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Ask HN: Will AI-generated images flooding the web pollute future training data?
We are seeing tons of AI-generated images from Dall-E, StableDiffusion, Midjourney, etc. flooding the internet.
This will only increase.
Not every such images has a distinct mark that denotes it as AI-generated. They could be mistaken for real photograph or real work of (digital) art by a human. Especially by an algorithm.
I also understand a lot of today's cutting-edge models are trained on images scraped from the web. Not sure what curation happens but it cannot be foolproof.
Will future AI models that generate "realistic" images feed on this as input and generate images that mimic some of these attributes -- creating some kind of feedback loop that will eco for generations of models?
Has anyone already thought of such issues -- not just with images but with AI-generated text, data, music, etc.
Curious to know what is the thinking of this group here.
- sebastien_b 4y agoI’m hopeful it will ruin the business model of privacy rapists like Clearview AI.
- hiccuphippo 4y agoCan the AI come up with novel faces? A lot of the faces I've seen from SD are just slightly modified Emma Watson faces.
- sebastien_b 4y agoThe GAN stuff[1] looks pretty darn good; granted this (and my comment) only applies to faces of people, not necessarily to other types of images as the OP asks. [1]https://thispersondoesnotexist.com https://thispersondoesnotexist.com
- Terretta 4y agoDall-E doesn’t have to generate Emma Watson: https://i.imgur.com/4YHP5GI.jpg https://i.imgur.com/4YHP5GI.jpg https://i.imgur.com/vAIIhwF.jpg https://i.imgur.com/vAIIhwF.jpg https://i.imgur.com/HgIWb7C.jpg https://i.imgur.com/HgIWb7C.jpg https://i.imgur.com/nEQzPJm.jpg https://i.imgur.com/nEQzPJm.jpg https://i.imgur.com/WUxIefs.jpg https://i.imgur.com/WUxIefs.jpg https://i.imgur.com/YEcGTk3.jpg https://i.imgur.com/YEcGTk3.jpg https://i.imgur.com/elnyzvF.jpg https://i.imgur.com/elnyzvF.jpg https://i.imgur.com/KQH93nV.jpg https://i.imgur.com/KQH93nV.jpg https://i.imgur.com/RLhmSDM.jpg https://i.imgur.com/RLhmSDM.jpg https://i.imgur.com/6UB9Mdc.jpg https://i.imgur.com/6UB9Mdc.jpg https://i.imgur.com/W2JgDLa.jpg https://i.imgur.com/W2JgDLa.jpg MidJourney can trend (sorry) that way, though: https://i.imgur.com/UVQBKoJ.jpg https://i.imgur.com/UVQBKoJ.jpg https://i.imgur.com/xxoJBoh.jpg https://i.imgur.com/xxoJBoh.jpg // all prompts by me, hallucinations by indicated
- liveoneggs 4y agoMaybe everyone should stop mass-stealing media to "train their model"
- vnjxk 4y agoits mass-borrowing
- DarkWiiPlayer 4y agoAnd maybe the same could be said about stealing code too
- whywhywhywhy 4y agoMaybe the ArtStation crowd needs to start acting more like the GPL crowd. Build a platform where to view content on the platform you have to agree not to use it for training data and to take action against companies where their work turns up as model output.
- TrackerFF 4y agoThat's a bit like saying that musicians should stop listening to music, painters should stop looking at art, directors should stop watching movies, authors should stop reading books. Of course - we can control ourselves to not copy/plagiarize something, to some extent. As should deep learning models / generators. But we're all influences by someone else.
- z9znz 4y agoYes but... as I mention in sibling post, all roads seem to end up profit seeking. It will be much more profitable to train AI on what music is popular and sells well, then produce new music which is not close enough to be infringing while still fitting the success formula. This can be done so cheaply (and at some point will be fully automated... requiring virtually no oversight or review) that it can be sold at a fraction of the price of something which took human time to make. Eventually the only way you'll ever be able to hear human music is to see a human play live or listen/buy directly from the artist. This seems doable, but finding the artists becomes the challenge. Of course we have the internet, so the obvious answer is to make a website to help listeners find artists (exists already, of course). But then, go back to the top of this comment and see how some "artists" (not real musicians, but people who see $ opportunity) will start producing non-human-generated music on that platform. They will sell it a bit cheaper. Algorithms will rank it higher in search or suggestion systems. And eventually, there's no human music except live (which can be faked pretty believably depending on the audience).
