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TikTok is being flooded with racist AI videos generated by Google's Veo 3
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- bongodongobob 1y agoRacists? On the internet you say!?
- runjake 1y agoI was skeptical about this, but a quick search for “the usual suspects” pulls up many, many examples for me.
- aaviator42 1y agoI really miss the time before generative images and video were a thing. We opened such a can of worms. Really seems like a "the scientists were so occupied with if they could they didn't stop to think if they should" situation. What is the actual utility of these tools again beyond putting artists out of work?
- Waterluvian 1y agoI’m old enough to remember when video killed the radio star.
- mslansn 1y agoI’ve seen lots of them which I found very very amusing. That seems good enough for me. Think about it: there are channels on YouTube and on the telly that are there just to amuse you. So a system that creates amusing videos is a net positive for the world.
- deadbabe 1y agoEvery generation has their “I miss the time before ‘thing I don’t like’ became a thing”. In our case, it’s just generative AI.
- mopenstein 1y agoI miss the time before everybody was on the Internet when it was mostly like minded techie types. This modem internet kinda sucks with all its AI generated racism.
- bashinator 1y agoHas every generation also seen the rise of massively-multiuser automated personalized propaganda engines?
- deadbabe 1y agoTV was one hell of a propaganda engine.
- HaZeust 1y agowas?
- thefz 1y agoIt cannot compete with millions of people glued to their pocket device for hours every day, in which they can see only what is not challenging - or reinforcing - their world view
- bashinator 1y agoNot personalized. Imagine TV that can be exactly tuned to every individual viewers' taste.
- 123yawaworht456 1y ago[flagged]
- const_cast 1y agoThis comment has the wombo combo of annoying shit nobody likes with "my brother in Christ" and "bless your heart". In all seriousness, nobody is concerned about capability. Everything was always capable if you're rich enough and you have enough time. But scale matters. That's why the printing press literally created new religions.
- currymj 1y agofrom an information theory perspective, predicting and efficiently representing data is so closely tied to generation that it is unavoidable. if you want to use ML to do anything at all with image and video, you will usually wind up creating the capability to generate image and video one way or another. however building a polished consumer product is a choice, and probably a mistake. every technology has good and bad uses, but there seem to be few and trivial good uses for image/video generation, with many severe bad uses.
- SchemaLoad 1y agoThe scientists were absolutely occupied with if we should. But the CEOs steamrolled them and had it built anyway.
- drdaeman 1y ago> nothing drives engagement on social media like anger and drama There. It isn’t even a “real” racism, it’s more of a flamebait, where the more outrageous and deranged a take is, the more likely it would captivate attention and possibly even provoke a reaction. Most likely they primarily wanted to earn some buck from viewer engagement, and didn’t care about the ethics of it. Maybe they also had the racist agendas, maybe not - but that’s just not the core of it. And in the same spirit, the issue is not really racism or AI videos, but perversely incentivized attention economics. It just happened to manifest this way, but it could’ve been anything else - this is merely what happened to hit some journalist mental filters (suggesting that “racism” headlines attract attention those days, and so does “AI”). And the only low-harm way - that I can think of - how to put this genie back in the bottle is to make sure everyone is well aware about how their attention is the new currency in the modern age, and spend it wisely, being aware about the addictive and self-reinforcing nature of some systems.
- CharlesW 1y ago> It isn’t even a “real” racism… Generating and distributing racist materials is racist regardless of the intent, even if the person "doesn't mean it". Simple thought experiment: If the content was CSAM, would you still excuse the perpetrators as victims of perversely incentivized attention economics?
- fluidcruft 1y agoI don't follow your CSAM bit but I have no outrage about Blazing Saddles existing, for example.
- jazzyjackson 1y agoIt would indeed be an impressive feat to produce a film satirizing child porn
- defrost 1y agoOff the cuff the closest example to mind is the Paedogeddon!! special episode of the Brass Eye series created by Chris Morris. Admittedly that didn't satirize CSAM material, rather it cut hard into the reflexive reaction people have at the very thought of CSAM and peodophiles. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paedogeddon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paedogeddon Moreover, that took a human to thread that needle, it'll be a while before AI generation can pass through that strange valley.
