Adobe Stock has photos from the Israel-Hamas conflict for sale, but they were created by artificial intelligence.
As fears grow that fake AI-generated photos are flooding the internet, one of the world's leading stock photo sites is selling fake AI photos of the Israel-Hamas conflict.
A quick Adobe Stock search for "Israel-Palestine conflict" displays dozens of imagess created by artificial intelligence and supposedly showing the conflict in the Middle East.
In fact, the vast majority of results in a given search are creations of artificial intelligence!.
A few pictures they seem really true and might well be publicized and perceived as true. Futurism reports that some of them have already been viewed by online media informations as true, as for example on Newsbit here.
And we imagine that if you take a fake Adobe photo and do a reverse Google search you'll see other news outlets have fallen for it.
Some of these photographs are particularly evocative: for example, a Muslim mother and her child walk among the debris of a war-torn landscape. Another shows smoke rising behind the Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem.
Crikey, an Australian site that started the issue, spoke to a senior lecturer from RMIT University in Melbourne, who says there are concerns if the public recognizes the photos in question as fake.
"There is a possibility that these images may mislead them people, to distort reality, to disrupt our perception of truth and accuracy,” Dr TJ Thomson tells Crikey.
We will add that in a war, what dies first is the truth.
In turn, Adobe stated that Adobe Stock requires all AI-generated content to be labeled as such when submitted for licensing. These particular images were flagged as productive AI when submitted and made available for license under these requirements.
And it is indeed marked, in fine print, but it is marked in the photo information.
Adobe announced that it accepts AI-generated submissions from producers such as Midjourney, DALL-E and Stable Diffusion, and is the only major stock photo site with such a policy.
The funny thing is that in June, a report from Stock Performer showed that on Adobe Stock AI images outperform real photos. It had even found that the average revenue per photo per month for AI images is four and a half times higher than real photos or any other format.
