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ZorbaTHut  1yr ago (text post)   Edited 1yr ago   38195 thread views

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?

I hate how much coverage the AI/rat community is giving to "Loab". It seems abundantly clear to me it's a social hoax (or at least just a funny art exhibition) rather than demonstrating anything insightful into the latent space of diffusion models.

"Coincidentally" there was this popular tweet ("Horror story where the same ominous figure recurs across Stable Diffusion samples regardless of the prompt"), shared by e.g. Yudkowsky three days before. Quite likely that the "Loab" author saw that and decided to spin up a hoax on it.

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