- alenrozac 4y agoPossibly, but should be easy enough to exclude. For example Dall-e has the pixels watermark (bottom-right), and I assume there's a possibility of an indicator that may by hidden in the data itself. One could also exclude common meme formats and their derivatives. Then there's the option of mapping to produced content via hashing a la Shazam, or have a discriminator component etc. But you're right, it's not trivial. I just don't think it's too big of a deal.
- dontchooseanick 4y agoYou're assuming a _voluntary_ action _can_ be done. This won't happen, Lazy humans will feed non-aware AIs. The OP is asking if s.o has "already thought of such an issue"
- WithinReason 4y agoIt should be easy to train a discriminator that can tell the difference well enough. And if it misclassifies an image then using it for training should be fine :)
- jacknews 4y agoLOL, Malkovich ... Malkovich, Malkovich. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q6Fuxkinhug https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q6Fuxkinhug Starring Malkovich, as, Malkovich.
- sebastianconcpt 4y agoLOL it would be funnier if this pollution wouldn't be about to become tragic.
- Kuinox 4y agoPeople will post more generated images that they consider good, than bad, thus improving the dataset.
- sebastianconcpt 4y agoWhat is that "good" you are referring to when the "goodness" notion is being broken by noise in intelligence itself?
- WithinReason 4y agoGood = label corresponds well to data
- sebastianconcpt 4y agoIf you go deep, you'll find that's still an insufficient imprecise and ambiguous definition. You just reframed the question by delegating that judgment to the dependency on "corresponds well" maintaining the ambiguity, vagueness and imprecision.
- WithinReason 4y agoThere is no ambiguity about calling a dog a dog being better than calling a cat a dog.
- Cthulhu_ 4y agoHowever, this has its own issues in terms of bias; what if you really like HR Giger's work, but this label of "good" is made synonymous with "pretty" or "inoffensive"? I wouldn't fully trust human input into these things.
- t_mann 4y agoProbably, but I don't think it'll be a huge problem. Firstly, we want to be able to identify generated images for much more important reasons anyway, and secondly, the importance of training data might decrease as those systems mature and move to less supervised training methods.
- pengstrom 4y agoOf course, as with all human cultural endeavours. The images published are also selected by human aesthetics and interest, so valuable novel information is still being propagated.
- benreesman 4y agoYou’re exactly right of course. The hullaboo around it is the perfect amount for me to be a curmudgeon about. I’m really looking forward to everyone realizing that there is a new baseline of capability, which is whatever amount above the old baseline, and that everyone ends up roughly where they started but with auto tune now.
- pjc50 4y agoYes - and not only that, but AI-generated art will start affecting how humans make art, and possibly even how they take photos. I wouldn't like to predict how, though. Especially with text there's an arms race to make undetectable AI text for blogspam and similar purposes. It's going to end up like carbon dating: once nuclear weapons were used in the atmosphere, everything ended up contaminated and had to be accounted for. https://www.radiocarbon.com/carbon-dating-bomb-carbon.htm https://www.radiocarbon.com/carbon-dating-bomb-carbon.htm The future will include humans claiming AI art as their own, possibly touched up a bit, and AIs claiming human art as their own.
- bilekas 4y ago> The future will include humans claiming AI art as their own, possibly touched up a bit, and AIs claiming human art as their own. Once that's all AI are claiming I'm okay with that !
- daoist_shaman 4y agoBeauty filters on social media which subtly change facial features such as lip and eye size are already leading to widespread body dysmorphia issues. I wouldn't be surprised if the number of augmentative elective surgeries is also skyrocketing.
