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Facebook Is Being Overrun with Stolen, AI-Gen Images That People Think Are Real

• lowbloodsugar 3y ago
  They aren’t stolen. If a human saw that image and made a similar picture (a man with a carving of a dog), it wouldn’t be a copyright violation. You can’t steal an idea.
• goles 3y ago
  While this may be a particularly dangerous way of thinking[1], it might be good that everything on the internet is becoming obviously fake, AI-generated junk. So that peoples attitude toward things that are real or borderline but are manipulated by bad actors, whatever their motivations may be, also lose some of their influence over the public. And (hopefully) the public becomes more skeptical about everything on the internet. [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accelerationism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accelerationism
  • pavel_lishin 3y ago
    Sure, but the flip-side is that the truth becomes harder to ferret out as well.
    • deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    • CrzyLngPwd 3y ago
      Maybe it's time to stop caring so much about things on the internet and focus on the truth that is in front of you, the real things.
      • usrusr 3y ago
        [flagged]
        • CrzyLngPwd 3y ago
          You can't do anything about it aside from getting stressed at your device. How would you feel if you were now getting stressed at a chatbot?
        • tharne 3y ago
          You really think more people rage-commenting on clickbait news articles makes the world better? The parent commenter is right. We should be spending our time on the people and relationships near to us in the real world, not junk on Facebook.
          • revscat 3y ago
            Interesting that you are getting downvoted here. I have come to a similar conclusion, for my own mental health if for no other reason. My ability to affect the course of human civilization is next to zero, and worrying about AGW, etc., is simply not something I feel driven to do anymore. Instead I’m baking cookies for friends and family today.
      • I_Am_Nous 3y ago
        I wish we could get other people to agree, the internet was great until it started leaking out into real life and affecting day to day existence. The internet is a meta-reality that keeps asserting itself into our perceived reality and convinces people it should be paid attention to.
        • CrzyLngPwd 3y ago
          Amen to that!
        • pavel_lishin 3y ago
          The internet is a reflection of reality, and mirrors are useful things - as long as not too many of them are fetched from a funhouse.
          • coffeecantcode 3y ago
            Nothing to add, just wanted to say this was very well put.
      • simiones 3y ago
        Well, if you care about your city or country, you have to care about many things that are not immediately in front of you. And the Internet is one of the main places where such things can be learned about.
        • randomdata 3y ago
          Most cities and counties see the people of those cities/countries hire representatives to discover and report on the things that should be cared about that are not immediately in front of the average person going about their day. If you alone feel you also need to duplicate their efforts, you may just have control issues, but if the need is genuine and shared by many then you need to rally the people to get the problem solved. Paying an employee to do nothing while you pick up the slack is a plain waste of resources.
          • simiones 3y ago
            You still have to care whether your representatives are actually doing the job you voted them in for and are paying your taxes for. You can't just say "I voted for someone who promised to build shelters for homeless people, so homeless people now have shelter". Ideally, the press would actually report on what is happening, but the incentives just aren't there for thorough and accurate reporting. You either get highly partisan press that lies or just omits important parts of what is happening because the ones paying the bills want them to, or you get an anemic press that can't do more than trawl FB or, worse, official declarations for info.
            • randomdata 3y ago
              When you sit down and go over the reports and give direction with your employee each week, it should stand out pretty clearly if they are not doing their job. No different than any other organization where you hire employees. Cities and countries are not somehow magically different. Of course, you don't just vote for the employee you like and never speak to them again. That would be just plain silly. Being the boss doesn't mean you can sit idle on a sandy beach for the rest of your life. Although that is not nearly as silly as hiring an employee and then doing their job for them. There is no point in hiring anyone if you want to do the job yourself. You go through the employee election process because you recognize that it is more efficient for one person to do the work on your, and your neighbour's, behalf. You are choosing to hand off the work to someone else precisely so you do not have to do it.
      • keybored 3y ago
        This is the Postmodern Age. People have been writing about this phenomena decades before the widespread adoption of the Internet and before geniuses began penning opinion pieces about how it’s possible to believe untruths now.[1] Which means that (in turn) you can’t just “log off” and be rid of the problem since it predates... logging off. Neo thought he could just “log off” in The Matrix. But then then it turned out that the illusions ran deeper than first thought. [1] Filter Bubble quacks et al
        • int_19h 3y ago
          Orwell wrote this in a letter in 1944: "Everywhere the world movement seems to be in the direction of centralised economies which can be made to ‘work’ in an economic sense but which are not democratically organised and which tend to establish a caste system. With this go the horrors of emotional nationalism and a tendency to disbelieve in the existence of objective truth because all the facts have to fit in with the words and prophecies of some infallible fuhrer. Already history has in a sense ceased to exist, ie. there is no such thing as a history of our own times which could be universally accepted, and the exact sciences are endangered as soon as military necessity ceases to keep people up to the mark. Hitler can say that the Jews started the war, and if he survives that will become official history. He can’t say that two and two are five, because for the purposes of, say, ballistics they have to make four. But if the sort of world that I am afraid of arrives, a world of two or three great superstates which are unable to conquer one another, two and two could become five if the fuhrer wished it. That, so far as I can see, is the direction in which we are actually moving, though, of course, the process is reversible."
