The fediverse used to feel pretty anti-ai, but over the past month or two I’ve noticed a LOT of generated memes and images, and they tend to have positive votes.
Has there been a sudden culture shift here? Or is there a substantial percentage of people just unable to tell the difference anymore?
There’s a whole instance of pro-AI users; many are toxic AF about it.
The average person is a moron
Which instance is pro ai?
db0
Did you know that there are no instances* defederated from dbzer0? So apart from setting up and running your own instance to defederate**, there is no way of making your feed filter out the subset of users from dbzer0 who think they should spread their instance’s values of AI content across all parts of the Fediverse, whether or not it is welcome there? Did you also know that Fediseer, the default web tool for instances to document issues and endorsements of other instances, which incidentally is maintained by the admin of db0, shows that lemmy.dbzer0.com has received no censures whatsoever from other instances? Do you think that users who avidly use AI to generate visual content for their posts may also avidly use AI to generate their text posts and comments? Countless accounts could simply be 1s and 0s from a machine instead of any actual human soul behind it (wait, isn’t that why many Lemmings left Reddit?).
*barring instances with hidden blocklists
**or instead manually blocking every user from dbzer0, which would be futile as they continue to gain users
No need to block every user from the instance, you can block the entire instance in your account settings.
Copied from another comment of mine:
Its not even just instance z. If they post to instance x, you will also see the user. You only will not see the posts to instance Y.
Which is counter-intuitive to how one would assume an instance-wide block should work.
That is genuinely really interesting, I didn’t expect it to be db0. Thanks!
Personally I’m pro GOOD ai content. Most of it is not.
I think the appeal of seeing stuff that people make is that it reflects the humans who made it.
I’m generally not especially interested in what an algorithm produces, at least not in the same way or for the same reason as I am things made by people.
I don’t know what gen ai could produce that I would sincerely find good, it lacks the humanity that gives that product any worth.
Yeah, so much of it is a mediocre/old joke overlayed on a generated image.
I’m guessing, there’s people out there, who genuinely just flood social media with these mediocre posts to try to grow accounts or similar…
What constitutes good AI content?
That I like it - at a high level anyways. I’d guess that usually it’s someone using it as part of their workflow to create something, rather than doing the creation entirely on it’s own.
I don’t know about specific instances but AI has both good and bad sides, so it’d be stupid IMO to just go with a black’n white stance.
Most loudmouths don’t know what they are talking about too (on both sides).
That doesn’t really help me or add anything to the conversation. I already have views on ai, I was really just asking about the dynamics and cultures of different instances because I find learning about those cultural differences interesting.
I’m personally not a fan. Its a commercial product built on the theft of intellectual labor by creatives and the primary selling point of generative ai is that it can replace the people who do that creative labor. I’ve tried using it at various points and it straight up made stuff up and ended up not helping me find what I was looking for at all. I tried to use it to generate practice text I could translate into Japanese for language learning and it constantly used words other than the ones provided- words I didn’t know in japanese.
It has hypothetically useful usecases, that I pretty much never see anyone actually implement, and it feels very clear that the only reason anyone is investing in it is because it can reduce the need to pay actual humans, generating more money for people who already have tons, while wasting huge amount of electricity and resources.
Telling me, apropos of nothing, that having a stance other than neutral is “stupid” doesn’t add anything, give me anything to consider, substantiate any stance, provide any details, etc. I don’t really need to know that you think I’m stupid for not liking ai.
Well, it seems you only judge AI on large language models, not when it’s used in other ways like in research. I integrated AI (Tensorflow) in a massive project in 2016, it outperformed other AI at the time and makes real differences in particle detection. For example.
So just know that AI isn’t just chatgpt or midjourney, that’s the products people try to shove into everything and upsell.
let me get this straight. you like AI because a model outperformed another? how is that a real argument for any kind of question? the topic was not about whether they evolve.
that “black and white stance” is not really bad here, because it’s not actually black and white. their stance is against generative AI, not the kind you use for research. and guess what, forums are flooded by gen AI slop, the only kind of AI today that highly affects our forums.
I just expressed that AI is good in some places, like research.
while dissing someone for not wanting AI in forums, for “not knowing what are they talking about”. right, they didn’t specify what kind of AI they don’t want, but I think it comes from the context that they don’t want generative AIs, because that’s what affects them negatively regularly
Is that generative ai or machine learning? I really don’t have the same issue with machine learning
Its not just llm’s, I find calling ai generated images “art” frankly offensive and demonstrates a fundamental misunderstanding of what art is and why it’s important to us as humans. But my issue is really just generative ai
I don’t really think people have an issue with machine learning, it’s useful for all kinds of stuff, and doesn’t really come with the same ethical problems as best I’m aware, so I have no reason to complain about it.