- spencerchubb 4y agoHopefully we get to a future where people just customize their avatar instead of feeling the need to change their physical body. I like to be optimistic
- EGreg 4y agoOptimistic: https://youtu.be/jX71XvnMDys https://youtu.be/jX71XvnMDys
- mab122 4y agoany examples of such filters?
- CTDOCodebases 4y agoI think the best analogy is hip-hop music. Everything will become a copy of a copy of a copy until everything just sounds the same and looks like a parody of itself lacking the soul that made it attractive in the first place.
- jcims 4y agoAnd then along comes Harry Mack.
- Bilal_io 4y agoThe GOAT
- CTDOCodebases 4y agoI guess that's where the analogy falls apart. It's possible to branch when you have an accurate history. As it is now all images are suspect. Even an analogue photo could be a photo of a high res digital ai generated image.
- jcims 4y agoYeah I think our perception of what we're looking at will change. It will go from 'this is a viewport into some place in our world' to 'i can imagine this environment'.
- Cthulhu_ 4y agoMost music is like that, but my theory there is that you need a lot of generic music to make the original or good things stand out. To paraphrase Syndrome, when everything is great, nothing is.
- personalidea 4y agoYes, that is what happens when big music takes an interest and everything is flooded. Same with beat, rock, punk, new wave, you name it. HipHop is alive and well, just need to know where to look.
- bee_rider 4y agoPerhaps someone will (or maybe it has already been done) figure out a business model for selling access to curated datasets that are known not to include a bunch of additional ML generated noise. Although, to some extent I wonder how much it matters. If we're creating images using AI tools, and then sharing the best results, doesn't that become valid training data? In some sense are we supervising the learning?
- Cthulhu_ 4y agoI do believe e.g. Google has datasets like that already. Some they offer to the public, but a lot they will keep to themselves.
- thfuran 4y ago>If we're creating images using AI tools, and then sharing the best results, doesn't that become valid training data? Maybe in cases where those results are at least as good as the real thing. But in general, something being the best of some set of options doesn't imply that it's good, let alone perfect. And besides, people will also share comically bad results.
- mminer237 4y agoJokes on you, I already share the comically bad results of stuff I draw manually!
- thenickdude 4y agoMaybe it'll be like pre-nuclear steel. Images created before the explosion of AI images contaminated the world will be sought after.
- jcims 4y agoI'm more worried about us becoming numb to visual novelty. I was tinkering with Stable Diffusion yesterday to come up with ideas for an apartment interior design. These aren't even cherry picked, you can generate images like this, one every 10 seconds or so, for as long as you like: https://imgur.com/a/mczYfnv https://imgur.com/a/mczYfnv
- xiphias2 4y agoWow, can you explain how you did it? I tried to write ,,nice apartment'' HuggingFace link from stable diffusion, but I got this error: ,,This application is too busy! Try again soon''
- l-lousy 4y agoIn the stable diffusion announcement post there is a link to a CoLab notebook that’s easy to use
- jcims 4y agoThere are a number of ways to do it, this is is where my images came from: https://beta.dreamstudio.ai/ https://beta.dreamstudio.ai/ With a prompt like this: "ultra modern apartment, leather furniture, bold dark colors, built-in fireplace" Add modifiers and other hints to see how it influences the outcome. You can add styles too (eg midcentury modern, shabby chic, etc) Tinker with the settings on the right (note that most of them will burn more credits per image as you move from the default). I've tried it with DALL-E and Midjourney and like the output of Stable Diffusion the best (specifically for this type of image, they are all good at some things and bad at others)
- sebastianconcpt 4y agoIt's a great question that brings me to two follow up questions: 1. The actual pollution happens in culture (our imaginary) and, as history shows, censorship (cultural via cancellation, or legal via politization of the issue) is not a moral nor practical solution. Then, high culture and filtering technology to the rescue? 2. Images are just the start as Murphy's Law ensures we'll face this same problem for every categorizable piece of knowledge you can think of using in an AI artifact (music, patterns of movements, speech recognition, behavior recognition, art recognition, etc)
- marcus_holmes 4y agothat quote from Matrix: "Which is why the Matrix was redesigned to this: the peak of your civilization. I say your civilization, because as soon as we started thinking for you it really became our civilization, which is of course what this is all about. " [0] I wonder how soon we'll reach "peak human creativity", and start to see people creating less art, music, fashion, code, because there's no point competing with AI-generated content. [0] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0133093/quotes/qt0324293 https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0133093/quotes/qt0324293
- sebastianconcpt 4y agoA dream come true for social engineers with owning power.
