I hate how the debate over “AI” leaves us with basically only two terrible options any time we share a picture of unknown origin:

1. don’t think about whether it could be fake and share it all over the place regardless (extra bad if it turns out to contain misinformation, or to be a clearly plagiarized version of some real person’s drawing or photography)

2. get in extremely misinformed fights with each other over whether it’s real, with many arguments being based on severe misunderstandings of how to recognize LLM-generated work

Ideally, the solution would be not to share pictures of unknown origin, and always to cite the original artist or source of the image.

But this can be a difficult rule to follow, in a whole Internet culture that has heavily built itself around treating images like part of language– using them as shorthand for ideas, hieroglyphics to transmit specific feelings and concepts, and freely cutting and pasting parts of them together “like dolls.”

With images that range from “absolutely no one knows where this originated” to “it’s such common knowledge that you don’t bother talking about that” (and different people can have different ideas of where the borders are on that spectrum!)

Do you know who drew all the Wojak art? The happiness bus cartoon? The “sickos” guy at the window? Do you know who took the photos in every old meme you share a dozen different edited versions of? Could you find and link to the source to credit them, every single time?

And would you? Or would it feel as ridiculous as citing the etymological origin of every word you use?

Where to draw these lines….