- Apocryphon 1y agoThe Tayification of everything
- turbofreak 1y agoNice callback. That was a golden era.
- ilaksh 1y agoThis isn't really a problem with video generation or AI in general. Sure, there is an aspect of ragebait to it, but the reality is that racism is extremely widespread. If it were not, this kind of content would not be so popular. The people at the very top of US government right now are white supremacists. I'm sorry that is not an exaggeration. There is another term that encompasses more of their worldviews which is not politically correct but is accurate. Stop trying to blame technology for longstanding social problems. That's a cop out.
- jazzyjackson 1y agoGranted that racism is not new, the infinite production of automated content drowning out any genuine human opinion is a harbinger of the internet to come.
- trhway 1y agoit also allows automated production of positive content. The main issue here is given a sea of good and a sea of bad content, where the typical person would go for a swim? Why calls for empathy fall flat while inciting rage and hatred is so successful?
- favflam 1y agoThis situation is like southern China when the British decided to even up their trade deficit with Opium.
- 7402 1y agoIt's entirely appropriate to blame a technology if the answer to the question, "Does this technology make a longstanding social problem worse or better?" is "It makes it worse." There can be a follow-on discussion about what, if any, benefits are also provided by aforesaid technology
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- ivape 1y agoI think it's fine to fingerprint AI generated images/videos. It's a massive privacy violation but I just can't see any other way. Too many people have always been and will always be unethical.
- SchemaLoad 1y agoI've been wondering if ChatGPT makes such excessive use of EM dash just so people can easily identify AI generated content. Google wouldn't even need a fingerprint, they could just look up from their logs who generated the video.
- oceanplexian 1y agoGoogle already admitted they are fingerprinting generative video and have a safety obsession so I guarantee they do it to their LLMs. Another reason is to pollute the output that folks like Deepseek are using to train derivative models.
- IAmGraydon 1y agoThe em-dash is one marker, but I’ve read that most LLMs create small but statistically detectable biases in their output to help them avoid reingesting their own content.
- partiallypro 1y agoEventually as models become cheaper, the big companies that would do this won't have control over newer generated content, so it's fairly pointless.
- WillPostForFood 1y agoTo what end? You want to fingerprint all AI images and video to catch people who make racist videos in order too to do what? It isn't illegal. If TikTok doesn't like the content they can delete the video and the account. If Google or OpenAI doesn't want the content being created, they can figure out a way to block it, and delete the user's accounts in the meantime. If I told you many 14 year olds were making very similar offensive jokes at lunch in high school, would you support adding microphones throughout schools to track and catch them?
- nvch 1y agoThe question is, who is acting in a racist manner here: the LLM that does what it can, or the humans sharing those videos?
- unsnap_biceps 1y agoUntil we get a LLM that actually "thinks", it's just a tool like photoshop. Photoshop isn't racist if someone uses it to create racist material, so a LLM wouldn't be racist either.
- redundantly 1y agoLLMs can and do have biases. One wouldn't be far off calling an LLM racist.
- ghushn3 1y agoI saw (on HN, actually) an academic definition for prejudice, discrimination, and racism that stuck with me. I might be butchering this a bit, but prejudice is basically thinking another group is less than purely because of their race. Discrimination is acting on that belief. Racism is discrimination based on race, particularly when the person discriminated against is a minority/less powerful person. LLMs don't think, and also have no race. So I have a hard time saying they can racist, per se. But they can absolutely produce racist and discriminatory material. Especially if their training corpus contains racist and discriminatory material (which it absolutely does.) I do think it's important to distinguish between photoshop, which is largely built from feature implementation ("The paint bucket behaves like this", etc.), and LLMs which are predictive engines that try to predict the right set of words to say based on their understanding of human media. The input is not some thoughtful set of PMs and engineers, it's "read all this, figure out the patterns". If "all this" contains racist material, the LLM will sometimes repeat it.
- stuaxo 1y agoAn LLM is a reflection of the biases in the data it's trained on, so it's not as simple as that.
