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Image Doctoring Is Tough To Spot, Even When We're Looking For It
An anonymous reader writes with a link to The Stack's look at study that examines the human capacity to detect (or to overlook) manipulation in images. About 400 volunteers looked at images which had been digitally altered by erasing elements, by replicating parts the image, or by pasting in elements from other images. Less than 58 percent of the alterations were detected, even though the volunteers knew that's what they were to look for. The article says "While its conclusion – that we are not very good at identifying doctored photos – is predictable, it's the type of 'fakes' that deceive us which are most interesting." Spoiler: Erasure is much harder to spot than image splicing.
You just have to see if any of the pixels are wrong. Oh, and flags on the moon should hang down.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
A couple decades from now, we're going to have generations that have never known an era when it was technically or logistically difficult to convincingly revise AND distribute photos and videos.
Beyond simply telling that stuff has been tampered with or invented wholesale, I'm really worried this is going to lead to a loss of credibility and gravitas of photos and videos of historic events.
It's going to get ugly when generations start denying and rewriting history because they lost trust and belief in the credibility of the medium used to preserve its records.
Movie doctoring is all the rage these last couple of weeks too. Isn't that right, all you crazy republicans?
Don't worry about that. People have accepted fake pictures for about a century already and there are no signs they will stop any time soon.
.... did not evolve to deal with camera's that can take super accurate photos and software with clever mathematics that can manipulate them.
A good example is hollywood special fx and how it evolved from stop motion and claymation/modelling to computer rendering. When you look at how we tried to fake images in the past we were pretty bad at it. We've gotten so good that the time and tools you'd need are pretty much expert status with special tools.
In my experience Republicans, and Democrats, are just people that checked a box on a voter registration form. That, I estimate, makes them more "whole" than many other Americans since they at least took the effort to register to vote.
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
This has happened before. People who gain critical thinking look back upon what they were learned about history in school or books, and realize that much of it is heavily colored by biases popular in that place and time. '1984' made the concept of rewriting history well-known, although propagandized 'interpretations' of historical events surely predated it. That someone went to the trouble to write a long description of an event indicates a motivation to do so, but that motivation may not be a desire to record or disseminate the truth; therefore, being written down is not proof of its truthfulness.
For example, it used to be a common occurrence for trusted/respected writers to have new writings attributed to them in order for their 'legitimacy' to be improved. Thus the large amount of apocryphal writings that exist. The Wright bros. weren't believed by journalists at the time that they'd achieved controlled flight; later, they withheld their flyer from the Smithsonian unless they agreed to acknowledge them as the inventors of controlled flight and ignore all the others who worked on airplanes at the time; so the media can get it wrong coming and going.
And then there's the whole 'mainstream media'/Faux News problem, presenting 1/3 of a story and encouraging people to jump to conclusions.
In the past, storytelling was the main method of history preservation. Look at how many myths and urban legends that led to, as well as gross embellishments a la Journey to the West. When you were a kid, chances are you believed a myth or 50; how did you feel when you grew up and realized they were nonsense?
In the end it's going to come down to chains of evidence leading to a trustworthy content creator: a well-known photographer, speaker, or a journalist who goes right to the source. If it originated from an anonymous internet account, then it's less trustworthy.
Corruption is convincing someone that the selfless ideal is the same as their selfish ideal.
"A couple decades from now," we will have shared memory and singularity like the borg. Everything will be irrelevant. TBH we are halfway there, everyone is doing whatever the fuck they want and noone is batting an eye unless it effects them financially... ridiculous.
World is fucked
After years of playing photo hunt in bars I could have aced that that study.
Why should they rewrite things? Nobody believes muricans did not cheat with Apollos anyway.
Minithruth is becoming a reality (ref. 1984, George Orwell)
It's going to get ugly when generations start denying and rewriting history because they lost trust and belief in the credibility of the medium used to preserve its records.
Yes, but not as ugly as it was before people lost their trust.
Looking back trough my old history books from school and comparing it to what I've read from more reliable sources I can see that a lot of the things regarding the timespan between 1600-1800 is utter bullshit. Or more precisely, people who were in power in that time found ways to glorify themselves in ways that were brought into the history books because the people in power controlled what authoritative sources were.
When it comes to documenting things with photography and moving pictures we all know that it is very easy to misrepresent the truth simply my the choice of what or when one takes a picture. Same goes for movies, misrepresenting the truth with simple editing goes back as far as Georges Melies in 1896
You may think that there is a timespan between 1950 and 1980 where journalists and history writers didn't push agendas and weren't used for propaganda purposes or that the technology at that time didn't allow for it. I don't see why that would be the case.
There is a lot of reason to be skeptical of "absolute truths".
I know these sorts of articles are wildly popular these days, showing HOW DUMB ALL OF YOU OTHER PEOPLE ARE. I understand, it's very reassuring to see yourself placed in the top position where you can shit on everyone else. Thousands of years of tyrannical human elites agree with you. But you don't need everyone to see it. It just takes a single person to spot that something is wrong, point it out, and the viral internet takes over from there. That's how Tom Brokaw's fraud was exposed, someone said, "Hmm, that looks just like MS-Word" and then made the animated .gif that changed the world. Thinking that everyone needs to be a Photoshop expert is just naive and misanthropic. Reuters was also caught red-handed altering photos to conform to their narrative. It just takes one person to utter the sacred phrase "Hmm, that's funny".
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
if you can see the pixels, then it's fake.
Spoiler: Erasure is much harder to spot than image splicing.
I dunno... the Erasure in this image is incredibly obvious if you ask me.
One easy way I found to make some tidy shops is resize the image to quadruple its resolution and edit it there.