          • keybored 3y ago
            I get the impression from Orwell that he thinks of these issues in too much of a top-down way. “prophecies of some infallible fuhrer.” It’s easy to mentally resist the propaganda of the fuhrer and his henchmen. You just have to parrot the lines, you don’t have to believe it.[1] But these issues have become internalized, not merely something that the Ministry of Truth or whatever says. I think the introduction to Eclipse of Reason explains it better (published 1947). In general I think “Truth” died due to Hyperreality. (If I could read French. Or understand Postmodernism.) Orwell’s vision has become too simplistic. I don’t really understand why his memes are so popular. Although perhaps on a meta-level it could be understood. [1] The propaganda in Animal Farm was mostly delivered through the henchmen who personally berated the animals and gaslit them. It’s harder to resist even that.
    • toss1 3y ago
      That is the literal plan of disinformation campaigns. The few who actually believe the BS is merely a bonus. The real goal is to get people to give up on finding the truth. At that point, they become easy to manipulate (because there is no outside standard of facts to work around).
      • randomdata 3y ago
        It has never been realistic for people to find the truth, perhaps save those who are focused on a very narrow subject of truth and are dedicating their lives to the study. We have always relied on a collection of people with the aforementioned focus with some system of accreditation to tell us what is true. While far from perfect, I'm not sure a deluge of generated AI nonsense outside of the vetted channels, complementing people already stirring up nonsense, changes anything.
        • toss1 3y ago
          >>It has never been realistic for people to find the truth, Rather strained definition of truth there. The truth that matters is a basic not-very-wrong version of what is happening. Examples: 1) The earth is roughly spheroidal. 2) NASA is a real space agency and landed people on the moon in 1969-1973. 3) The trails behind airplanes are condensation particles, not sprayed chemicals. 4) Vaccines are safe and effective, and the ratio of issues to prevented disease is on the order of millions-to-one, a vast benefit to society, especially those who medically cannot get vaccines. 5) Hijacked airlines and not pre-set explosives brought town the WTC towers in NYC on 9/11/2001. Etc. Etc. Etc.... We do NOT need a doctorate in Geology, selection into NASA Astronaut Corps, graduate astronomic physics course, PhD-level immunology, or a structural engineer's license to understand any of the above to a useful level. Yet, there is sufficient human-generated noise to convince millions that none of these are true. And you are claiming that adding industrial-scale AI agents to the public 'conversation' at a scale never seen in history will have zero effect? Sure, it might completely fizzle. But the normal and prudent expectation when something comes in and "floods the zone with shit" [0], especially when that shit has the potential to be at a volume that is far beyond anything experienced, is to expect that it will have some effect. What evidence do you have that it will have no effect? In answering, consider another top HN story at the moment "Facebook Is Being Overrun with Stolen, AI-Gen Images That People Think Are Real". [1] [0] Steve Bananon's description of a disinformation tactic [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38684309 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38684309
    • pluc 3y ago
      Truth is whatever advertisers pay for it to be
    • bigEnotation 3y ago
      Truth has always been hard to figure out. An old mentor once told me to be skeptical of everything I hear and only trust half of what I see. When I asked about which half to believe, he said that’s something I needed to figure out.
  • the8472 3y ago
    Not every equilibrium is a good equilibrium.
  • visarga 3y ago
    AI hallucinations are kindergarten level compared to what humans do online.
  • kube-system 3y ago
    I don't think it actually is obvious to many. What will probably (and already is starting to) happen is that people will revert to deriving truth through tribalism rather than evidence.
  • wimp 3y ago
    I'm more worried about the lower tail end of the bell curve that doesn't get the memo, and they become increasingly deranged. When 1/4 of the public is essentially brainwashed, your society is in deep trouble.
    • Nasrudith 3y ago
      Yeah, 25% is way too low a threshold for brainwashed to be useful to those at the top. They need at least 50%, 70% would be good but 90% is ideal. Society being defined as in peril is basically a rhetorical constant however. On a more serious note haven't societies long been based upon common brainwashing? The Bronze Age and before are fuzzier on the details but propaganda certainly existed then as well at a smaller scale.
      • wimp 3y ago
        I think this is a commonly shared miscalculation. In the grand scheme of things, relatively little is required to destabilize society. Technology advancements raise the danger potential almost exponentially when compared to late history, or even recent history. It doesn't take much to tip the course of history. The bronze age didn't require the same type of risk assessment that we have the burden of managing.
