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Man, everyone is happy with these advancements, and they are impressive. I’m here looking at users and wondering - the content pipelines are broader, but the e

Man, everyone is happy with these advancements, and they are impressive. I’m here looking at users and wondering - the content pipelines are broader, but the exit points of attention and human brains are constant. How the heck are you supposed to know if your content is valid? During a recent apple event, someone on YT had an AI generated video of Tim Cook announcing a crypto collaboration; it had a 100k users before it was taken down. Right now, all the videos of rockets falling on Israel can be faked. Heck, the responses on the communities are already populated by swathes of bots. It’s simply cheaper to create content and overwhelm society level filters we inherited from an era of more expensive content creation. Before anyone throws the sink at me for being a Luddite or raining on the parade - I’m coming from the side where you deal with the humans who consume content, and then decide to target your user base. Yes, the vast majority of this is going to be used to create lovely cat memes and other great stuff. At the same time, it takes just 1 post to act as a lightning rod and blow up things. Edit: From where I sit, there are 3 levels of issues. 1) Day to day arguments - this is organic normal human stuff 2) Bad actors - this is spammers, hate groups, hackers. 3) REALLY Bad actors - this is nation states conducting information warfare. This is countries seeding African user bases with faked stories, then using that as a basis for global interventions. This is fake videos of war crimes, which incense their base and overshadow the harder won evidence of actual war crimes. This doesn’t seem real, but political forces are about perception, not science and evidence.

