Artificial intelligence has made image manipulation more powerful and accessible than ever. With just a few clicks, anyone can generate hyper-realistic images. While this technology opens up creative possibilities, it also raises serious ethical concerns—one of the biggest being misinformation and deception.
When AI gets attention for recovering lost works of art, it makes the technology sound a lot less scary than when it garners headlines for creating deep fakes that falsify politicians’ speech or for using facial recognition for authoritarian surveillance.
Sonja Drimmer, How AI is hijacking art history
Deepfake technology, for example, can create entirely fake but convincing photos of events that never happened, people saying things they never said, or historical moments that never existed. This isn’t just about entertainment or harmless pranks; it has real-world consequences. Political propaganda, fabricated evidence, and reputational damage are all possible when AI-generated images spread unchecked. If people lose trust in visual evidence, what happens to journalism, historical records, or even personal reputations?
Then there’s the issue of consent and ownership. AI models are often trained on vast datasets of images scraped from the internet—many of them copyrighted or personal photos uploaded without permission. Who owns the final AI-generated image? The original artists? The people in the photos? The developers who built the AI? The lack of clear regulations means that right now, the answer is often: whoever uses the tool, regardless of fairness.
Art historian Claire Bishop criticized this development, noting that when computer science becomes integrated in the humanities, “[t]heoretical problems are steamrollered flat by the weight of data,” which generates deeply simplistic results.
Sonja Drimmer, How AI is hijacking art history
Just as Claire said, as AI and image manipulation become more sophisticated, we need ethical guidelines to prevent harm while still allowing for innovation.
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4 thoughts on “Lab Assignment 4”
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Your concerns about misinformation and deception are valid. I appreciate how you supported your argument with Drimmer’s confrontation about faulty narratives regarding AI: no, AI isn’t only a harmless art preservation tool, it facilitates deception. I appreciate your connection between the quote and concerns about trust and journalistic integrity. That is a big issue that American politics and our polarized country faces today. Good point, AI does play a role in that and has a huge potential to.
Hello Chloe! I completely agree with your concerns about misinformation. It may start as a joke, but as AI becomes better at creating realistic images and videos, one’s public image may become public domain. For example, the fake AI videos of Ariana Grande with a buzzcut may seem funny now, but what else can AI technology generate with Ariana Grande’s likeness — or matter of fact any other person’s likeness? I agree that we need ethical guidelines to regulate the use of AI and mitigate any potential negative consequences.
Hi Chloe! I strongly agree with your concerns about AI, especially regarding misinformation and deception. While generating fun images with AI can certainly be entertaining, I completely agree that when these images are spread without fact-checking, they can become incredibly dangerous. As AI-generated photos become more common, it really makes me wonder how people will be able to tell the difference between what’s real and what’s fake.
I totally agree with you Chloe, how do we draw the line with what AI creates and what it is trained on as well. How do we combat the use of AI in misinformation campaigns and other damaging uses of AI? I also wonder if limiting AI limits the potential it has as well? If we constantly constrain AI are we not allowing innovation, what are we missing out by constraining AI?