For a long time, I was trying to be ambivalent. I thought “AI is a fad, it’ll blow over” and I bore through all the pictures clogging up my favorite art websites but the recent explosion in popularity of AI videos as “memes” on Twitter and YouTube has finally flipped me. This shit sucks.
I don’t even know what kind of people are into these things. Have you tried watching an AI video? They’re very creepy. The characters within look and move very unnaturally. I can’t watch them because I keep thinking it’s going to explode into gore and viscera like The Thing. This is an asshole thing to say but people who produce those things have earned my harshest judgement.
And the worst part is that one day very soon, this technology is going to used to start making videos of people commiting crimes. Sickos have already used it to homemake CP, it’s not going to stop there. I wonder if this is what it was like to live in the Terminator universe when Skynet was starting to be developed. It’s very obvious that this problem is only going to escalate, millions of people are calling for regulation or rules, but the scumbags engineering the tech remain anonymous and completely unhindered in their efforts.
There are a few types of “AI” generated art that I enjoy but they’re relatively niche (usually surreal, more or less obviously has a human purposefully guiding it with a style/angle - eg actually using it as a tool rather than content slop generator), but by and large it’s much more common to come across uncanny valley or straight-up disturbing products nowadays. And much of it cookie-cutter. tbh I’m very limited on social media/wider common internet useage and tailor my feeds highly selectively/avoid as much as possibly the ones that push algorithmic content but even so the slop spills over sometimes. That said I just Can’t watch the “AI” gen videos that CGTN sometimes puts out but the good thing is that they follow Chinese laws and very obviously demarcate “this is ‘AI’ generated” so it’s easy to avoid it. Can’t say the same about other places - I briefly looked back at pinterest a couple months ago (back in the day I had curated some moodboards with friends) and it was just unusable.
Speaking of, western media (including social media) has a history of appropriating images from unrelated contexts to generate mountains of atrocity propaganda especially regarding China and specifically XUAR. Can’t wait for East Turkestan Government in Exile and other US Congress/NED/CIA backed groups to start using “AI” to fabricate atrocity propaganda, can only hazard a guess they might use footage from real active genocides (eg currently committed by Isreal) to generate such atrocity propaganda, then passed off as real by western mainstream media /sarcasm (But yeah as someone else already noted, coulda been doing this in photoshop all along. AI would just make it faster particularly for video formats, which makes selling the fabrications as real easier)
I put “AI” in this context in quotes because it’s anything but “intelligent”, in the sense of General Artificial Intelligence. Learning Machine? eh, shakey, it can only reflect biases inherent to its training data, can’t escape or grow away from it. Big Data Doohickey? sure. Calling “generative content/content detection machines that use training data” -> “AI” was such a techbro upselling to venture capitalists thing and I hate it. sorry for random rant