AI-Generated Images.... Are We Fucked?

[notjosh]

I've been messing about with Dall-E 3 recently to see what the possibilities are, and I'm pretty sure that not only are we finally in the future (despite lack of affordable hoverboards), but we're also hurtling unstoppably towards dystopia.

FUCKED 1: DESIGNERS?

The wonkiness of AI design has been chronicled in past AI threads, but it's improving fast. I asked it for a packaging design for a vegan sausage and got these:




When asked to design the back of a King Kong-themed playing card set it gave me this:




And here are its designs for imaginary 80s glam rock records:




If you look properly you can see the issues, and it's hard to get reliably good designs, but if you're a budget company knocking out a cheapo product and you don't give a shit - why hire a designer when an intern can spend an afternoon tweaking AI designs on Photoshop?

We've already seen examples of TV shows dabbling in this stuff: Marvel's Secret Invasion used AI to create it's opening theme, and it was used to create prop posters for True Detective: Night Country (as discussed in the CaB thread).

I've also experimented with using it to create bespoke birthday and Christmas cards, and the result is often indistinguishable from the kind of tat that you get in Clinton's already.

Are designers fucked?


FUCKED 2: OUR GRIP ON REALITY?

A couple of times recently I have seen people posting AI-generated images on facebook, thinking they are real. One was a luxury cat house, the other a luxury human house. In both cases there were hundreds of comments from people gushing over them without considering that they might not be real.

I'm also pretty sure they've started using AI images of fake people for the fake vox-pops on the satirical website News Thump. That's clearly presented as satire, but imagine being able to load an article full of quotes from "real people" and being able to use their images knowing that they can't deny the quotes because they don't exist.

These are fairly inconsequential examples, but it's obvious that unless people start learning the tells of AI-generated images (and that will become even harder as the technology gets better), then this stuff is just going to proliferate to the point where having a "photograph" of something will be worth about as much as a dirty rumour scrawled on a toilet wall. Imagine an unscrupulous state who has this technology with the filters off being able to generate countless imaginary warcrimes attributed to their enemy. Imagine having genuine images of an atrocity and trying to convince people they're real once this technology becomes widespread.

Are we fucked? Is everything fucked?

[ajsmith2]

Yeah we're fucked, and for the reasons you state as well as others. I'd love for someone to be able to convince me we're not but nothing works.  I know life and the quintessence of humanity always carries on in some form and we will adapt again but to me this seems well worse that anything before on a different level. People saying 'oh folk thought photography/synths etc were the living end and yet here we are' just don't get it and also don't reassure one iota.

[touchingcloth]

Part of my job is data analysis, and a couple of the tools we use are hawking DO ANALYSIS IN AI TRY IT TRY IT TRY IT!!!!!!!!

What, get help with working out whether my financial data shows improvements or declines and contains any outliers from the thing that doesn't know how many fingers a hand has?

The AI isn't going to fuck us itself, but people thinking it's all that definitely will.

[touchingcloth]

FROZZEM saeAGCS with VEGH-BASEL INGUIENTS

VETAN.GLANUCA DOUUDBRROHE

[Blue Jam]

Will AI ever learn how to do hands properly?

[idunnosomename]

I've lurked on the Midjourney discords and it is creepy seeing people make things like coffee shop logos and tweaking them with more prompts till they look pretty good

The suckering facebook boomers is amazing though. I caught these a few months ago. Some big clickbait page hit viral with this ridiculous image that idiots who dont know how trees work fell for



Then it just kept doing it and more idiots kept falling for it, never questioning anything. Like whats wrong with his fucking hand

[Jim_MacLaine]

As usual nerds ruin everything.

[Psybro]

Eventually people will believe life before the simulation was just part of the simulation.

[Blue Jam]

Then it just kept doing it and more idiots kept falling for it, never questioning anything. Like whats wrong with his fucking hand

He was able to make such an intricate carving because of all those extra fingers, duh.

[Blue Jam]

Maybe King Charles III is AI-generated, have we considered that?

[bgmnts]

Oh it will and probably has overtaken humanity in terms of design and that, it's learning from humans so it will just ape human content.

The game was up as soon as they started doing AI shit despite us all knowing this is what would happen. Funny seeing all the whinging about it though.

Obviously the deep faking images and voices stuff is genuinely dangerous as fuck but ah well.

[touchingcloth]

The suckering facebook boomers is amazing though.

This isn't an AI thing, it's a boomer thing. I've made what I thought were clearly obvious poor photoshops for my dad in the past - no effort at all to conceal the edges, match the lighting, sort the perspectives out - and the next time I've spoken to him he's been like "wow, Cloth! It's amazing that Barack Obama came to your halls of residence and stood in the corner of your grotty bedroom! Are any other world leaders due to visit you?"

Now that the barrier for entry has been removed and you don't even know how to use photoshop to make pathetic jokes like that, I'm sure even the boomers will catch on soon enough.