- tarunmuvvala 4y agoI am curious how do these AI get the data sourced? Is it the free floating images on the internet or is it the data that we keep on the servers of the BigTech?
- Cthulhu_ 4y agoBit of column A, bit of column B; I'm confident that Facebook and Google have huge datasets of people's personal information and photos, but they will not use them in anything public facing, because they know this scares people and will cause huge lawsuits. So for the public image generators, they will use public images; I believe places like artstation and flickr will be used a lot. Also because they will include metadata, either on the descriptions or in the photo's metadata, about the location, scene, setting, camera, etc. Then (and I'm mainly thinking of Dall-E here) there's other open caches of data, like collections of artwork along with intricate descriptions of what they depict.
- tarunmuvvala 4y agoThanks for answering. If its Publicly sourced data. There is huge opportunity for some create a DATA DAO where data better labelled and people can use their data to use the AI for their usecases. What do you think of challenges for such use cases?
- lazyjones 4y agoAI-generated media in general will likely plunge us into a new dark age. Every report you see on the news, every "secret recording" of a politician doing something dodgy, will be either an AI generated fake or considered as such by many viewers. Nothing will be certain anymore and MSM have already lost their credibility for many viewers.
- bluelightning2k 4y agoI think it's likely that AI can recognize AI generated images. This would mean it's always likely to be filterable. And if not, it's arguable that this pollution becomes an asset. It would be high quality synthetic training data which is commonly intentionally used. It would also be possible to look for the metadata that accompanies photos taken on phones etc. and weigh that more highly.
- knome 4y agoAn AI that recognizes AI generated images would be a great tool for training an AI that produces images that won't be recognized as AI generated images via GAN, no?
- bluelightning2k 4y agoI actually think it's likely that part of the next generational leap of these models is using the images people chose to export and feeding them back in as training data. They more likely represent high quality feedback (essentially labelling the output) than pollution.
- iammjm 4y agoI am worried about information dumping -- just flooding the Internet with insane amount of AI generated data to drown the "real" data. And I dont mean "real" necessarily in a sense of genuine or man-made, but simply fake or slightly divergent. Imagine a world where only 1 out of 1000 news stories or tweets is real... the amount of damage you can do to institutions, democracies, causes... just continue fucking with people to the point where they have no idea what is real and what is fake and give up the truth-seeking altogether and give in to the loudest/most dominant narrative. Invest money into a an AI farm that just spits a fake every second and see if the fact-checkers and well-researched alternatives keep up.
- WanderPanda 4y agoI‘m not too worried about this because we already have this to an extend where it is required for a particular publisher to build up a reputation. People will learn to pay more attention to the reputation and publishers will apply more scrutiny in return
- trention 4y ago>People will learn to pay more attention to the reputation and publishers will apply more scrutiny in return A subset of the people will but most will not. Right now obviously fake news stories are shared left and right, without even a modicum of rational analysis applied as to their plausibility. The average person is simply incapable of rational thinking about anything that is not day-to-day and this will not change.
- sigmoid10 4y agoYou don't have to imagine that world, it is already here. The vast, vast majority of "news" sites out there is already straight up propaganda or ad-focused pseudo grassroots bullshit. Maybe not yet completely AI generated, but that seems like it would only be the cherry on top of the cake for the people behind it. We need solutions for this and not ways to prevent what has already happened.
- Cthulhu_ 4y ago
- seydor 4y agothere will be no longer "training data" , that is, large datasets. People will finetune their models to add specific new subsets of images
- mrweasel 4y agoThat should be an add-on to licenses: You are not allowed to use this works as part of a training set for AI/ML. That would work beautifully for text, code and images.