        • pixl97 3y ago
          People don't seem to understand the massive amount of specialization that's occurred with humanity, especially since the start of the industrial revolution. The most distant you go in the past the more general your title was, for example farmer. Now you can have some extremely narrow field, say EUV lithography, and if you and the other 10 experts on it on the planet decide to go bonkers you could cost billions of dollars to the processor industry.
  • saulpw 3y ago
    That's definitely happening for some people, like yourself and others here on HN, but it's also pretty clear that there is a large % of people, whether MAGA or older or dumber or less educated or something else, who aren't ever going to figure it out. All the science and expertise and logical arguments and appeals to sensibility do not matter, and this has become readily apparent over the past 5-10 years. So while it might feel good to hope that there is a silver lining, it's just wishful thinking. Let's not accelerate towards a mirage.
• hasty_pudding 3y ago
  This is better than most human content on Facebook. Lol
• everdrive 3y ago
  This was one of the most obvious outcomes anyone could have and should have predicted. Even when people know an image is fake, it still seems to be able to sway them. The effect we've seen over the past few years is simply likely to become worse: more polarization, more extremism, more inter-group hostility, and more BS online.
  • xg15 3y ago
    You have to put this into context though. Think of all the Roko's Basilisk believers who finally can have a full night's sleep again. /s
  • RecycledEle 3y ago
    > Even when people know an image is fake, it still seems to be able to sway them. Yes, this has been happening for a long time. This is why fiction literature exists. If images we know are fake could not move our emotions, nobody would have ever laughed at a cartoon.
    • evan_ 3y ago
      Not analogous. The original woodcarving is fiction- a person created a representation of a dog. The AI clones are a fiction of a fiction.
    • int_19h 3y ago
      I don't think OP meant "sway" in that sense. One thing that I'm increasingly seeing is when you point a fake out to a person, and they just shrug and say, "okay, so this one was fake, but it's still a good illustration of how things are in general, so what's the problem?".
      • coffeecantcode 3y ago
        The same argument being made when you tell them certain apps that they use are full of spyware: “Okay, I don’t care, I have nothing to hide.”
      • 3y ago
• unnamed76ri 3y ago
  It is the same people that exercise no discernment when sharing fake news that share these obviously fake AI images. I’ve been seeing it for most of this year and it is concerning that people can’t spot obvious fakes at current AI tech levels.
  • lnsru 3y ago
    It’s classical Nigerian prince audience. The stories are crafted that way, the audience does not see obvious warn signs. When for other people first sentence with intentional mistake is a red light.
  • Baldbvrhunter 3y ago
    LinkedIn is pretty bad too. From people with fancy sounding job titles.
• smitty1110 3y ago
  The financial incentives encourage this. All FB cares about is the monthly and daily active users don't dip, and they get more ad impressions. They don't care if the content is fake, so long as it gets eyeballs on the page or in the app.
  • none_to_remain 3y ago
    Similarly T-Mobile doesn't give a shit if I send my friends and family text messages full of lies
    • Nextgrid 3y ago
      T-Mobile gets a flat fee regardless whether it's a lie or not. Facebook gets more money the more eyeballs their algorithms decide to show the lie to.
      • int_19h 3y ago
        There's also the part where the emotion that makes "engagement" the most likely is anger, so it makes sense to encourage, or at least not interfere, with the content that triggers that.
    • albntomat0 3y ago
      T-Mobile also doesn’t send your texts to millions of people based on the engagement they generate.
      • ilovetux 3y ago
        yet
      • hackerlight 3y ago
        This is why analogies interfere with clear thinking and shouldn't be used as arguments. Usually it's like this. There's a superficial similarity between the two things being compared. Otherwise, those two things are very different, and the comparison is meaningless because of those differences. It's so banal and irksome to see this fallacy everywhere in discussions.
• cabirum 3y ago
  But the most views and comments on these images are also ai-generated. Aren't they?
  • aeontech 3y ago
    From the article: > I tried to determine if the commenters, too, were bots. The vast majority of them clearly are not. Most commenters I looked into are people who have been judiciously posting family photos, political arguments, and status updates on Facebook for decades. I wouldn't be surprised if most of them are real. There's still an incredible number of Facebook users (especially the older generations) that just scroll through Facebook for hours each day and earnestly interact with things they see.
• philomath_mn 3y ago
  I wonder if we will get to a point where the web is so saturated with this junk that the web itself starts to lose its luster. If AI can dream up a million impressive wood carvings, it seems like the real carving I saw in person is the only one that is actually interesting.
  • MrDarcy 3y ago
    We blew past that point around 2015.
    • dpflan 3y ago
      Can you provide details of this watershed date?
      • syndicatedjelly 3y ago
        That was the year that the phrases “influencer” and “content creator” entered the vernacular.
