Text-to-image AI: powerful, easy-to-use technology for making art – and fakes

Type "Teddy bears working on new AI research on the moon in the 1980s" into any of the recently released text-to-image artificial intelligence image generators, and after just a few seconds the sophisticated software will produce an eerily pertinent image. Seemingly bound by only your imagination, this latest trend in synthetic media has delighted many, inspired others and struck fear in some. Google, research firm OpenAI and AI vendor Stability AI have each developed a text-to-image image generator powerful enough that some observers are questioning whether in the future people will be able to trust the photographic record. As a computer scientist who specializes in image forensics, I have been thinking a lot about this technology: what it is capable of, how each of the tools have been rolled out to the public, and what lessons can be learned as this technology continues its ballistic trajectory. Although their digital precursor dates back to 1997, the first synthetic images splashed onto the scene just five years ago.