This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Another stepping stone to a much worse world. We won't know what is real anymore.
I think it's very cool technology, but in the hands of governments and psyops, it's going to brainwash entire countries.
Want another 9/11? Sure no problem. Blow up a building, tell people you have some random video of what happened, captured by civilians...place evidence in locations where it will be found.
We already don't know what is real. This will only make that clearer.
I think some governments already had tech like this but not all.
It will be interesting to follow this. Probably lots of fake videos on YouTube as a consequence where events are not real but used to stir up aggression.
Maybe, but I doubt it, only because traditional propaganda has been %100 effective without generative AI.
Photoshop has existed for a long time. Three Letter Agencies have been faking stuff forever. Not new.
Will this make it easier/faster? For sure. The one upside I can see is it brings the conversation to everyone, even those folks who don't want to acknowledge government is as bad an actor as anyone else.
We won’t know what is real anymore.
Of all the things, this really scares me. Many people scroll through their socials so quickly they will definitely not be able to tell apart generated clips from real ones. And the generated ones will only get better. One generation later, nobody will believe anything they see on a screen. And no, I don't think regulation can do much here as it will only end up in heavily censoring everything, leading to more distrust in media.
I think it could end up being a good thing if it causes social media to collapse into smaller, better known social groups.
This kind of AI stuff bums me out. You get people legitimately sharing AI images (and potentially videos in the future) and saying "look what I made!". It's totally inauthentic.
My boss loves this shit, on the other hand. Looking forward to the day she can automate our jobs away, I assume.
Why are they working so hard on making humanity worse?
I really have to say it?
Because we're all born selfish assholes*, and some people never learn to not be so.
*We're all born as selfish idiots, how can we be otherwise? We're helpless at birth, thrust from perfect comfort and safety into discomfort, utterly ignorant and wholly dependent, with no knowledge there are others, who are just as dependent and helpless when they're born. Learning about others, and how to get along is part of maturing.
It's like we're going back to the pre-internet era but it's obviously a little different. Before the internet, there were just a few major media providers on TV plus lots of local newspapers. I would say that, for the most part in the USA, the public trusted TV news sources even though their material interests weren't aligned (regular people vs big media corporations). It felt like there wasn't a reason not to trust them, since they always told an acceptable version of the truth and there wasn't an easy way to find a different narrative (no internet or crazy cable news). Local newspapers were usually very trusted, since they were often locally owned and part of the community.
The internet broke all of those business models. Local newspapers died because why do you need a paper when there are news websites? Major media companies were big enough to weather the storm and could buy up struggling competitors. They consolidated and one in particular started aggressively spinning the news to fit a narrative for ratings and political gain of the ownership class. Other companies followed suit.
This, paired with the thousands of available narratives online, weakened the credibility of the major media companies. Anyone could find the other side of the story or fact check whatever was on TV.
Now what is happening? The internet is being polluted with garbage and lies. It hasn't been good for some time now. Obviously anyone could type up bullshit, but for a minute photos were considered reliable proof (usually). Then photoshopping something became easier and easier, which made videos the new standard of reliable proof (in most cases).
But if anything can be fake now and difficult to identify as fake, then how can you fact check anything? Only those with the means will be able to produce undeniably real news with great difficulty, which I think will return power to major news companies or something equivalent.
I'm probably wrong about what the future holds, so what do you think is going to happen?
I don't think you're wrong, I have been thinking the same thing.
Everyone has been worried about "AI misinformation" - but if misinformation becomes so commoditized online that someone convinced the moon landing is fake finds two dozen different AI generated sources agreeing with them but disagreeing with each other (i.e. a video of Orson Wells filming it but also a video of Stanley Kubrick filming it) we may well end up in a world where people just stop paying attention to the bullshit online that has been destroying people's minds for years now.
Couple this with the advances in AI correctly identifying misinformation and live fact checking it with citations to reputable and/or certified sources, combined with things like Elon Musk's 'uncensored' Grok turning around and calling his conservative Twitter fans racist and small minded morons while pointing out why they are wrong, or Gab's literal Adolf Hitler AI telling a user they were disgusting for asking if Jews were vermin - and we may just end up on a narrow path out of the mess we've found ourselves in well before AI was suddenly a thing.
I had been really worried about the AI misinformation angle, but given some recent developments in the past few months I'm actually hopeful about the future of a better informed public for the first time in years.
Agreed, people are up in arms that misinformation will become easier. But I think the naive idea that the internet is inherently a reliable source of truth when it is mixed with subtler forms of misinformation, is much more insidious. Journalism used to be a highly respected field before we all forgot why it was so important.
Now what is happening? The internet is being polluted with garbage and lies. It hasn’t been good for some time now.
Social media as content aggregation is generally garbage, but it's a far stretch to apply that to the Internet or even the Web as a whole. Don't forget Wikipedia is still a thing and almost every creator of primary source data publishes online.
But if anything can be fake now and difficult to identify as fake, then how can you fact check anything? Only those with the means will be able to produce undeniably real news with great difficulty, which I think will return power to major news companies or something equivalent.
That's kind of always been true. And I agree, we need to find a way to maintain information sourcing organizations (e.g. news) that we can trust as the arbiters of this information. If Washington Post can actually put credible reporters on the ground to confirm something, and I know I can trust WaPo, I can fairly say with some confidence that it's good information.
I think we all (or some of us at least) just need to be willing to pay for this service.
Fake photos existed before Photoshop, with scissors and glue
Every day were getting closer to "The Running Man."
FANTASTIC reference! This movie is so funny and awesome, and it seems to have completely disappeared from pop culture. I never understood why Conan looms so large in our collective memory, but this movie totally vanished.
More dancing women in tv???
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.
I'd buy that for a monthly subscription!
Genuine question: why do we need this type of thing?
Especially in view of the harm it can cause, what's the point of creating this aside from generating shareholder value?
Sure, creating a video out of text quickly is cool, but is there an actual need for this?
Art. Presentations. Visualizations. Porn.
Weird music videos. Just this week Youtube had pushed me music videos all done in the weird warpy AI style.
It's kind of cool and simultaneously already feels like a fad that tired with.
Who said anything about need?
It was created because someone thought of it. How it's used is a measure of the person using it.
People will find ways to utilize whatever someone creates. And usually in ways the creator never envisioned.
"Needing" something comes after a tool becomes ubiquitous. Imagine trying to screw in a Phillips screw with a slot screw driver - you'd need a Phillips driver because those screws are now ubiquitous (and I can't wait for them to go away. All hail our stripped screw saviour Torx!)
OpenAI singlehandedly breaking the internet. Props, tbh.
They really are. I don't know about Google but with DDG when searching for information I feel like most of the top results are articles written by AI. Luckily it's still somewhat easy to recognize but that's not going to be the case for long. It's inevitable though so I don't really blame them. If not OpenAI then it would have just been someone else. I'm just worried about where this is going. I can think of more ways this could go wrong than right.
Isn't this a bit over dramatic, seeing as we had deepfake tech for a while now?
I don’t think so, as deep fake stuff was about switching faces and voices. You needed actual footage to train this on.
So if you wanted to stage something, it would take considerable effort, money, time, and manpower.
Now anyone will be able to just type in a prompt and have a video generated.
We saw the Joe Biden deepfake that made calls to tell people not to vote for him. Now just wait until we are having videos of him saying it sent out in mass.
Imagine generating 5,000 videos of different people (likenesses pulled from Facebook) reacting to a fake calamity staged in a certain city.
Imagine seeing it every day to a point you can't see the real calamity coming because you stopped believing in them entirely.