      • simiones 3y ago
        This suggests the problem pretty well: https://xkcd.com/331/ https://xkcd.com/331/
        • agumonkey 3y ago
          no joke, when I close my eyes, the strange light patterns behind my eye lids are somehow pixelated now, i'm afraid LCDs altered cells in my retina somehow
          • araes 3y ago
            You are what you eat, hear, touch, smell, see. ...all your life will ever be.
            • 3y ago
• airstrike 3y ago
  If shitty AI content brings about the end of spammy social media as we currently know it, I'm all for it
  • r053bud 3y ago
    How is this any different?
    • airstrike 3y ago
      We'll have to find new ways to communicate
• lawlessone 3y ago
  The comments are probably generated too so it balances out! Youtube shorts are also ruined with tons of "facts" videos that are just generated images and some hilariously bad text to speech readings of wikis. Often though they don't even use any tertiary sources like wikipedia and get some facts very wrong. edit: They also usually have some AI-generated image with some of histories worst dictators made to look nice and some animated particle or lightning effects. edit 2: The genie is out of the lamp now. I think the only way to inoculate people against this is to give everyone these capabilities. When people see how easy this it will hopefully make them more discriminating when they see other images.
  • ipaddr 3y ago
    That wiki's fault. Not sure why we put blind trust that wikipedia facts are accurate that we blame people who reuse the content when the wiki editors are create the disinformation.
    • andybak 3y ago
      Huh?
    • lawlessone 3y ago
      >That wiki's fault. Not sure why we put blind trust that wikipedia facts are accurate Sorry, i wasn't clear. Not all of them are using Wikipedia. Them using Wikipedia is usually best case scenario. Often though it's just anecdotal crap.
• tarr11 3y ago
  I wonder if this problem could be addressed with immutable timestamps and a vector database with image embeddings. Eg, someone builds a system that constructs a graph that points images back to the previous references, based on their distances. The one with the earliest timestamp is considered the original.
  • visarga 3y ago
    That, but also for text. We need an attribution AI to find the source of "inspiration" for any piece of content, in order to avoid generating copyright infringement. A model needs to have a sense of what is infringing.
    • Der_Einzige 3y ago
      Or we continue to live in a de-facto copyright free world like right now in the AI space. Copyright abolitionism is probably the dominant ideological position among AI researchers and thank god for it. Aaron Swartz was a saint.
• kimi 3y ago
  Facebook has become a cesspool of clickbaits. Less that 1/3 of my feed is people I know (most of which quitted posting anything years ago) or groups I subscribed to - the rest is literally spam, as in meat that's been ground finely and repackaged in a thousands ways. The result is a general sense of nausea.
  • usrusr 3y ago
    This. And I keep staring at it, under the excuse of a faint hope that it might perhaps build partial immunity to attention dump feeds that aren't yet quite as terrible (and therefore more dangerous)
    • tommica 3y ago
      And hitting your head is a great way to improve your neck muscles.
  • JAlexoid 3y ago
    There is some config, where you set your feed to be your friends and similar. I use Facebook only because the town groups are all there. It's the local forum board, and barely anything else for me at this point.
    • chihuahua 3y ago
      Yeah, I haven't had this experience of FB showing me random stuff I didn't ask for. All I see is updates from my friends, and pages I explicitly joined (e.g. Raccoons, Cross Washington Mountain Bike Route, etc). If there's annoying stuff on my feed, it's because of something I did, and can undo (e.g. unfollow someone who posts annoying stuff)
  • hotpotamus 3y ago
    Whenever I'm told about the impressive work people are doing at their FAANG dev job, I always wonder what they mean. Because the product I see is not particularly appealing (I suppose I am the product though). They did at least switch from showing me political rage bait to women whose nipples I can clearly see through their clothing, which is indeed more pleasing to me, but not what I go to Facebook for, and eventually drove me off.
• Pxtl 3y ago
  Occasionally I go back to FB to see if any friends and family have posted and like 90% of the feed is "recommended for you" shovelfulls of garbage for infinite scrolling. Worst off, there's a kind of anxiety about even pausing to look at anything on there out of fear that FB will decide I like that particular kind of garbage and show me more of it. Most of the garbage I get is innocuous - silly comics, AI generated movie posters of like "what if Wes Anderson made the Marvel movies" that I tend to block. Occasionally it's aggressive right-wing memes (and it's never "personal responsibility" or "low taxes" stuff, always "this is the group we hate today and how stupid and annoying they are"). Still, I occasionally find myself absentmindedly infinite-scrolling, just because I started there looking for news from old friends.
• Ajedi32 3y ago
  Here's one thing I don't get; why did the content farms bother creating all those AI-generated variations when they could have just as easily just used the real photo? Does Facebook have some kind of repost detector that this circumvents?
  • CrzyLngPwd 3y ago
    I imagine copyright plays a role.
