Making it convincing certainly was. Being able to generate an image in 30 seconds is completely different from having to dedicate an hour of your day to it.
In the gun debate, there's something called "Weapon Instrumentality Effect"
"Easily in the pre-AI era" is different from "easier" & "easier" wasn't the claim.
To answer your question, relative ease is a function, in part, of one's skills & resources, so, it's certainly a reasonable claim to make, but will be different person to person.
Background image of some local street. Image of a wolf and object selection tool (pre AI era version). Touch up a little and add some filters to drop the quality.
Sure a little bit more involved than the two second AI prompt, but 3 min job for the lulz photoshoppers.
No, it’s not “a little bit more involved”, it’s significantly more involved because it also requires the skills to even know what you’re talking about, the experience of having done it before to be convincing, the inclination to spend the time on it, downloading Photoshop itself, possibly cracking it… There are a lot of steps, most of which most people haven’t done and don’t know how. With generative AI, you just open a website and type a few words.
There are significantly more people able to type a few words into a prompt than people who can use an image editor fast and convincingly and would be inclined to waste their time on this kind of fake.
> This is the kind of thing it was very easy to hire people for.
But would you? People grumble about $0.99 for an app they’ll use everyday, I doubt paying even $5 (and waiting for a result!) for a fake image to mislead police is high on anyone’s list.
Making this image was likely fast and free. It’s a crime of opportunity.
This argument has always seemed a bit silly to me. It's like responding to someone saying that it's easy to set up a hello world web server without AI with "but but but first you need to know what a web server is and how to use the command line and download a compiler/runtime and and and", as if there were some dire shortage of people who are already programmers. There are literally millions of us, the existence of one who would want to put up a website about pretty much anything you can think of is not some huge shock. We know this because we were literally there in that pre-AI world full of sites about all sorts of things! Just because you can now do the same thing with a prompt doesn't mean it was magically unlikely to find a site about, I don't know, the social lives of cane rats before.
And there are literally billions of everyone else.
Do you not see that the amount of fake images has exploded with free access and ease of use? That’s what a tool does. It’s silly to argue generative AI doesn‘t make a difference in the proliferation of fake images, just like it’d be arguing that digital photography on a small multi-purpose device that is always with you doesn’t make people take more pictures.
Why does it HAVE to be my relative when the actual question is whether hello world web servers exist?
I don't know why people are so determined to miss the point that "people can do [image manipulation] faster with AI" does not magically mean that people weren't doing it before AI, at scale mind you. Did y'all really unironically believe EVERY single image you saw on the internet prior to the past few years was entirely real and entirely what it was presented as? My goodness