Then, when you are done, resize it back.
It smooths things together pretty nicely on a sub-pixel level that is usually undetectable even to machine-scanning techniques.
Of course, if you have the original image, it will be trivial to spot the edit regardless, but it will be harder to figure out which one is the original image.
Another I have been experimenting with is adding in grainy-looking texture from awful quality CCDs at that quad-res layer.
It is far easier to do this at the quadruple resolution because the botched noisy pixels will be enlarged quite considerably.
Now instead of nearly breaking your arm trying to be overly precise, you can easily just draw a circle and apply whatever color or filter to it. (in another layer, of course!)
Sooner or later, with smarter editing software, it is going to be damn near impossible to tell an image is edited without the original.
People in any position of power will be able to, quite literally, rewrite history. (not that this has changed anything, this has been true for thousands of years)
Look at the high variance images at the top of page 9 of the original article. I finding unsurprising at all the people can't tell if a sand dune was smoother or if erasures occurred on image of pine tree branches against pale blue sky.
One documentary on the development of new currency said portrait sizes were increased because of our ability to notices small variation in faces. I don't have the reference for this, but my personal observations match the claim.
My wife and I are both artists with masters of fine art in painting. For years, bad effects in movies will jump out at us. We will sometime refer to the "cgi cast of thousand" in egregiously offending movies. For some years now my ability to identify cgi inanimate objects has almost disappeared. In modern movies I almost never have a cgi object jump out at me. I notice that the cgi animation of people is similar improving, although glaring problems still appear. I am sure it has both to do with complexity of the physics problems and my own visual capability and nature focus of attention. I except it is few short years until I almost never notice any cgi modifications.
He's bad at trolling, it is the way of his kind.
From my experience, professional photographers, photo lab technicians, and their ilk, who spend lots of time looking photos and their technical aspects (sharpness, lighting, colour, pixelation, etc, etc, etc), would easily spot the, to me, obviously edited photos. Case in point: the top photo in the The Stack article - clinton-fake-photo-832x333.jpg - is so obviously faked that I'm surprised that anyone would be fooled by it.
First dead giveaway: Clinton's head is illuminated from the right-read as is Mandela's(?) head. De Angelis's head? From the top-front. (I can't believe that De Angelis's victims didn't spot that fakery.)
Second less-dead giveaway: the pixelation isn't quite the same. The imposter's pixels are larger, not by much, than Clinton's - at least in the sample from the article.
All you have to do is look at who is the publisher. If the parent company is owned by Rupert Murdock or say American Media and it is a picture of a celeb then chances are the image has been run over by photo shop.
Didn't see anything in the article or PDF that would point me at them. If anyone knows where they might be lurking, I'd love to see 'em.
What hell is that digitally altered by erasing elements, by replicating parts the image, or by pasting in elements from other images. Less than 58 percent of the alterations were detected, even though the volunteers knew that's what they were to look for. As we thought that Image Doctoring Is Tough To Spot, Even When We're Looking For It.
Last time I checked 50% was still a half. So less than 58% says to me the exact opposite. That we are good at spotting doctored photos.
I'm surprised no one else has posted this, but the address of the actual test is
http://newton.inf.ufrgs.br/
You have to register, and fill in a small survey consisting of your experience with image manipulation, but its still up as of this post.
I've decided to Diversify my Holdings. I've divided my cash between my left and right pockets, instead of all in one.
I've seen pictures of the potus that have been photoshopped to look like there's a nigger in the white house.
My wife once spotted Andy Bell in the crowd at a B.E.F. concert outside of London. Does that count?
Oh, I've never completely trusted historians.
But until very recently I've been able to mostly trust film footage, especially vintage film reels. I don't think my grandchildren will ever share that.
People who sum up their personal ideals into an "our team" vs "their team" menality are all broken. Both Democrats and Republicans are idiots. And assuming that when someone says "those idiots are idiots" necessarily means "those other idiots aren't idiots" makes you an idiot. The proper response is to chuckle and say "yes, they are", as you internalize "as they all are".
Learn to love Alaska
Beyond simply telling that stuff has been tampered with or invented wholesale, I'm really worried this is going to lead to a loss of credibility and gravitas of photos and videos of historic events.
It's going to get ugly when generations start denying and rewriting history because they lost trust and belief in the credibility of the medium used to preserve its records.
Perhaps we should re-embrace film. Sure, you can do almost the same thing with film, the Three Letter Agencies, both United States and the Communists did it on a regular basis, but it's a bit harder than in PhotoShop.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
One of the ideas I've had for a long time is to make digital cameras that cryptographically sign every photo. Maybe such things already exist. I'm not expert enough on those matters to tell whether there are pitfalls in this idea. The key would have to be buried in the silicon somehow such that attempts to get at it would destroy it.
-- "This world is a comedy to those who think, a tragedy to those who feel."
Convincing photo editing is a reality- so if we want to be able to trust photographic evidence we need a foolproof way to detect image manipulation. Cameras could add an encrypted checksum to the meta data of each digital photograph. Any change to the image should change the checksum, and since since the editing program wouldn't have the camera's encryption key it couldn't re-generate the encrypted checksum. The real trick is what encryption will be secure for a long time? Of course there is no way to be sure the scene the camera is recording is real - for example one could take a picture of a photograph of a pre-manipulated image.
All I can think of is all those "experts" claiming Obama's birth certificate was a forgery because they could tell when something has been photo-shopped.
"Do not be swept up in the momentum of mediocrity." - anon
Record-keeping is an outdated concept. Now we have the right to be forgotten. Soon we'll have the right to reinvent the past.