- benreesman 4y agoI’ll pose a mental model which is more than a bit simplistic, but I’ve watched big models in feedback loops before and I feel that the intuition is fundamentally sound. There is sort of a fixed-point on this stuff that creates a Nash point. Every relevant move is a move for some advantage (from megacorp copyright laundering to aspiring influencer content output) and that competition tends to wash out roughly where you started.
- enviclash 4y agoWhat are the AI vs AI game-theoretical implications of cultural or strategic development?
- benreesman 4y agoIt’s very boring really. All of the actors involved are striving for notability, which is kind of a proxy for primal urges around status/reproductive eligibility, and once everyone is tuning up their profile with the same net, it gets a bit random at best.
- enviclash 4y agoActors might be boring but speculation about the topic is endless.
- enviclash 4y agoYes, in the same way that algorithms influence human decisions.
- emporas 4y agoI think that all the future deep learning will be trained to fresh data, crowdsourced from billions of humans. Humans will be expected to photograph a door knob, from a distance of 20cm, a height of a meter from the floor etc. If a billion humans take 50 photos like that, and spend fifteen minutes of their life to do so, we will have almost as much data as the Laion database, but for door knobs. The photo workers will be paid something like 0.00001 dollar for a picture, by the users of the deep learning algorithms. The payment method is called blockchain and bitcoin if you have heard of such a thing. Bitcoin, the money of information will enable a marketplace of information, in which the better the information, the more the producer is paid. Bitcoin bsv, can support almost a million transactions per second as of today, and every year the tps is increasing tenfold.
- leonidasv 4y agoHello, GPT-3.
- emporas 4y agoActually is used GPT-3 to create my own text, to make fun of the covid hoax and many others. How did you know? lichess/ emporas/blog. The next on the list to make fun of, is the legacy economic system!
- Cthulhu_ 4y ago> The payment method is called blockchain and bitcoin if you have heard of such a thing. Bitcoin, the money of information will enable a marketplace of information, in which the better the information, the more the producer is paid. Bitcoin bsv, can support almost a million transactions per second as of today, and every year the tps is increasing tenfold. That's worded needlessly condescending; come on, bitcoin has been around for over a decade, nobody on this site has NOT heard of it. You're coming across as preachy as if it helps sell the flawed technology.
- emporas 4y agoYes i thought it sounds a little bit funny that way. Thanks for the comment btw. Actually what i am referring to, is a blockchain which can support billions of tps, trillions and quadrillions tps. Image data needs to be literally a monster amount! BTC which is the name of what you are referring to, it can support only 10 tps. Have you heard of a company which sells shoes, known by the name of Adidas, and another company which sells shoes as well, known by the name of Abibas? Btc is the Abibas of blockchains!
- hiccuphippo 4y agoIf they are mistaken for real photography then mission fucking accomplished. https://xkcd.com/810/ https://xkcd.com/810/ Jesting aside, if the resulting image is good enough to publish and tag, then it's good enough to put back into a training set. I also assume there could be a market for AI trained only on "human produced art" the same way there's a market for organic vegetables.
- seqi 4y agoIf a human cannot distinguish between a real image and an AI-generated image and the AI-generated images are manually labelled, then there is no problem?
- kybernetyk 4y agoNo, just create an image service like Getty or Shutterstock where human made images are uploaded for the sole reason of selling those images to AI companies who want to train their networks with organic material.
- seqi 4y agoIf a human would label the AI-generated image exactly the same as if it was a real image, then there is no problem?
- hmate9 4y agoimo no. Just use existing image sets to train future models if this becomes too big of a problem.
- eru 4y ago> They could be mistaken for real photograph or real work of (digital) art by a human. Especially by an algorithm. Perhaps by a naive algorithm. I'm fairly sure it's fairly easy to train a neural network to recognize current generation AI generated images. And probably for quite a while longer. Btw, if you want to create realistic images, it's fairly easy to create guaranteed pristine data: just take a video camera and create some footage. Perhaps there will even be a market for such pristine data. Now, if you want to create art and train on human artists' output, that might perhaps get harder in the future.
