Bad though these might be in themselves, they only scrape the surface of what this kind of AI could do to society. Of course it is terrible to alter photographs to make people look naked when they were actually fully clothed. Of course it is awful to think an official report was based on spuriously-generated false information and no one checked. That doesn’t need saying.

What these concerns seem to miss, though, is the real harm which is done to the historical record and to public knowledge if it becomes easy for anyone to produce convincing fake images recording events which never happened or people in places they never went. That means we will no longer be able to believe anything. Evidence will become valueless because it is trivial to fabricate anything. Never again will truth be discernable from lies or fact from fiction. That matters because both reputation and justice depend on truth. Without truth no one can be treated fairly and no one can know what lessons to learn from history. The whole of human culture would become inaccessible in the absence of any means of corroboration.

Think how useful this would be to a politician. Convince the world you did the good things someone else did, by producing the pictures to prove it along with the testimonies of eye witnesses who never existed. Imprison your opponent by generating evidence of him committing crimes and sending him for trial. What could the verdict of a jury or the result of an election mean in such a world? How could civilisation possibly survive that?

Past totalitarian regimes faked photographs, of course, but their efforts were often clumsy and easy to spot. Now we have high-class fakes indistinguishable from the real thing, along with all the other overwhelming information which could accompany it. No one will know anything anymore if generative AI is allowed full-rein.

Something very serious needs to be done if the world we live in is not to be irretrievably lost. The problem is, I don’t know what.