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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   35397 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 3, 2022

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This week's revolutionary AI advance:

Imagen Video

It's not really revolutionary, as people have been pointing out this is the obvious next step for ages months now. But it still is a milestone worth noting.

As for this:

While our internal testing suggest much of explicit and violent content can be filtered out, there still exists social biases and stereotypes which are challenging to detect and filter. We have decided not to release the Imagen Video model or its source code until these concerns are mitigated.

Google's made a habit of this. They announce an amazing advance, and then say no one can have access to it because it can be used for Evil. No matter: Stable Diffusion will have something comparable out in a couple months.

ETA:

Actually, this out of DeepMind might be the bigger advance today, if less flashy:

Press: Discovering Novel Algorithms with AlphaTensor

Paper: Discovering faster matrix multiplication algorithms with reinforcement learning

My greatest fear for AI content generation is it being dominated by woke megacorps, with independent creators permanently locked out of contributing to culture. It looks like Google is investing heavily in that dystopia.

Novelai and stable diffusion being mostly uncensored has been a big white pill so far, but it feels like the shoe is about to drop.

Reading this with its assorted replies along with @Primaprimaprima's post earlier in the week leaves me feeling like I have a fundamentally different understanding of art, and experience it in a vastly different way from the majority of commenters here. I'm not sure what to make of your stated concern because I don't see how it even relates.

While I grant that I may be falling for the "passing tranny fallacy" (IE transwomen who pass don't get recognized as transwomen) pretty much every example of AI generated text and images I've encountered has struck me as painfully obvious. Whether it's GPT-x or DALL-y it's all very obviously not human, not even close, and thus I find myself wondering what all the furor is about.

Am I really an outlier in my ability to notice that randomly strung together words, even if they are grammatically correct, aren't conveying any meaning? Ditto the visual medium, I've gotten used to cheap sci-fi book covers having nothing to do with the plot, but am I really the only guy who's noticed?

Seems to me that you're painting in apocalyptic terms what to me looks like just another Thursday and that raise the question of which, if either, of us is actually out of line.

...pretty much every example of AI generated text and images I've encountered has struck me as painfully obvious.

Am I really an outlier in my ability to notice that randomly strung together words, even if they are grammatically correct, aren't conveying any meaning?

Yes. You are an outlier. A majority of people are consistently failing the reverse turing test for text and images. Literally everyone will at least have some of their time wasted reading the first couple sentences of AI generated text before realizing something is off. Nobody is immune to info-chaff.

Nobody is immune to info-chaff.

The internet is already full of info-chaff (otherwise known as spam) and things are, for the most part, working fine. If AI is going to change that then it needs to do a lot better than fooling people for a couple of sentences. Spammers can already do better than that.

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