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Culture War Roundup for the week of September 12, 2022

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To continue the AI topic from the previous thread:

Can you give me an example of how AI could undermine the power of “the bureaucrats in Brussels”?

I responded to this with a lighthearted joke, but today when I was letting my mind wander, I remembered a recent story about a woman called Loab:

I discovered this woman, who I call Loab, in April. The AI reproduced her more easily than most celebrities. Her presence is persistent, and she haunts every image she touches. CW: Take a seat. This is a true horror story, and veers sharply macabre.

I'll explain negative prompt weights, in case you don't know. With these, instead of creating an image of the text prompt, the AI tries to make the image look as different from the prompt as possible. This logo was the result of the negatively weighted prompt "Brando::-1".

I wondered: is the opposite of that logo, in turn, going to be a picture of Marlon Brando? I typed "DIGITA PNTICS skyline logo::-1" as a prompt. I received these off-putting images, all of the same devastated-looking older woman with defined triangles of rosacea(?) on her cheeks.

My friend made this image of a "[...] hyper compressed glass tunnel surrounded by angels [...] in the style of Wes Anderson". I innocently combined this image with the original image of Loab in an image prompt, without text. For reasons we can't fully explain, nightmares ensued.

Thread continues, I recommend clicking for the visuals.

So it got me thinking - could you use something like this to scramble AI analyzing you / your community? Would mixing your content, with the result of negatively weighted prompts for whatever it is you normally do, generate a whole bunch of Loabs for people trying to spy on you?

So I looked through the thread and I can't really find what's so crazy about this.

They took a creepy image and combined it with all sorts of random stuff, and then out come more creepy images? That doesn't sound noteworthy.

The twitter OP emphasizes in the replies that the noteworthy thing is that the derivative images seem to conjure gore and body horror. The original creepy image is merely creepy and doesn't have any gore or body horror. This isn't that noteworthy if the training associates gore and body horror with the generally demonic looking eyes and the raw wounded-looking skin that are already in the source Loab.

Since Loab was discovered using negative prompt weights, her gestalt is made from a collection of traits that are equally far away from something. But her combined traits are still a cohesive concept for the AI, and almost all descendent images contain a recognizable Loab.

It seems the researchers did negative(negative("Brando")) to get the original creepy image. I would be more impressed if negative(negative(X)) generated a Loab for many X, including things not anthropomorphic. Or am I misunderstanding something?

I probably leaned into the creepiness of the original story too much. My actual question was more to the effect of "would mixing thing with negative(thing), be a valid countermeasure against AI going over your stuff?"

I can't visualize what "an AI going over your stuff or your community" is. Like if you wanted to make art but do some steganography on it to make it "unlearnable" by a text-to-image AI? Or; if you wanted to have a forum but do something to it so that a language AI couldn't generate plausible-sounding posts?

It's hard for me to imagine a way to mix that would attack the AI but leave human perception unchanged.

Like if you wanted to make art but do some steganography on it to make it "unlearnable" by a text-to-image AI? Or; if you wanted to have a forum but do something to it so that a language AI couldn't generate plausible-sounding posts?

No, not quite...

I have this on my to-watch and have seen it yet, but here's a dad, using AI to go full MI6 on trans social contagion. It's trivial to imagine the government, or various "deradicalization" NGOs doing the same. My question is about possible ways of scrambling that. Having disturbing artifacts randomly pop up for the investigator would be hilarious, and a plus, but not necessary.

It's hard for me to imagine a way to mix that would attack the AI but leave human perception unchanged.

Gilltrut, downthread, seems to disagree