    • Ajedi32 3y ago
      Maybe, but why would a content farm care about copyright? Does Facebook have a photo-equivalent of YouTube's Content ID?
      • CrzyLngPwd 3y ago
        If the content farm is using images subject to copyright then they could lose their page with just a couple of image reports for copyright infringement, and their hard work would be for nothing.
  • smcin 3y ago
    To make the content immune to DMCA takedown requests. This also protects the account itself from suspension.
  • nperez 3y ago
    Not sure if this is the primary reason, but it should be enough to throw off anti-spam systems that are looking for repeated posting of the same content within a short timespan
• rubin55 3y ago
  Maybe off-topic, but I was taken aback at actually seeing ads on this page. Long time ago that uBlock Origin did not block something for me.. The horror.
  • rubin55 3y ago
    Mm, just upgraded to firefox 120.x and all my extensions were disabled, even though they showed up as enabled in the about:extensions screen. It turns out I am not the only one: https://superuser.com/questions/1819527/firefox-120-panel-not-shown-when-i-click-the-extensions-button https://superuser.com/questions/1819527/firefox-120-panel-no... I had to disable and re-enable all my extensions to fix it.
• wharvle 3y ago
  And 100% of my YouTube ads are scams the last few weeks, many with deepfake fuckery going on. This whole side of the Web needs to be put down. The algo-feed ad-clearinghouse side. It’s a cesspit.
  • RajT88 3y ago
    Most of the facebook ads shown to me for the last few years were scams of varying sorts. Ranging from fast fashion sites "going out of business" (whose domain was registered within the last 90 days) to kickstarter campaigns for cloned products to drop-shipped products with slick videos whose discount price is 3x what it costs for the same on Amazon...
  • miah_ 3y ago
    This right here is why we adblock. Google needs to wake up and do something if they really want to stop people from using adblocks on Youtube, or their other properties.
    • unshavedyak 3y ago
      Why would they tho? As long as the ads pay, they win. Plus if people don't leave, and instead switch to the massively overpriced $15/m (or w/e) subscription, they make out even better. Google wins as long as the viewers don't leave.
      • katbyte 3y ago
        > the massively overpriced $15/m why do you consider this massively overpriced? 55% of it i believe goes to content creators and they make more from a subscription watch then an ad supported watch.
        • unshavedyak 3y ago
          > why do you consider this massively overpriced? Because i struggle to imagine the ads i watch would amount to $15/m. So it feels like significant markup. A flat rate seems either upcharging, or subsidizing. Neither feel good as a consumer. I rather (and have) quit than pay them $15/m for a handful of ads. They started fighting a month back or w/e and i just stopped watching them for ~2 weeks. When i tried later, the "problem" was gone lol. Not sure what happened. I'd much rather pay for a platform that gives money to creators more directly. I pay for a fair share of things on Patreon, for example. edit: I should note, my assumptions on price are based on how little ad views net in value.
• Ancapistani 3y ago
  I like to browse the "conspiracy" side of TikTok - not because I believe them, but because I think it's interesting to watch them form, rise in popularity, and be replaced by the next wave of strange ideas. In the past month or so I've noticed an increasing number of videos that use obviously AI-generated images as "proof" for everything from a flat earth to Tartaria and the "mud flood". All of the videos are getting comments that call this out... but they're never anywhere near the top. Of course, the other comments could well be AI-generated as well - but I don't have enough faith in humanity to believe that's the likely.
  • deemster 3y ago
    I've seen a similar thing on TikTok where an AI generated voice of Joe Rogan is used to narrate conspiracy theory content.
  • MarcoZavala 3y ago
    [dead]
• dpflan 3y ago
  Aren't there comments equally likely to be AI-generated?
  • dpflan 3y ago
    """There is no polite way to say this, but the comments sections of each of these images are filled with unaware people posting inane encouragement about artwork stolen by robots, a completely constructed reality where thousands of talented AI woodcarvers constantly turn pixels into fucked up German Shepherds for their likes and faves. I tried to determine if the commenters, too, were bots. The vast majority of them clearly are not. Most commenters I looked into are people who have been judiciously posting family photos, political arguments, and status updates on Facebook for decades. """ ...for decades...
• fatherzine 3y ago
  spoiler alert: facebook was always about fakes
• RajT88 3y ago
  Facebook already was a hellscape without the AI generated content. A simple solution: #DeleteFacebook
  • elforce002 3y ago
    Usually, I won't use any service, platform, etc..., but with FB, things hit differently. Never in my life, would I have thought I'd be proud of not being part of an org., yet here I am.
• shp0ngle 3y ago
  > unaware boomers click “like,” “share,” and say things like “wow, incredible,” all day every day. I laughed at this
  • smcameron 3y ago
    If only "incredible" meant "not credible".