yieldcrv 2y ago
I only care about being able to express myself more easily Maybe get a job where interviewers are biased against my actual look and pedigree Just ignore everyone else’s use of the tool
- mitthrowaway2 2y ago
  > Just ignore everyone else’s use of the tool That's precisely the hard part!
AyyEye 2y ago
The Information Bomb. There's a reason military types and spooks are joining the boards of OpenAI and friends. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/203092.The_Information_Bomb https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/203092.The_Information_B... > After the era of the atomic bomb, Virilio posits an era of genetic and information bombs which replace the apocalyptic bang of nuclear death with the whimper of a subliminally reinforced eugenics. We are entering the age of euthanasia.
- BizarroLand 2y ago
  There is some credence to the idea that the third reich was only possible due to mass media. Radio, television, and movie theatres broadcasting and rebroadcasting information onto a populace that did not have experience with media overload and therefore had no resistance to it. Not attempting to justify their actions or the outcomes, just that media itself is and has been long known to be a powerful weapon, like the fabled story of a city besieged by a greater army, who opened their gates to the invaders knowing that the invaders were lead by a brilliant strategist. The invader strategist, seeing the gates open, deduced that there must be a giant army laying in wait and that the gates being open were a trap, and so they turned and left. Had they entered they would have won easily, but the medium of communication, an open gate before an advancing horde, was enough in and of itself to turn the tide of a pitched battle. When we reach the point where we can never believe what we see or hear or think on our own, how will we ever fight?
coldcode 2y ago
Also, cost. How many do you have to generate to get something you want? Does it take 1 or a 100 attempts to get something reasonable, and what does it cost for each attempt? Might not affect Hollywood, but someone has to pay for this to be profitable for Meta. How many 5-Gigawatt power stations will be required (what OpenAI wants to build all over the country) if lots of people use this?
- intended 2y ago
  Hopefully this becomes the limiting factor, however generating more power isn’t that hard - and it doesn’t solve the rate of production issue.
paganel 2y ago
A State-actor could have already done that manipulation using CGI or something. The answer is not to trust the people and persons who one sees as not to be trusted. As per your Israel example, I don’t personality trust them because I have low levels of trust in genocidal regimes, so even if IDF-asset Gal Gadot were to come to my door and tell me that I won a million dollars I would just slam-shut the door in her face, never mind her and her ilk trying to convince me and people like me through videos posted on the internet of whatever it is they are trying to convince people of. Again, plain common sense just works, most of the times.
csomar 2y ago
The solution to that is to make models both open weight and open source. That will equalize the level playing field.
- rolisz 2y ago
  How will that help? How will uncle Joe be able to tell fake videos better with an open source model?
  - ein0p 2y ago
    Uncle Joe will just stop assuming that just because there’s a video it is real. That hasn’t been the case for decades. About time uncle Joe caught on.
- bee_rider 2y ago
  So what’s the plan to level the playing field in that case? Give everybody an equal amount of compute and ask them what sort of propaganda they’d like to have theirs contribute to?
tsimionescu 2y ago
We are at a crossroads of technology, where we're still used to the idea that audio and video are decent proof that something happened, in a way in which we don't generally trust written descriptions of an event. Generative AI will be a significant problem for a while, but this assumption that audio/video is inherently trustable will relatively soon (in the grand scheme of things) go away, and we'll return to the historical medium. We've basically been living in a privileged and brief time in human history for the last 100-200 years, where you could mostly trust your eyes and years to learn about events that you didn't directly witness. This didn't exist before photography and phonograms: if you didn't witness an event personally, you could only rely on trust in other human beings that told you about it to know of it actually happened. The same will soon start to be true again, if it isn't already: a million videos from random anonymous strangers showing something happening will mean nothing, just like a million comments describing it mean nothing today. This is not a brave new world of post-truth such as the world has never seen before. It is going back to basically the world we had before photo, video, and sound recordings.
- bee_rider 2y ago
  That’s an interesting thought. I think I would not like to live in a world in which democracy isn’t the predominant form of government. The ability of the typical person to understand and form their own opinions about the world is quite important to democracy, and journalism does help with that. But I guess the modern version of image and video heavy journalism wasn’t the only thing we had the whole time; even as recent as the 90’s (I’m pretty sure; I was just a kid), newspapers were a major source. And somehow America was invented before photojournalism, but of course that form of democracy would be hard for us to recognize nowadays… It is only when we got these portable video screens that stuff like YouTube and TikTok became really important news sources (for better or worse; worse I would say). And anyway, people already manage to take misleading or out of context videos, so it isn’t like the situation is very good. Maybe AI video will be a blessing in disguise. At some point we’ll have to give up on believe something just because we saw it. I guess we’ll have to rely on people attesting to information, that sort of thing. With modern cryptography I guess we could do that fairly well. Edit: Another way of looking at it: basically no modern journalist or politician has a reputation better than an inanimate object, a photos or video. That’s a really bizarre situation! We’re used to consulting people on hard decisions, right? Not figuring out everything by direct observation.
stann 2y ago
Yeah... African users... oh poor infantile, gullible, creatures... so incapable of discerning truth from falsehood are the ones to be fooled by generative AI...I get the gist
smallerize 2y ago
It's just something to put ads next to. Selling ad spots is the business, and investors demand an increase even if they already have 3.5 billion pairs of eyeballs. https://www.404media.co/where-facebooks-ai-slop-comes-from/ https://www.404media.co/where-facebooks-ai-slop-comes-from/
echoangle 2y ago
This will just lead to people not taking videos as evidence anymore. Just like images of war crime aren’t irrefutable evidence due to staging and photoshop, videos will lose their worth as evidence. Which is actually a good thing in some instances. If someone blackmails you with nudes/explicit videos, you can just ignore it and claim it’s fake.
staticman2 2y ago
Before photography was invented, mass communications was all just words on paper, right? How would you know that the British burned down the white house in 1812? Anyone could fake a paper document saying it so. (Except many people were illiterate.) As far as I can see you need institutions you can trust.
- intended 2y ago
  Everyone is focusing on photography. 1) it’s not the tech. It’s the rate of production. You had only 1 newspaper, no mass media, and boatloads of time in the 1800s 2) Before photography was created we lived in a world steeped in superstition, inequality and ignorance. A tiny economy compared to what we have today. 3) humanity changed with the advent of photography. It ushered in a new standard of proof that modern society depends on to this day.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
baxtr 2y ago
If this was true, why haven’t we seen it with manipulated pictures? Maybe I’m not well informed but there seem to be no example for the issues you describe with photos. I believe it’s actually worse than you think. People believe in narratives, in stories, in ideas. These spread. It has been like this forever. Text, pictures, videos are merely ways to proliferate narratives. We dismiss even clear evidence if it doesn’t fit our beliefs and we actively look for proof for what we think is the truth. If you want to "fight" back you need to start on the narrative level, not on the artifact level.
- intended 2y ago
  We have seen it with manipulation of pictures. Hell - look of the fate of the rest of the world online. They’re basically thrown to the fucking wolves. Minorities are lynched around the world after viral forwards. Autocrats are stronger than ever and authoritarian regimes have flourished like never before. Trust and safety tools are vastly stronger for English than any other language. See the language resource gap (lost in translation, Nicholas and Bhatia) In America, the political divide has reached levels unimaginable. People live in entirely different realities. Images from democrats sides are dismissed as faked and lies take so long to discredit that the issue has passed on, tiring fact checkers and the public. The original fake news problem of Romanian advert farms focused entirely on conservative citizens.