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- AstroJetson 1y agoJust watched Mountainhead about this very topic. The AI videos were good enough to start wars, topple banking systems and countries. It is very scary because the "tech-bros" in the movie pretty much mimic the actions of the real life ones.
- eurleif 1y agoSomewhat related, on YouTube, there's a channel filled with fake police bodycam videos. The most-viewed of these are racially inflammatory, e.g.: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5AkXOkXNd8w https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5AkXOkXNd8w The description of the channel on YouTube claims: "In our channel, we bring you real, unfiltered bodycam footage, offering insight into real-world situations." But then if you go to their site, https://bodycamdeclassified.com/ https://bodycamdeclassified.com/, which is focused on threatening people who steal their IP, they say: "While actual government-produced bodycam footage may have different copyright considerations and may be subject to broader fair use provisions in some contexts, our content is NOT actual bodycam footage. Our videos represent original creative works that we script, film, edit, and produce ourselves." Pretty gross.
- RockRobotRock 1y agoThese videos are insane, and the lack of "this is fake" comments are disheartening.
- tgsovlerkhgsel 1y agoI assume those just get deleted?
- Lockal 1y agoI scrolled down and don't see a single comment with word "fake" (but a lot of comments like "not real") - channel owner probably automatically shadowbans all users who write "fake".
- fakedang 1y agoThe top comment in that link GP shared was literally 'Impersonating a police officer is a crime.'
- RockRobotRock 1y agotheir other videos are better at riding the line of believable, much less comments calling it out unless you dig into the replies.
- prvc 1y agoNone of the examples shown in the video are passable hoaxes. They are all obvious burlesque-style parodies, albeit made in bad taste. They all also have clear and prominent hallmarks of AI generation. Anyone fooled by these has got bigger, prior problems than any potential belief instilled by these videos.
- ghushn3 1y agoThe problem is not that they are fooling anyone. No one thinks a woman is marrying a chimpanzee. The problem is that the videos are obviously and openly racist and being spread quite brazenly. If I have to encounter a constant barrage of shitty racist (or sexist, or homophobic, or whatever) material just to exist online, I'm going to pretty quickly feel like garbage. (If not feel unsafe.) Especially if I'm someone who has other stressors in their life. Someone who is doing well, their life otherwise together, might encounter these and go, "Fucking idiots made a racist video, block." But empathize with someone who is struggling? Who just worked 18 hours to make ends meet to come home and feed their kids and pay rent for a shitty apartment that doesn't fit everyone, and their kid comes up to them asking what this video means, and it just... gets past all their barriers. It wedges open so many doubts. This isn't harmless.
- Dig1t 1y ago[flagged]
- pcbro141 1y agoYour country is currently deporting people for speaking ill of a certain special country in the Middle East (and soon stripping citizenship).
- tomhow 1y agoOnce again you're using HN for ideological battle, which is against the guidelines. We've asked you to refrain from doing this before. Please remember to avoid this. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- brunker2 1y ago[flagged]
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- linotype 1y agoPeople have to stop watching this trash. And I mean all of TikTok.
- ghushn3 1y agoSome of TikTok is great. I mean, most of it is just dopamine hits, and it's potentially quite bad from a health perspective. But also, plenty of TikTok is news, or political theory, or thoughtful commentary, or explanations of how things work. It's a bowl of fun size candy bars, with a few razors, a few drugs, a few rotten apples, etc. mixed in. You can, by and large, get the algorithm to serve you nothing but the candy, but you are still eating only candy bars at that point. Some people can say no to infinite candy. Other people, like myself, cannot and it's a real problem.
- jrflowers 1y agoThe interesting thing about this is that it is the use case for these video generators. If the point of these tools is to churn out stuff to drive engagement, and the best way to do that is through content that is inflammatory, offensive, or misinformation, then that’s the ideal use case for them. That’s what the tool is for.
- no_time 1y agoThe spirit airlines video with the smoke alarm chirp is perfect though.
- thefz 1y agoLuckily sane US senators just rejected a 10 year ban on state level AI regulation.