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Is it? I seriously doubt it. Other than "you can't trust anything you don't see with your own eyes", what kind of shift is it? People lived like that for liter

Is it? I seriously doubt it. Other than "you can't trust anything you don't see with your own eyes", what kind of shift is it? People lived like that for literally millennia before photography, audio, and video recording. At absolute worst, we are only undoing about 150 years of development, and only "kind of" and only in certain scenarios. Moreover, people were making convincing edits of street signs, etc. literally 20 years ago using just Photoshop. What does this really change at a fundamental level? Okay, so you can mimic voices and generate video, rather than just static images. But people have been making hoax recordings and videos for longer than we've had computers. I think the effects of this stuff will be: 1) making it easier/cheaper to create certain forms of art and entertainment media, 2) making it easier to create hoaxes, and 3) we will eventually need to contend with challenges to IP law. That's about it. I think it will create a lot of value for a lot of people (sibling comment makes a good point about this being equivalent to CGI), but I don't see the big societal shift you're claiming that this is.

kertoip_1 4y ago
> people were making convincing edits of street signs, etc. literally 20 years ago using just Photoshop You needed to have tools, skill, resources and time to do such things. You don't need to have that anymore. Anyone can do anything on any scale. It's something what SpaceX did. Ofc it was possible to launch a rocket before SpaceX, but few really could afford that. Now that prices are low, that opens infinite number of new space exploration possibilities.
- time_to_smile 4y ago
  > You don't need to have that anymore. Anyone can do anything on any scale. I have yet to see an example of "Synthetic AI media" that was both realistic and not immediately recognizable as being synthetically generated. And if you think being 99% there means we're very close to 100% just remember how long it's taken self driving cars to close the gap (we actually don't know how long since they still haven't succeeded in this).
  - pretendscholar 4y ago
    >I have yet to see an example of "Synthetic AI media" that was both realistic and not immediately recognizable as being synthetically generated. Would you know if you had?
  - gpm 4y ago
    > I have yet to see an example of "Synthetic AI media" that was both realistic and not immediately recognizable as being synthetically generated. Man, am I a good photographer or what https://imgur.com/mUoY4b1 https://imgur.com/mUoY4b1 I mean, probably if you're familiar enough with squirrels something gives it away, but I'm not.
    - gpm 4y ago
      That said, I do think it does better with less realistic images right now, like https://imgur.com/mcJsg0n https://imgur.com/mcJsg0n and https://imgur.com/41eENUO https://imgur.com/41eENUO It also took a number of much worse images to get those ones.
      - borski 4y ago
        Okay, but Imgur marked that second one as erotic, so for every two steps forward… haha
        gpm 4y ago
        Lol, it didn't tell me that. In case anyone is worried, it isn't remotely erotic or otherwise nsfw.
    - butwhywhyoh 4y ago
      You're right. I guess if you can't tell the difference, that means everyone who claims to be able to tell the difference is lying! I'm not particularly familiar with squirrels and something about that "photo" looks very off. If you showed it to me in a vacuum I'd just assume someone was trying to make a highly stylized version of something they had a photo reference for, but under no circumstances would I believe that's a real photo.
- nerdponx 4y ago
  > You needed to have tools, skill, resources and time to do such things. Downloading a cracked copy of Photoshop and checking out a book from the library on how to edit photos is only somewhat more difficult than learning to use Python and write programs that generate art from some model. And only because learning anything is extremely easy today with so many free resources and help forums. > Anyone can do anything on any scale. I'll believe it when I see it. > Now that prices are low, that opens infinite number of new space exploration possibilities. Except SpaceX is still in the "crawl" phase of "crawl, walk, run", and they only got even that far because because an eccentric billionaire has staked his reputation on the problem and thrown a huge amount of money at it, without having to worry about things like "reporting to Congress" and "making sure the space program creates jobs in such-and-such voting district". And after all that effort and truly astounding engineering (the rocket lands itself back on the launch pad!!), space launches are still expensive, risky, and complicated, and will remain so into the foreseeable future (~decades).
  - kertoip_1 4y ago
    > they only got even that far because because an eccentric billionaire has staked his reputation on the problem and thrown a huge amount of money at it That's what Bezos did with its Blue Origin. If you check where is Blue Origin in space race, you'll quickly realize it's not enough Edit: ah, and is space still expensive? If one of universities in my middle-sized country with no space engineering background could afford to launch cubesat via SpaceX, then yes, I think it became cheap.