yieldcrv 2y ago

I only care about being able to express myself more easily Maybe get a job where interviewers are biased against my actual look and pedigree Just ignore everyone else’s use of the tool

mitthrowaway2 2y ago
> Just ignore everyone else’s use of the tool That's precisely the hard part!

AyyEye 2y ago

The Information Bomb. There's a reason military types and spooks are joining the boards of OpenAI and friends. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/203092.The_Information_Bomb https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/203092.The_Information_B... > After the era of the atomic bomb, Virilio posits an era of genetic and information bombs which replace the apocalyptic bang of nuclear death with the whimper of a subliminally reinforced eugenics. We are entering the age of euthanasia.

BizarroLand 2y ago
There is some credence to the idea that the third reich was only possible due to mass media. Radio, television, and movie theatres broadcasting and rebroadcasting information onto a populace that did not have experience with media overload and therefore had no resistance to it. Not attempting to justify their actions or the outcomes, just that media itself is and has been long known to be a powerful weapon, like the fabled story of a city besieged by a greater army, who opened their gates to the invaders knowing that the invaders were lead by a brilliant strategist. The invader strategist, seeing the gates open, deduced that there must be a giant army laying in wait and that the gates being open were a trap, and so they turned and left. Had they entered they would have won easily, but the medium of communication, an open gate before an advancing horde, was enough in and of itself to turn the tide of a pitched battle. When we reach the point where we can never believe what we see or hear or think on our own, how will we ever fight?

coldcode 2y ago

Also, cost. How many do you have to generate to get something you want? Does it take 1 or a 100 attempts to get something reasonable, and what does it cost for each attempt? Might not affect Hollywood, but someone has to pay for this to be profitable for Meta. How many 5-Gigawatt power stations will be required (what OpenAI wants to build all over the country) if lots of people use this?

intended 2y ago
Hopefully this becomes the limiting factor, however generating more power isn’t that hard - and it doesn’t solve the rate of production issue.

paganel 2y ago

A State-actor could have already done that manipulation using CGI or something. The answer is not to trust the people and persons who one sees as not to be trusted. As per your Israel example, I don’t personality trust them because I have low levels of trust in genocidal regimes, so even if IDF-asset Gal Gadot were to come to my door and tell me that I won a million dollars I would just slam-shut the door in her face, never mind her and her ilk trying to convince me and people like me through videos posted on the internet of whatever it is they are trying to convince people of. Again, plain common sense just works, most of the times.

csomar 2y ago

The solution to that is to make models both open weight and open source. That will equalize the level playing field.

rolisz 2y ago
How will that help? How will uncle Joe be able to tell fake videos better with an open source model?
- ein0p 2y ago
  Uncle Joe will just stop assuming that just because there’s a video it is real. That hasn’t been the case for decades. About time uncle Joe caught on.
bee_rider 2y ago
So what’s the plan to level the playing field in that case? Give everybody an equal amount of compute and ask them what sort of propaganda they’d like to have theirs contribute to?