- asib 4y ago> I'm fairly sure it's fairly easy to train a neural network to recognize current generation AI generated images. Could you explain how this is done and why it's easy?
- eru 4y agoYou get a corpus and do some supervised learning. Why do I think it's easy: the goal of current generation AI image generation project was just to produce images that look good to humans. Not to be indistinguishable. Even for casual human observer, they are still relatively easy to spot. A trained machine that can pay more attention to details should do even better. In some sense, this is just the same idea as a GAN. Only that the generator is fixed, and we are only training the discriminator. With future systems, distinguishing them might be harder.
- dougmwne 4y agoFirst, it’s probably quite possible to train a network to filter on AI vs. human generated. There are many visible signs for the untrained eye and probably many more that are not visible to humans but can be picked up from the correlation. Secondly, there is still a big human selection process going on. Only the most interesting and coherent images will find their way onto the public internet. In fact, if you can automatically detect that these images are AI, then they can serve as an additional training signal to help teach the AI which of its outputs are most likely to delight the human.
- webmaven 4y ago> Secondly, there is still a big human selection process going on. Only the most interesting and coherent images will find their way onto the public internet. That's rather optimistic. Plenty of low quality images are generated and posted to the public Internet. What is true is that most of that generated junk doesn't have much of a shelf-life, which reduces the odds of it making it into the training data.
- colmanhumphrey 4y agoIt’ll make some naive approaches work differently, but it’s overall more info: both the selection effect of what images humans share, and the surrounding context (eg what comments are people making about the image)
- zecg 4y agoI think each AI generated image should have a steganographic signature with data on the system generating it.
- Cthulhu_ 4y agoI'm sure it has been done before, but, has anyone ever generated a set of machine learning generated anythings (images, text, whatever) and used it as the learning set for a new ML thing? Then again, and again, and again, until we end up in the 10th dimension of AI surrealism.
- andrewnc 4y agoOne examples of this is back translation [0] It works fairly well as model size increases Also, shameless plug, we're pretty proud of our generated anything's at Gretel[1]. It's tabular, text, and time series for now - but we recently had a blog post that shows how generated data can be useful for downstream ML [2] [0] https://arxiv.org/abs/2110.05448 https://arxiv.org/abs/2110.05448 [1] https://gretel.ai/ https://gretel.ai/ [2] https://gretel.ai/blog/how-to-safely-work-with-another-companys-data https://gretel.ai/blog/how-to-safely-work-with-another-compa...
- Terretta 4y ago> https://gretel.ai/ https://gretel.ai/ Where were you the last decade of my professional life? I couldn’t find anyone to take my money for exactly this.
- steve_john 4y agoAlgorithms of AI can generate images or videos based on a set of parameters or it can create new images by combining and altering existing images.
- XorNot 4y agoI don't think so - they'll probably ensure enhance it. An AI draws something, people describe what they actually see, the AI is now refined in what it should produce for a given prompt (and moves away from the original prompt).
- shmatt 4y agoOne thing I've noticed that no AI tooling company is building is a good/easy to use feedback loop. A high quality model needs a lot of human feedback. No one is really building a strong platform to do that. But eventually someone will have to fill that gap
- CarbonCycles 4y agoI think it's going to become a cat and mouse game. AI generated images (e.g., deep fakes) are already being used in very nefarious ways such as job interviews, applying for gov't documents via video, etc. Researchers are finding ways to identify the tale-tell markers that currently give them away, but yes, for the neophyte this is going to be a real issue on what can I trust. However, the great thing is that you will always have data...the challenge will then become how well do I TRUST my predictions, which I believe will spur some very interesting algorithms such as anomaly detection (i.e., the RGB distributions, spatial-markers, etc are way too distorted if I compare metadata from other pictures of this type).
- taubek 4y agoYes, it will pollute the training data from todays perspective. In future, I don't think that people will care. It is a shame that there is no metadata embedded in AI generated images so that they can be distinguished.