    - nerdponx 4y ago
      Did Bezos stake his reputation on Blue Origin? I think it'd be a lot less embarrassing for him if Blue Origin folded than it would be for Musk if SpaceX folded.
  - nextaccountic 4y ago
    > Python Most people using those models aren't writing Python code. Check out https://www.reddit.com/r/dalle2/ https://www.reddit.com/r/dalle2/, https://www.reddit.com/r/midjourney/ https://www.reddit.com/r/midjourney/, https://www.reddit.com/r/StableDiffusion/ https://www.reddit.com/r/StableDiffusion/, https://www.reddit.com/r/bigsleep/ https://www.reddit.com/r/bigsleep/ etc I expect that once the technology matures, a smaller and smaller niche of users will be doing any kind of programming
- fatherzine 4y ago
  "opens infinite number of new space exploration possibilities" In practice, "infinite" translates mainly to a handful of hyper-competitive guys checking off "went to space" off their achievements list. There is a very good reason for that: space is very inhospitable, much more inhospitable than Antarctica. Nothing much has happened in Antarctica for 100 years beyond the occasional hyper-competitive athlete and a few research stations. Perhaps a natural resource gold rush might liven up the place for a few decades, until exhaustion and falling back to inhospitable status, dotted with the rare ghost town remains. Something similar happens in the "creative" space: the Internet unleashed a massive tidal wave of "content", yet the vast vast majority of it is rather trite and devoid of any (spiritual) meaning. Personally, I'm much more inclined to stick with the classics than even 20 years ago, simply because it's not worth my time wading through the deluge of poor quality "content" out there. To wrap up the analogy, I'd rather inhabit a nutritionally rich environment, than getting lost in the the vast, but mostly empty, expanse of the Internet.
  - simonw 4y ago
    Even if the vast majority of content on the internet is "rather trite and devoid of meaning", there's so much out there that even if just 0.05% of it is any good then that's a vast amount of new high quality content to enjoy and learn from. I would take today's internet-fuelled media landscape over the landscape of 20 years ago in a heart beat.
    - fatherzine 4y ago
      I am fairly torn on this topic. The statement is mostly an admission that I'm too weak to not personally waste too much time on trite Internet content. The question I often ask myself: is spending time with this content, while entertaining in the short term, perhaps via the novelty factor, also nourishing in the long term? The answer is, sadly, much more frequently NO than in the time of printed books. The best I can hope is to be able to use Internet as an encyclopedia for laser-focused lookups. Sadly, I am too often caught in browsing random content only loosely related to the original lookup topic.
  - borski 4y ago
hackernewds 4y ago
Photoshop has always existed. Yet we haven't lost the era of not trusting pictures. What is new? I think we're making the folly of comparing AI generated art to human generated art from the 90s. Humans have "advanced" much further with the advancements now that DALL-E is nowhere close to. https://youtu.be/iKBs9l8jS6Q https://youtu.be/iKBs9l8jS6Q
- jhbadger 4y ago
  And even earlier than Photoshop or computers. The concern over this reminds me of the era shortly after the development of photography where it was discovered that doing things like multiple exposure allowed the creation of "trick" photographs where you could combine images to create pictures of giants towering over buildings or tiny people playing in teacups. Society managed not to be falsely convinced of the existence of such beings despite the worry that people wouldn't be able to tell fact from fiction in them.
flycaliguy 4y ago
I think your perspective is really sharp and hits the important points. I think you might be right but I also think we are witnessing a sort of merger between an internet history and physical history. It’s playing out in a lot of ways but mostly through the impact of social media on civil discourse. We are watching technology collide with the real world. It just feels to me like the internet has arrived in a way that can best be expressed in an Adam Curtis documentary.
tracerbulletx 4y ago
Being able to just make a mental storyboard of ideas, and have that be trivially easy to turn into a finished product will transform who can express, and how they will express ideas and stories and art. Now you can do images. Will we also be able to do voice actors, video, 3d Assets, and even story beats and dialogue? It seems quite possible. Everyone just became, or is becoming, a director with 1000 cast members, concept artists, and crew at their disposal.
- nprateem 4y ago
  Not to mention being able to generate movies from a script and a few key frames. This tech is a revolution for opening up creativity.
planetsprite 4y ago
gernb 4y ago
Ever see the movie "Fantasic Planet"? This isn't just drawing. It's the start of telling a computer you want something and it making it. Not just pictures, anything. Phyiscal things, computational things,... Hey computer make me a sandwich, a desk, a computer virus, a paperclip, a gun, a bomb, a little brother.