  • lawlessone 3y ago
    Looking at all the comments congratulating them for their woodwork it seems largely accurate :(
• wslh 3y ago
  The Absurd Web.
• werdnapk 3y ago
  I'm seeing AI-gen images of obviously (to me) bad nature themed images that sooo many people think are legit and make comments like "Nature is beautiful", "Amazing", "Proof of God", etc. These images don't even need to be stolen... they're just so easy to generate and then posted for clicks.
  • RecycledEle 3y ago
    Most if not all of the "comments like "Nature is beautiful", "Amazing", "Proof of God", etc. are bots or shill accounts. Welcome to 1998's WWW.
  • TrackerFF 3y ago
    90% of those users are probably bots I saw one movie group that was spamming the 103rd birthday of Kirk Douglass, this year. 30k comments and 250k likes. Endless congratulations, without anyone pointing out that Kirk, unfortunately, passed away 3 years ago. He'd turn 107 if he was still alive. The dead internet theory doesn't sound too outlandish now.
• burnerburnson 3y ago
  My Facebook feed is almost entirely comic strips like Calvin and Hobbes. If they are AI-generated, the AI is doing a really good job. I doubt "Facebook is being overrun" is an accurate description of this situation.
• whelp_24 3y ago
  404 media is really, really anti-ai and especially image generation. In this case stolen isn't as inaccurate as it could be but the article definitely has a strong bias. (Stolen in the same way a musician can steal a chord progression, i.e, not illegal but done faithfully enough sorta unethical)
  • RecycledEle 3y ago
    404 media is lying when they say any image of a man with a wood carving of a dig is stolen. Copyright does not work that way. They need to be sued into bankruptcy for defamation. AI is a wonderful tool that lets anyone creat beautiful images, and the incumbents in the image-faking field are deeply offended by that.
    • digging 3y ago
      > They need to be sued into bankruptcy for defamation. How about let's not.
    • visarga 3y ago
      What? I thought copyright would cover "*.human-with-carved-dog", not "specific.human-with-carved-dog". At least that's how it seems to work if you listen to some people. You draw a flower, nobody can draw a flower anymore. This is the logical conclusion if you believe training on some copyrighted works and then generating different enough content would violate the original copyright. If I remember correctly, just training on a copyrighted image without generating a similar image was argued in court to be copyright infringement.
    • etchalon 3y ago
      "Stolen" is meant colloquially, not literally let alone precise legally.
      • RecycledEle 3y ago
        I disagree.
  • 3y ago
• Oras 3y ago
  There are tutorials showing how to create an AI influencers using mix of text to image and deep fake. Next step will be high quality fake vidoes not just images and those will be even more believable for most of people.
  • visarga 3y ago
    An with AI advancing so fast, they will be better than what most people would create on their own.
    • bonton89 3y ago
      And efforts to fight it will create crushing burdens of verification and false positives for the remaining humans, driving out much of the remaining signal.
• labrador 3y ago
  Believe it or not, there is a high brow Facebook where this is not a problem. I spend a lot of time on FB with my older friends where literature, film, poetry and science are topics and never see fake stuff. It's called out. That said, I can believe it's a problem on low brow Facebook, I just haven't seen it.
  • mock-possum 3y ago
    Call it out, and employ an n-strikes-process - after you’ve given a particular user a chance to get their act together, simply block them. Now they will no longer waste your time, and in time all you will have left are the users worth remaining connected to. The problem is, people don’t look at Facebook as an experience they themselves ought to actively curate - it’s mostly out of obligation at this point. They feel guilty if they don’t remain connected to this relative or that friend of a friend or some celebrity or brand, and so they put up with whatever they’re spammed with, rather than choosing to improve their situation.
    • labrador 3y ago
      My friends actually aren't as active as I implied now that I think about it, but by carefully curating my Facebook I'm talking as much or more to smart people I've never met. This gives me a feeling of connection that I enjoy. I'm not there to make friends necessarily, but to interact around ideas.
  • randomdata 3y ago
    I have seen it. Nobody I know posts on Facebook anymore, so when Facebook is desperately trying to find content to fill the feed it turns to whatever it can come up with from random accounts. The apparent active group of friends you have is no doubt why you haven't seen it. That activity gives Facebook something to work with.
    • Beijinger 3y ago
      "I have seen it. Nobody I know posts on Facebook anymore" Interesting thought. I just dropped meta in my investment account since I needed the money for a trade. They had a good run, unfortunately I bought before the dip because of metaverse.
• somenameforme 3y ago
  I see a silver lining here. One of the worst parts about social media is image crafting. And it even seeps into real life on occasion where you see people at incredible locations spending all their time trying to craft some perfect pic to put up, instead of just soaking in the location or even really enjoying themselves. If anybody can [literally] image craft anything, then the entire point of online image crafting disappears, because anybody can now trivially fake anything.