- verdverm 4y agoThis reminds me about Google's paper titled "Machine Learning: The High Interest Credit Card of Technical Debt" https://research.google/pubs/pub43146/ https://research.google/pubs/pub43146/ Abstract: Machine learning offers a fantastically powerful toolkit for building complex systems quickly. This paper argues that it is dangerous to think of these quick wins as coming for free. Using the framework of technical debt, we note that it is remarkably easy to incur massive ongoing maintenance costs at the system level when applying machine learning. The goal of this paper is highlight several machine learning specific risk factors and design patterns to be avoided or refactored where possible. These include boundary erosion, entanglement, hidden feedback loops, undeclared consumers, data dependencies, changes in the external world, and a variety of system-level anti-patterns.
- sinecure 4y agoThe most valuable thing online in the next few decades will be authenticity. Authenticity is really the new luxury. The beauty of the early internet was its pure, passion driven authenticity. Websites sprouting up for every interest, built only because someone was driven to share their thoughts on a given subject. Forums, filled with techies chatting about their interests. Video games exploring interactive media and forming a new art. The rise of memes from places like 4chan, that have come to dominate digital expression. All of these beautiful things have been degraded by the inauthentic, focus-group, advertising data harvesting machines of mega-corporate greed. Unique websites and blogs are drowned out into oblivion, unprofitable and hidden by the SEO Gods of Google, funneling you into their own products and advertising pathways. Forums bled out into Reddit, which is now an astroturfed corporate dream world where advertisers can masquerade as real users and corporate appointed moderators funnel all conversation into the optimum advertising framework--deleting anything that could harm reddit's shareholder pool of giant corporations and governments. Video games went from novel, artistic experiments, to hyper-optimized addiction machines built to drain the time, money, and drive from their young audience. Even memes, with all their raw vulgarity and juvenile silliness, have been coopted by corporations trying to bend this new form of expression to their advertising goals. First, content online was authentic and human. Then, big tech started trimming and censoring and funneling and optimizing it into something less real... less human, but far more ripe for advertising revenue and data collection. Now, we are entering the stage of AI-generated content. Articles written by algorithm, art created by machine, bots filling up the whole internet with noise. The level of distrust, paranoia and questioning of reality that users will experience online in the coming years will be unparalleled. Is this image real? Is this person I'm talking to a bot? Is this artwork human made? Which brings me back to my main point. Authenticity will be the new luxury. And the builders of tomorrow who figure out how to curate authentic online communities and experiences will be the winners in this content war.
- antisthenes 4y agoAgreed on all points. I'm a person that generally doesn't consume art, but if I did (let's say I was looking for artwork to hang at home), I would rather get 1 authentic hand-painted and hand-signed piece from a local artist than 10 digital AI-generated inkjet prints. I wouldn't necessarily call it a luxury, more personal preference? Quality over quantity. There are some valid reasons to prefer one or the other, depending on circumstance.
- warrenm 4y agoI look forward to the "pollution", personally This is not in denigration of human artists, photographers, etc I think it'll drive artists to make better/different work (just like the advent/adoption of the vanishing point changed art ~500-1000y ago)
- peaslock 4y agoWhile automatic data collection might become harder, one can still curate high quality datasets. An example is Tesla's FSD autopilot which is nearly entirely trained on curated data (AFAIK), as well as highly realistic 3D simulation data. Sure, it is expensive, but the expected returns are also very high. However, there is some evidence that NNs currently are somewhat limited by the availability of high quality data,[0] however I'm not sure this is really a problem because neural nets already accomplish amazing things, so one might not need that much data to get something useful (perhaps at the expensive of more compute, but so what; e.g. analog computing might give some 1000x speedup anyhow). [0] https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/6Fpvch8RR29qLEWNH/chinchilla-s-wild-implications https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/6Fpvch8RR29qLEWNH/chinchilla...
- raphar 4y agoWith all these ai generated images, the only thing I don't want is the younger ones quiting drawing, ditching the pencil for an app, loosing the motivation for hand drawing because using these programs are easier and faster. It would be a sad world.