kertoip_1 4y ago

> people were making convincing edits of street signs, etc. literally 20 years ago using just Photoshop You needed to have tools, skill, resources and time to do such things. You don't need to have that anymore. Anyone can do anything on any scale. It's something what SpaceX did. Ofc it was possible to launch a rocket before SpaceX, but few really could afford that. Now that prices are low, that opens infinite number of new space exploration possibilities.

time_to_smile 4y ago
> You don't need to have that anymore. Anyone can do anything on any scale. I have yet to see an example of "Synthetic AI media" that was both realistic and not immediately recognizable as being synthetically generated. And if you think being 99% there means we're very close to 100% just remember how long it's taken self driving cars to close the gap (we actually don't know how long since they still haven't succeeded in this).
- pretendscholar 4y ago
  >I have yet to see an example of "Synthetic AI media" that was both realistic and not immediately recognizable as being synthetically generated. Would you know if you had?
- gpm 4y ago
  > I have yet to see an example of "Synthetic AI media" that was both realistic and not immediately recognizable as being synthetically generated. Man, am I a good photographer or what https://imgur.com/mUoY4b1 https://imgur.com/mUoY4b1 I mean, probably if you're familiar enough with squirrels something gives it away, but I'm not.
  - gpm 4y ago
    That said, I do think it does better with less realistic images right now, like https://imgur.com/mcJsg0n https://imgur.com/mcJsg0n and https://imgur.com/41eENUO https://imgur.com/41eENUO It also took a number of much worse images to get those ones.
    - borski 4y ago
      Okay, but Imgur marked that second one as erotic, so for every two steps forward… haha
      - gpm 4y ago
        Lol, it didn't tell me that. In case anyone is worried, it isn't remotely erotic or otherwise nsfw.
  - butwhywhyoh 4y ago
    You're right. I guess if you can't tell the difference, that means everyone who claims to be able to tell the difference is lying! I'm not particularly familiar with squirrels and something about that "photo" looks very off. If you showed it to me in a vacuum I'd just assume someone was trying to make a highly stylized version of something they had a photo reference for, but under no circumstances would I believe that's a real photo.
nerdponx 4y ago
> You needed to have tools, skill, resources and time to do such things. Downloading a cracked copy of Photoshop and checking out a book from the library on how to edit photos is only somewhat more difficult than learning to use Python and write programs that generate art from some model. And only because learning anything is extremely easy today with so many free resources and help forums. > Anyone can do anything on any scale. I'll believe it when I see it. > Now that prices are low, that opens infinite number of new space exploration possibilities. Except SpaceX is still in the "crawl" phase of "crawl, walk, run", and they only got even that far because because an eccentric billionaire has staked his reputation on the problem and thrown a huge amount of money at it, without having to worry about things like "reporting to Congress" and "making sure the space program creates jobs in such-and-such voting district". And after all that effort and truly astounding engineering (the rocket lands itself back on the launch pad!!), space launches are still expensive, risky, and complicated, and will remain so into the foreseeable future (~decades).
- kertoip_1 4y ago
  > they only got even that far because because an eccentric billionaire has staked his reputation on the problem and thrown a huge amount of money at it That's what Bezos did with its Blue Origin. If you check where is Blue Origin in space race, you'll quickly realize it's not enough Edit: ah, and is space still expensive? If one of universities in my middle-sized country with no space engineering background could afford to launch cubesat via SpaceX, then yes, I think it became cheap.
  - nerdponx 4y ago
    Did Bezos stake his reputation on Blue Origin? I think it'd be a lot less embarrassing for him if Blue Origin folded than it would be for Musk if SpaceX folded.
- nextaccountic 4y ago
  > Python Most people using those models aren't writing Python code. Check out https://www.reddit.com/r/dalle2/ https://www.reddit.com/r/dalle2/, https://www.reddit.com/r/midjourney/ https://www.reddit.com/r/midjourney/, https://www.reddit.com/r/StableDiffusion/ https://www.reddit.com/r/StableDiffusion/, https://www.reddit.com/r/bigsleep/ https://www.reddit.com/r/bigsleep/ etc I expect that once the technology matures, a smaller and smaller niche of users will be doing any kind of programming
fatherzine 4y ago
"opens infinite number of new space exploration possibilities" In practice, "infinite" translates mainly to a handful of hyper-competitive guys checking off "went to space" off their achievements list. There is a very good reason for that: space is very inhospitable, much more inhospitable than Antarctica. Nothing much has happened in Antarctica for 100 years beyond the occasional hyper-competitive athlete and a few research stations. Perhaps a natural resource gold rush might liven up the place for a few decades, until exhaustion and falling back to inhospitable status, dotted with the rare ghost town remains. Something similar happens in the "creative" space: the Internet unleashed a massive tidal wave of "content", yet the vast vast majority of it is rather trite and devoid of any (spiritual) meaning. Personally, I'm much more inclined to stick with the classics than even 20 years ago, simply because it's not worth my time wading through the deluge of poor quality "content" out there. To wrap up the analogy, I'd rather inhabit a nutritionally rich environment, than getting lost in the the vast, but mostly empty, expanse of the Internet.
- simonw 4y ago
  Even if the vast majority of content on the internet is "rather trite and devoid of meaning", there's so much out there that even if just 0.05% of it is any good then that's a vast amount of new high quality content to enjoy and learn from. I would take today's internet-fuelled media landscape over the landscape of 20 years ago in a heart beat.
  - fatherzine 4y ago
    I am fairly torn on this topic. The statement is mostly an admission that I'm too weak to not personally waste too much time on trite Internet content. The question I often ask myself: is spending time with this content, while entertaining in the short term, perhaps via the novelty factor, also nourishing in the long term? The answer is, sadly, much more frequently NO than in the time of printed books. The best I can hope is to be able to use Internet as an encyclopedia for laser-focused lookups. Sadly, I am too often caught in browsing random content only loosely related to the original lookup topic.
- borski 4y ago