  • kube-system 3y ago
    ...and then our social relationships are judged on a default presumption of distrust?
    • noman-land 3y ago
      On the internet, nobody knows that you're a dog.
    • stemlord 3y ago
      Or our social relationships cease to be predicated by social media platforms altogether
      • kube-system 3y ago
        People are too dopamine addicted to these platforms to stop using them. The frog is already starting to boil and I don't think it's going to notice any time soon.
    • int_19h 3y ago
      Aren't they already, given that the practice of "crafted" social media feed has been in the public awareness for over a decade now?
      • kube-system 3y ago
        I think many currently believe that social media is "fake" as in "unrealistic snapshot", but not "complete fabrication".
• quelltext 3y ago
  Facebook is being overrun with low effort memes and repetitive video content (literally being shown the same crap in regular intervals either reposted or from the same source). I make an effort to hide and block each time I see another video dominating my timeline but alas, it doesn't get better. It's not even ads. I don't mind the ads actually. They seem to be the only sane content in comparison aside of course the occasional but rare real content shared by my friends. I just want to keep all this crap off my timeline please. Show me more ads if you want, but stop with the TikTok like reposts with AI generated drivel overlayed or some "reaction": "What did you think of this brave lad? We think he's great, leave a comment." Next: 5 minutes craft video.
• evanjrowley 3y ago
  Reminds me of a recent submission: AI is a weapon to surpass Metal Gear https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38435978 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38435978
• dissident_coder 3y ago
  The Patriot AI in Metal Gear Solid 2 was probably the most prescient prediction that Hideo Kojima has ever made, and it's even worse than even he imagined. The irony of it all considering Kojima was also falsely accused of assassinating the Shinzo Abe just last year. The Most Profound Moment in Gaming History: https://youtu.be/jIYBod0ge3Y https://youtu.be/jIYBod0ge3Y
• deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
• denton-scratch 3y ago
  I'm troubled by people thinking that shit they find on the internet is "real". But Facebook? As far as I'm aware, people just use it to keep in touch with friends. Nobody has ever sent me a Facebook link implying that it's any kind of source of truth. It might seem an odd position to take, but I think Facebook is in the process of dying. I've been expecting it for 20 years; after all, MySpace died (although I hear it's ghost still haunts some people). /me never had a Facebook account.
• numpad0 3y ago
  Maybe it's time to deprecate reposts, altogether. One of reasons real users don't care about image authenticity is because it's de facto "ok" in English web to steal and repost content ad infinitum. There are a lot of younger generation web users with an entirely misguided belief that seeking approval by ripping, modifying, re-uploading, in the process relabeling content with the user themself as the creator is not only tolerated but encouraged behavior, which is not at all a correct understanding. Some call this type of criticism "copyright maximalism", as if it's bad. It's good. Copyright is good. It works. It's not going to reduce bandwidth, nor hurt content quality. In fact, some are starting to recognize need to always "put sauce" because it is becoming harder to ease approval craving in today's Web without doing so. Maybe it's time to push it further. Just a bit.
  • whelp_24 3y ago
    What does copyright work to do and who does it work for?
• anonymousDan 3y ago
  Could this be a good thing for online privacy in the long run? If everything on facebook is potentially fabricated and there is no way to distinguish true photos from faked then everything about you on facebook becomes deniable.
• kleiba 3y ago
  How is it possible to generate a stolen image?
  • brvsft 3y ago
    Just more pearl-clutching about AI. The images are mimicking several original images of a person with some artwork they made. The 'stolen' images are of a very similar form, but with changes to the person and the artwork. Presumably, they make fake versions of the images to gain clout on FB or elsewhere without having to credit the original artist. While it is ethically dubious, I don't really care. The pearl-clutching that we're inventing a fake reality can be viewed two different ways. Either it's overblown, as it clearly doesn't matter who is liking what on the internet, not in the grand scheme of things. Or if it is a problem, the ship sailed a decade ago when people started carrying a screen around in their pockets 24/7, and AI art is just another drop in the bucket.
    • int_19h 3y ago
      According to the article, they're using img2img to make those. That's very clearly a derived work regardless of your stance on AI art in general.
      • brvsft 3y ago
        What did I say that makes you think what you said is contrary to my own comment?
  • phyzome 3y ago
    The article explains: People have bots that are taking real images, running them through img2img AI, and then posting those images.
    • kleiba 3y ago
      I'm referring more to botched semantics here: either you steal something - then it must have pre-existed - or you generate something - then it cannot have pre-existed. You cannot generate stolen pictures.
• Havoc 3y ago
  Insta is also absolutely drowning in AI generated female "influencers". It's tangibly worse this week vs even 2 weeks ago.
