Was the forger lying to grab headlines? How does one know what the truth is? This problem applies to fake everything today. Is that video of a politician or actor saying or doing something real? Or is it a fake as those folks claim? There are fakes and then there are deepfakes. “Deepfake AI is a type of artificial intelligence used to create convincing image, au...