hackernewds 4y ago

Photoshop has always existed. Yet we haven't lost the era of not trusting pictures. What is new? I think we're making the folly of comparing AI generated art to human generated art from the 90s. Humans have "advanced" much further with the advancements now that DALL-E is nowhere close to. https://youtu.be/iKBs9l8jS6Q https://youtu.be/iKBs9l8jS6Q

jhbadger 4y ago
And even earlier than Photoshop or computers. The concern over this reminds me of the era shortly after the development of photography where it was discovered that doing things like multiple exposure allowed the creation of "trick" photographs where you could combine images to create pictures of giants towering over buildings or tiny people playing in teacups. Society managed not to be falsely convinced of the existence of such beings despite the worry that people wouldn't be able to tell fact from fiction in them.

flycaliguy 4y ago

I think your perspective is really sharp and hits the important points. I think you might be right but I also think we are witnessing a sort of merger between an internet history and physical history. It’s playing out in a lot of ways but mostly through the impact of social media on civil discourse. We are watching technology collide with the real world. It just feels to me like the internet has arrived in a way that can best be expressed in an Adam Curtis documentary.

tracerbulletx 4y ago

Being able to just make a mental storyboard of ideas, and have that be trivially easy to turn into a finished product will transform who can express, and how they will express ideas and stories and art. Now you can do images. Will we also be able to do voice actors, video, 3d Assets, and even story beats and dialogue? It seems quite possible. Everyone just became, or is becoming, a director with 1000 cast members, concept artists, and crew at their disposal.

nprateem 4y ago
Not to mention being able to generate movies from a script and a few key frames. This tech is a revolution for opening up creativity.

planetsprite 4y ago

gernb 4y ago

Ever see the movie "Fantasic Planet"? This isn't just drawing. It's the start of telling a computer you want something and it making it. Not just pictures, anything. Phyiscal things, computational things,... Hey computer make me a sandwich, a desk, a computer virus, a paperclip, a gun, a bomb, a little brother.