• adriand 3y ago
  To be somewhat contrarian, I'm not sure I see the problem here. From the platform perspective, this is just a faster way to generate the same crap that's been on these sites for years, with less risk of copyright claims and associated take-down notices. From the perspective of artists, I think whether or not there's a problem has a lot to do with how much artists have decided to centre their efforts around social media, as opposed to something more intrinsically bad or damaging. Let's consider the first work that appears in the article, the image of the carving of the dog. The article states: > The real German Shepherd carving was made by a UK-based professional chainsaw sculptor named Michael Jones, who detailed his work in a series of videos and photos posted over the course of the summer. Jones’ work has since been stolen and turned into endless variations. First of all, Jones's work has not actually been "stolen". The output of his artistic process in this instance is a wooden carving of a German Shepherd. That carving has not been stolen. What has had actually happened is that a photograph of him posing next to his art has been used to generate other, similar images. The impact of this image generation and subsequent garbage posting on social media is, according to Jones, that he and his fellow carvers are "missing out on the rightful credit exposure to their work" and that this is "setting unrealistic expectations when it comes to creating chainsaw carving art or any art". Personally, I am skeptical that exposure to people on Facebook whose appreciation for artistry consists of "your a fantastic artist" is worth very much. And what's the counterfactual here? If these posters were not making these fake image memes, would that traffic be going to his posts instead? That seems far from certain. The second part of his complaint, that this sets "unrealistic expectations", is closer to the heart of the matter, I think. I don't think qualified buyers of genuine art will pay less for real works of art because they've seen so many AI-generated artworks that they no longer have a realistic understanding of what real art looks like. I think they are, and will continue to be, educated and discerning enough to understand the difference, to appreciate process, and so on. I do think that people on Facebook who have seen increasingly fantastic "wood carvings" on Facebook may appreciate his genuine wood carving photographs less in the future. This might be a real problem for him, given that it seems like posting on Facebook is something important to him, and might also be important to his business model. In other words, his real problem might boil down to, "Some people are better at making viral posts on Facebook than I am". But how much this qualifies as a genuine problem for the platforms, their users, or society at large, is not all that clear to me.
• PolieBotics 3y ago
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• TrackerFF 3y ago
  I've noticed that for the past month or two, FB has been absolutely deluged with AI-generated photos of otherwise "real" photos. Looks like a combination of up-scaling, and some GAN model trying to recreate photos. It kind of pisses me off, because every photo ends up looking the same. They all have the same "smooth" look. It gives that uncanny valley effect Example of Meryl Streep I found after just browsing for 10 seconds: https://i.imgur.com/b4J2iPq.jpg https://i.imgur.com/b4J2iPq.jpg
• rchaud 3y ago
  I signed into Instagram for the first time in many months; it was unbelievable how many of ads are using AI images of celebrities and politicians. One was of the comedian/TV host Howie Mandel being led away in handcuffs for who knows what. It's as if Facebook saw what Taboola and Outbrain were doing with their 'one weird trick' style ads, and decided they needed a piece of that themselves.
• Apocryphon 3y ago
  Is this how blockchain makes its comeback? Weren't they saying it can be used to certify original images somehow
  • PolieBotics 3y ago
    In my opinion, yes. I posted elsewhere on this thread to spam my project, which is to derive an initialisation vector from a blockchain (or other interlocutor), derive a projection from this I.V., record an image of the resultant projection, hash it, project the hash, repeat this process, and resubmit the final hash to the blockchain. A neural network is used to verify the correspondence between projection and image (e.g. by training an autoencoder on the concatenated RBG matrices). In a mature system, this process is performed at a rate not achievable by generative networks. I have a sample dataset at truthbeam.etc, timestamped at https://explorer.rsk.co/address/0xb4910aa351e7f425369f49723039b669531d4471 https://explorer.rsk.co/address/0xb4910aa351e7f425369f497230... on Rootstock. I'm here to spam and answer questions, and I'm running low on spam!
• vannevar 3y ago
  Facebook is not "being overrun." Facebook is collaborating with a variety of scammers and manipulators to promote fraud, racism, sexual innuendo, and misinformation to their users. Facebook is getting paid to promote spam content to the users it thinks would be most vulnerable to the underlying fraud or manipulation. Facebook is not a neutral party, it's an active participant.
• deleted 3y ago
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• camdenlock 3y ago
  [flagged]
• iteratethis 3y ago
  Meme pages and other "aggregate" accounts reveal a flaw in the internet in that credit is rarely attributed to the original content owner. This is unrelated to AI specifically. You'll have an account "Amazing science". You follow it and it does post interesting videos. You believe the account provides a valuable service. In reality, these accounts never credit the original source, and even if they do, in a disconnected way. The actual person that made the content does not get the views, likes, reshares, and follows. It's all done under the disguise of "fair use" but it's a great injustice that these accounts profiteer from effectively "stealing" content. Or at least stealing exposure. And yes, AI would be the next evolution to make the production of original content increasingly pointless.