Wimblewrong is fucked, however.

[touchingcloth]

Oh it will and probably has overtaken humanity in terms of design and that, it's learning from humans so it will just ape human content.

It hasn't done the bolded bit, kind of by definition due to the italicised bit. It can only ape what humans can do and it can't innovate. Designers will adapt in ways that AI can't, and they're only fucked in the sense that painters were by the invention of the camera.

[Mister Six]

I've lurked on the Midjourney discords and it is creepy seeing people make things like coffee shop logos and tweaking them with more prompts till they look pretty good

The suckering facebook boomers is amazing though. I caught these a few months ago. Some big clickbait page hit viral with this ridiculous image that idiots who dont know how trees work fell for



Then it just kept doing it and more idiots kept falling for it, never questioning anything. Like whats wrong with his fucking hand

These Facebook pages get royalty sharing money from FB to encourage them to create "engaging" content, where engagement can absolutely include people bickering over what is and is not an AI image, so they're incentivised to put up wonky AI pics because everyone saying "This is AI, look at his hands" is contributing to the metrics that (a) increase the post's reach, and (b) calculate how much "Animal Lovers" (incorporating Plant Mutilators) should get paid.

This is the shit that will destroy us. Everyone wasting their time and energy feeding into algorithms that serve no purpose other than to make Zuckerberg et al richer.

I do it myself, of course, because I'm a cunt who can't help himself.

[Claude the Racecar Driving Rockstar Super Sleuth]

I'm a graphic designer by trade, and seeing the rise of this is fucking horrible. I just don't see how my job will be viable for very much longer. The worst part is, I don't have any real argument against it. It's faster than me, cheaper than me and (the occasional seven fingered hand aside) better than me. Plus, I've spent years using photoshop to do in hours what some poor painter would have done in days.

[Cuellar]

We will be fine. All it will mean is that soon we will just have to assume that every image we see and any audio we hear isn't real, and that we can only know something happened or exists if we see it in person and actually touch the thing in real life.

Our horizons will narrow to what we can physically interact with and the things that images and audio can't help us with anyway e.g. God.

[idunnosomename]

Oh yeah Facebook is just a grim dystopian mega-machine overall. It's like the Matrix but except by simulating reality, it enslaves minds by showing elderly people comics by The Grog. AI just streamlines the process even more

[bgmnts]

It hasn't done the bolded bit, kind of by definition due to the italicised bit. It can only ape what humans can do and it can't innovate. Designers will adapt in ways that AI can't, and they're only fucked in the sense that painters were by the invention of the camera.

Nah they're fucked.

It'll just adapt as well and start creating its own stuff. Then nukes happen. Humans are quite limited as well, and destined to fuck it all up. Plus half the species probably actively wants this anyway.

[Sebastian Cobb]

if you think our ai is going to be scary when it gets beyond us, just imagine how scary the ai is of aliens that are even more advanced than us to begin with

[frajer]

I can't stand it. I'm surprised anyone likes it, beyond corporations who see it as a way to get quick, cheap, adequate art that barely does the job, but (not incorrectly, sadly) interpret 'barely does the job' as 'gets the job done.'

I posted about this in the George Carlin thread but it's probably more apt here. It's about a way of masking original art so it doesn't get scraped by the AI tech.

Bit of a thread tangent but off the back of the Midjourney lawsuit, I heard about Glaze. It's software designed to combat AI theft by digitally cloaking the image in a way that the human eye doesn't even perceive it, but it bamboozles AI. Gave me a bit of a cheer, even if only to find out there is a potential way for artists to protect themselves: https://glaze.cs.uchicago.edu/what-is-glaze.html

I know so little about tech that I can just about manage posting on a forum (unfortunately for you lot, I do manage it) but hopefully this means there are ways to combat it, or at least offer a verifiable alternative.

[salr]

I think some of this AI stuff, videos and audio could potentially be really dangerous when it come to politicians and having them say things they wouldn't irl.

I sort of tangentally know of some x users who made a fake keir starmer audio quote which gained some attention online. There were newspaper articles about it and starmers office/Labour had to deny it as a fake.

Then there was Sadiq Khan deepfaked as saying something about armistice day/gaza protests that was partly responsible for riling up gammons to 'protect' the cenotaph on armistice day.

Unless each one gets publicly de-bunked by official sources they can easly gain traction and spread through online communities.

[touchingcloth]

I can't stand it. I'm surprised anyone likes it, beyond corporations who see it as a way to get quick, cheap, adequate art that barely does the job, but (not incorrectly, sadly) interpret 'barely does the job' as 'gets the job done.'

This has always been the case, hasn't it? It's shifted the bar for the bare minimum from being using literal clipart as a logo, to using clipart shitted out by a robot.

[idunnosomename]

Will AI ever learn how to do hands properly?

i think it has, a bit. That grandad rose one seems a bit old hat now (I screencapped it in Nov).