AI is machine learning. It was just called “machine learning” before every C-suit had to try to sell it.
I’m with you when it comes to shitty images, but there is interesting approaches too IMO, especially when they will get better, if they do. As for art, it’s just another tool in the toolbox. Painters treated photography similarly, and do you remember (if you’re old enough) when digital cameras became affordable and everyone and their grandma became “a photographer” and flooded the planet with soulless photos? I do 😅
Art is art, no machine will change that, but maybe it will help people get into the arts, with the cost of a lot of slop ofc. Which is cool IMO.
Generative ai and machine learning are pretty broadly considered different if adjacent technologies if I’m not mistaken
https://www.forbes.com/sites/bernardmarr/2024/06/25/the-vital-difference-between-machine-learning-and-generative-ai/ probably not the best source, I just grabbed what came up
They don’t really do the same thing, and have different types of outputs compared to one another, even if both use a neural network of weights or whatever
As a person who has spent a huge amount of my life making art I think the idea that it will get more people into art is naive, and I think being devoid of understanding artistic principles it makes poor reference compared to anything else, which is part of why artists communities loathe generative AI. I follow tons of artists online and they all periodically have to stop and vent their frustration.
A youtuber artist did a whole video explaining how finding reference on the internet is now borderline impossible due to ai content, and after problem solving explained you can avoid that problem by only looking at images older than when gen ai became widespread. It reached a pretty big audience and was extremely well recieved by artists, broadly, hate gen ai and want nothing to do with it 😅
Also just wanna clarify- I’m not downvoting you. I try to downvote when a comment is bad behaviour or doesn’t add anything, not just when I don’t agree with someone
Interesting, my art friends, around 50% just love using generative AI for images to use, the other just don’t care. No one does digital art though, or not as their main style for what I know (acrylics, oil paint, gouache, aquarelle etc ).
I don’t like AI gen images because there is always tons of crap in colors and lighting, I guess for composition it could be useful but I don’t use images for that personally, so I like go on pinterest.co.kr with an ad blocker and use my imagination.
Yeah there is someone on a downvote spree lol, no problems & thanks for your post!
There’s really nothing good about ai if you really look into it. MAYBE medical advances, and thats it.
They have been doing machine learning for novel proteins for over 15 years now. “AI” is just a buzzword grant writers have to add these days to have any chance at funding is all
There are a massive number of scientific research and other pattern matching positive uses that all involve using the AI to help narrow down what to focus on. All of those use AI as a way to filter and group information, not as the end result like the current trend is for the AI being shoved into everything.
Heck, there are some positive uses that could be made with the right guardrails like as a supplemental tool when learning a language (with an educator for oversight!) or as a natural language output for something that is created through an algorithm that returns accurate results.
Mainly, the exact opposite of what is being forced on everyone right now which is inaccurate slop that is full of errors but presented as reliable and helpful.
Is there any resource I can read on or start from that’s useful for the average person? Just pointers so I don’t go on slop rabbit holes which I’m sure there are a lot of.
Not sure how detailed you want to get, but the two that I know of off the top of my head are looking for exoplanets and signs of where humans used to live. Here are a couple of easy reads on the application.
https://blog.tensorflow.org/2019/11/identifying-exoplanets-with-neural.html?m=1
https://www.themirror.com/news/world-news/groundbreaking-ai-uncovers-lost-ancient-945182
Useful medical applications are similar, where the pattern matching can be used to narrow down what to look for, but there is a human step afterwards to verify.
Thanks. Starting easy is fine. At least I now have a place to start from.
Translation tools (like DeepL and Google Translate), proof assistance for mathematicians, camera settings optimisations, data analysis assistance in pretty much any field of research, anomaly detection, compression algorithms, ADAS systems like following a lane or self-parking, I can’t remember the specifics, but I know Nokia uses ML/AI methods for signal transmision/receiving optimisation, noise removal, image recognition for various purposes, I recall a system for automatic tree pruning, etc etc.
And before I get the usual “only GenAI is AI”, the underlying methods for creating a generative model and something like a model that detects street signs or abnormalities in medical scans are based on the same principles, they are the same field of computer science.
I have to correct you here, machine learning (AI) is extremely important in research. There is just no doubt about it.
Is AI image generators beneficial for society? Probably, I have artist friends who use AI images to help them paint for example, but is it out weighing the cost? Dunno.
Is AI slop beneficial? Orobably not :-)
Everyone is on the moron bell curve. Most people are morons all the time. Some people are only morons occasionally.