tsimionescu 2y ago

We are at a crossroads of technology, where we're still used to the idea that audio and video are decent proof that something happened, in a way in which we don't generally trust written descriptions of an event. Generative AI will be a significant problem for a while, but this assumption that audio/video is inherently trustable will relatively soon (in the grand scheme of things) go away, and we'll return to the historical medium. We've basically been living in a privileged and brief time in human history for the last 100-200 years, where you could mostly trust your eyes and years to learn about events that you didn't directly witness. This didn't exist before photography and phonograms: if you didn't witness an event personally, you could only rely on trust in other human beings that told you about it to know of it actually happened. The same will soon start to be true again, if it isn't already: a million videos from random anonymous strangers showing something happening will mean nothing, just like a million comments describing it mean nothing today. This is not a brave new world of post-truth such as the world has never seen before. It is going back to basically the world we had before photo, video, and sound recordings.

bee_rider 2y ago
That’s an interesting thought. I think I would not like to live in a world in which democracy isn’t the predominant form of government. The ability of the typical person to understand and form their own opinions about the world is quite important to democracy, and journalism does help with that. But I guess the modern version of image and video heavy journalism wasn’t the only thing we had the whole time; even as recent as the 90’s (I’m pretty sure; I was just a kid), newspapers were a major source. And somehow America was invented before photojournalism, but of course that form of democracy would be hard for us to recognize nowadays… It is only when we got these portable video screens that stuff like YouTube and TikTok became really important news sources (for better or worse; worse I would say). And anyway, people already manage to take misleading or out of context videos, so it isn’t like the situation is very good. Maybe AI video will be a blessing in disguise. At some point we’ll have to give up on believe something just because we saw it. I guess we’ll have to rely on people attesting to information, that sort of thing. With modern cryptography I guess we could do that fairly well. Edit: Another way of looking at it: basically no modern journalist or politician has a reputation better than an inanimate object, a photos or video. That’s a really bizarre situation! We’re used to consulting people on hard decisions, right? Not figuring out everything by direct observation.

stann 2y ago

Yeah... African users... oh poor infantile, gullible, creatures... so incapable of discerning truth from falsehood are the ones to be fooled by generative AI...I get the gist

smallerize 2y ago

It's just something to put ads next to. Selling ad spots is the business, and investors demand an increase even if they already have 3.5 billion pairs of eyeballs. https://www.404media.co/where-facebooks-ai-slop-comes-from/ https://www.404media.co/where-facebooks-ai-slop-comes-from/

echoangle 2y ago

This will just lead to people not taking videos as evidence anymore. Just like images of war crime aren’t irrefutable evidence due to staging and photoshop, videos will lose their worth as evidence. Which is actually a good thing in some instances. If someone blackmails you with nudes/explicit videos, you can just ignore it and claim it’s fake.

staticman2 2y ago

Before photography was invented, mass communications was all just words on paper, right? How would you know that the British burned down the white house in 1812? Anyone could fake a paper document saying it so. (Except many people were illiterate.) As far as I can see you need institutions you can trust.

intended 2y ago
Everyone is focusing on photography. 1) it’s not the tech. It’s the rate of production. You had only 1 newspaper, no mass media, and boatloads of time in the 1800s 2) Before photography was created we lived in a world steeped in superstition, inequality and ignorance. A tiny economy compared to what we have today. 3) humanity changed with the advent of photography. It ushered in a new standard of proof that modern society depends on to this day.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

baxtr 2y ago

If this was true, why haven’t we seen it with manipulated pictures? Maybe I’m not well informed but there seem to be no example for the issues you describe with photos. I believe it’s actually worse than you think. People believe in narratives, in stories, in ideas. These spread. It has been like this forever. Text, pictures, videos are merely ways to proliferate narratives. We dismiss even clear evidence if it doesn’t fit our beliefs and we actively look for proof for what we think is the truth. If you want to "fight" back you need to start on the narrative level, not on the artifact level.

intended 2y ago
We have seen it with manipulation of pictures. Hell - look of the fate of the rest of the world online. They’re basically thrown to the fucking wolves. Minorities are lynched around the world after viral forwards. Autocrats are stronger than ever and authoritarian regimes have flourished like never before. Trust and safety tools are vastly stronger for English than any other language. See the language resource gap (lost in translation, Nicholas and Bhatia) In America, the political divide has reached levels unimaginable. People live in entirely different realities. Images from democrats sides are dismissed as faked and lies take so long to discredit that the issue has passed on, tiring fact checkers and the public. The original fake news problem of Romanian advert farms focused entirely on conservative citizens.