Now I sometimes see this endless iron maiden crapstream page (nearly all AI) shoved at me and seems a bit more in character with AI's limitations at the mo



One of the things that gives AI away is its approach to composition, overall symmetrical but adding in some variation so it doesnt look too symmetrical. Hence different numbers of fingers on each hand.

If AI learning looks at cartoons it's accustomed to three-fingered hands. It seems very hard to tell it even for a fantasical monster, it just looks stupid to mix numbers of fingers.

[Huxleys Babkins]

The AI's gotten so good, my attempt to make a convincing video of Dua Lipa noshing me off is just 20 minutes of a deepfaked Lipa telling me to fuck off and calling the police.

And, to make matter's worse, it's given me seventeen arses and they are all really fat. :(

[Dr M1nx PhD]

These are fairly inconsequential examples, but it's obvious that unless people start learning the tells of AI-generated images

Genuine question; what are the tells that I should be looking for in things like this? I know that AI used to be(?) bad at hands, but beyond that (and really obviously wonky stuff like weird blurring or lines that ought to be straight that aren't) I have no idea.

Bear in mind that I can genuinely be fooled by an actor wearing a wig (as long as they don't talk).

[Huxleys Babkins]

Genuine question; what are the tells that I should be looking for in things like this? I know that AI used to be(?) bad at hands, but beyond that (and really obviously wonky stuff like weird blurring or lines that ought to be straight that aren't) I have no idea.

Bear in mind that I can genuinely be fooled by an actor wearing a wig (as long as they don't talk).

In the case of the Jesus tree, trees don't grow like that. They get thinner toward the top, but they don't suddenly drop a third of the width near the base. Everything is badly blurred/compressed apart from the carved face. Fair enough if it's the background, but the rest of the tree and the girl should be in focus. The bricks seem quite well defined on the far left, but turn into indistinct stripes the further in you get. Why does a house that big have no upstairs windows? Also, the woman's top lip doesn't seem to join up properly. Could be post cleft palate op, but when added to everything else?

In the rose carving, what the fuck is that behind the carving? We're told this is someone's garden, so why is there a massively pixelated grey mass in the background? Why does the house seem to merge into it? Why do the wooden roses look almost metallic?

[perplexingprocrastinator]

I keep being reminded of the world-building in Blade Runner where real animals - non-synthetic - are a status symbol for the rich.

I too hate the fuck out of this dismal shit, which is obviously going to decimate a lot of jobs (I'm an illustrator), replacing creativity and the evolution of culture with a cul de sac of recycled rubbish.

I do think that it will push artists into poverty; it might also push them into really dynamic new style and practise, to offer something original. And as in Blade-Runner, "human-made" might become a premium. But the market will not, remotely, support many people doing that.

It's an indictment that for our society, profit is more important that maintaining an ecosystem of actual human creativity. They're genuinely trying to turn us into the dough-people from that "Wall-E". The thing that film didn't show was that those were the elite people. The superfluous ones - 99% of humans - were obviously all dead and ground to powder in the blasted wasteland of Earth.

Mark Zuckerberg is cunt

[Lemming]

DALLE and SDXL are a lot of fun for personal use. Mainly for desktop wallpapers. Here's a couple I wasted time generating earlier this morning:

Spoiler alert

[close]

Of course there's always a sense of hollow weirdness after you're done - you don't feel any real attachment to the image because you didn't do anything to make it beyond fuck with your prompt to wrangle the AI into giving you what you wanted, nor is there much reason to show it to anyone else, beyond the novelty of "hey, look, a computer made this".

That said, it's amazing how much the tech has come on in leaps and bounds. I remember two short years ago we were stuck fucking around with DALLE Mini and couldn't even get the damn thing to draw a person's face, now look where we are. DALLE-3 is extraordinary in its ability to comprehend what you mean even from a vague prompt. It can even do hands!

[jamiefairlie]

I can't stand it. I'm surprised anyone likes it, beyond corporations who see it as a way to get quick, cheap, adequate art that barely does the job, but (not incorrectly, sadly) interpret 'barely does the job' as 'gets the job done.'

I posted about this in the George Carlin thread but it's probably more apt here. It's about a way of masking original art so it doesn't get scraped by the AI tech.

I know so little about tech that I can just about manage posting on a forum (unfortunately for you lot, I do manage it) but hopefully this means there are ways to combat it, or at least offer a verifiable alternative.

Any technology can be overcome by technology. It'll become an ongoing war of attrition so the general public will be easily fooled by fakes agreeing with their own biases.

I'm at the stage now where my default assumption is that any photo or video is fake.

[touchingcloth]

I'm at the stage now where my default assumption is that any photo or video is fake.

I take it one step further and assume that "people" I meet in real life are holograms with deepfaked voices so I reach out a hand to see whether or not it goes straight through them to make sure.

























Your Honour.