Just another flavor of cynicism for me. Before AI, I would look at most “cute” animal videos and just see an animal performing a trained trick under the guise of “Omg, LOOK my dogs love spontaneously hugging each other, isn’t that cute??!!”
People have ALWAYS lied on the internet.
There was a wave of “sleepy baby animals collapsing in sleep together” on Spez’s site until someone figured out most of them were “sleepy” because they were drugged.
I have begun policing myself for feelings of amazement. Seems to be the biggest thing slop tries to induce, followed closely by outrage. I know I can’t control when something makes me outraged or amazed but I definitely can choose what I signal boost
I have a business idea:
Vintage social media.
Only media that verifiably exists on the internet before 2021 is allowed. That’s still billions of cute animal photos and videos.
EDIT:
And a sister project: RAW-only social media. Only photo/video uploaded as raw sensor data (which even phones can take now) is allowed. Metadata is stripped, and they’re post-processed by the site.
Why? RAWs are technically possible to fake, but difficult enough to deter lazy slop spam. As a bonus, they can’t be heavily edited either; they’re unprocessed, unglamourous slices of reality. And they can be served in HDR with modern compression, as a cherry on top.
…Now I just need a few billion dollars to host it, and about a trillion to survive anticompetive attacks.
I was thinking about digitally signing content and you can go check the author’s public key against it or something.
Fr your second idea is actually quite good.
Honestly, I don’t think your edit is crazy at all. I have a hunch that all the fake, filtered, AI-processed, vtuber’d social media is going to result in a sharp backlash soon. Kind of like how over-the-top, image-focused glam and heavy metal of the 80s spawned a backlash in the rawer, more “real” feel of grunge and stripped down alt-rock in the 90s.
Maybe that desire for reality will be one of the triggers for the AI bubble bursting.
Before ai there was photoshop. People who knew how to use it could make good fakes, but far from everyone could do that.
Then ai was created, it was fun to experiment with image generation, but it still was kind of a toy, and images was obviously generated.
Now ai became so advanced, that some ai “photos” or “artworks” require through examination to determine whether its real or fake.
If ai is so “good” right now, future generations of ai will make it nearly impossible to distinguish real pictures from generated, doesnt matter if its a photo, drawing, or other digital artwork.
AI has plateaued.
It’s certainly still improving in many areas - like coding assist, for sure. I think video generation is still improving but it takes a shit ton of resources, so it’s a bit slower. Maybe image generation has plateaued, but that could certainly be temporary. There are lots of more niche applications that are still progressing at a slower pace like I just read an article on using image processing AI in fertility clinics to better predict viability of embryos for implantation. Cool stuff that could actually improve people’s lives.
medical applications of machine learning are a pretty far cry from llms/genai
It is a great exercise to test your media literacy. That you can’t even trust cute cat videos and art really does suck though.
;–;
I just adjusted my way of thinking. Before it was “this video is staged, until proven otherwise”, now it’s “this video is AI, until proven otherwise”.
It’s not that hard to spot; my mother will watch them sometimes. A parrot using complete sentences and witty turns of phrase about a cat trying to attack them? Yeah no. But how do you get a “I just want to sit under my blanket, eat soup and watch cute animal videos” boomer retiree to understand she’s destroying the world by paying attention to this?
she’s destroying the world by paying attention to this
Okay, I’ll bite. How exactly is your mom “destroying the world” by paying attention to it?
By actively selecting these videos, watching them, sometimes multiple times through, going back to them to show them to me “You’ve got to see this video I saw” god hate fucking dammit, she’s driving revenue toward their uploaders, which is causing them to pave over the entire continent of North America with data centers that are destroying the concept of truth itself and murdering the environment.
get her on libretube she can watch it all day with no effect
