Top headlines
Lead story
Seeing might’ve been believing some bygone era ago. But the past few decades of increasingly refined image editing tools have taught many viewers to be skeptical of what they see online – or if not mistrustful, then at least leery of getting the proverbial wool pulled over their eyes. Generative artificial intelligence has made the task of figuring out to whom or what to give your visual trust even more difficult.
For science, this atmosphere of visual suspicion poses a threat to scientific credibility itself.
“If audiences stop trusting visual evidence altogether, science loses one of its most powerful tools for public communication,” writes Nan Li, a researcher at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who studies visual science communication.
She points out that AI-generated images have already infiltrated scientific spaces, and while some are farcically inaccurate – remember that absurdly well-endowed rat? – others may not be as easy to spot. And that doubt casts a pall across scientific images as a whole.
[ Understand what’s going on in Washington and around the world. Get our Politics Weekly newsletter. ]
