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Culture War Roundup for the week of October 3, 2022

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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.

First of all, I think sans some sort of blinded test, the "passing tranny fallacy" (or the "toupee fallacy" as I've more commonly seen it called) should be the default conclusion.

However, I do suspect that even if you did do a blinded test, you would find that you could tell better than chance. Presuming that you would, I think the furor is about the potential future, not the present. If we compare what AI generated images looked like in October 2021 and October 2022, the difference is stark. We can't extrapolate directly to October 2023 or 2030, but we do know with pretty good certainty that it will be no worse, and there's good reason to suspect that it will be better, and by a significant amount.

Which then raises the question to me, what do you mean by "not even close?" "Close [to human-made art]" is a subjective measure, of course, but is your opinion that AI art is currently just so far away from human-made art that the idea of it getting "close enough" to substitute human-made art in many significant contexts within the next 5-10 years is science fiction?