This was not marked as AI-generated and commenters were in awe at this fuzzy train, missing the "AIGC" signs.
I'm quite nervous for the future.
A) Most of the give aways are pretty subtle and not what viewers are focused on. Sure, if you look closely the fur blends in with the pavement in some places, but I'm not going to spend 5 minutes investigating every video I see for hints of AI.
B) Even if I did notice something like that, I'm much more likely to write it off as a video filter glitch, a weird video perspective, or just low quality video. For example, when they show the inside of the car, the vertical handrails seem to bend in a weird way as the train moves, but I've seen similar things from real videos with wide angle lenses. Similar thoughts on one of the bystander's faces going blurry.
I think we just have to get people comfortable with the idea that you shouldn't trust a single unknown entity as the source or truth on things because everything can be faked. For insignificant things like this it doesn't matter, but for big things you need multiple independent sources. That's definitely an uphill battle and who knows if we can do it, but that's the only way we're going to get out the other side of this in one piece.
[1]: e.g. tiktok https://newsroom.tiktok.com/en-us/partnering-with-our-indust...
Then there's the usual giveways for CG - sharpness, noise, lighting, color temperature, saturation - none of them match. There's also no diffuse reflection of the intense pink color.
Indeed, a great (if counterintuitive) example of this is The Wolf of Wall Street. I bet a lot of people would be surprised at just how much CGI is used in that just for set/location.
The truth is... most people will simply not care. Raised eyebrow, hm, cute, next. Critical watching is reserved for critics like the crowd on HN and the like, but they represent only a small percentage of the target audience and revenue stream.
I’ve worked in CG for many years and despite the online nerd fests that decry CG imagery in films, 99% of those people can’t tell what’s CG or not unless it’s incredibly obvious.
It’s the same for GenAI, though I think there are more tells. Still, most people cannot tell reality from fiction. If you just tell them it’s real, they’ll most likely believe it.
I've noticed people assume things are CG that turn out to be practical effects, or 90% practical with just a bit of CG to add detail.
Worse, directors often lie about what’s practical and we’ll have replaced it with CG. So people online will cheer the “practicals” as being better visually, while not knowing what they’re even looking at.
I’ve seen interviews with actors even where they talk about how they look in a given shot or have done something, and not realize they’re not even really in the shot anymore.
People just have terrible eyes once you can convince them something is a certain way.
Lawrence of Arabia or Cleopatra alone have incredible fully live shot special effects which can not be easily replicated with CG and have aged like fine wine, unlike the trash early CG of the 80s and 90s which ruined otherwise great films like the last starfighter
You’re taking the best films of an era and comparing them to an arbitrary list of movies you don’t like? Adding to that, you’re comparing it to films in the infancy of a technology?
This is peak confusion of causality and correlation. There are tons of great films in that time frame with CG. Unless you’re going to argue that Jurassic Park is bad.
Especially because I’ve done both on set and virtual production, it’s hard to suspend disbelief in a lot of films.
This goes for conversation too! My neighbour recently told me about a mutual neighbour who walks 200 miles per day working on his farm. When I explained that this is impossible he said "I'll have to disagree with you there"
https://www.reddit.com/r/Ultramarathon/comments/xhbs4d/sorok...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aleksandr_Sorokin
So, not very convenient for a non-world-champion runner to do (let alone while doing farm work) (let alone on more than one occasion).
In my opinion anyway, I'm gonna have to disagree with any counterpoints in advance.
If all opinions are equal, and we’ve reinforced that you can find anything to strengthen an opinion, then facts don’t actually matter.
But I don’t think it’s actually all that recent. History is full of people saying that facts or logic don’t matter. The Americas were “discovered” by such a phenomenon.
A related phenomenon is not being able to hear the difference between 128kbps and 320kbps. I find the notion astonishing, and yet lots of people cannot tell the difference.
But also in the case of the fluffy train there's nothing to compare it against. The reason CGI humans look the most fake is because we're trained from birth to read a human face. Someone that looks at trains on a regular basis will probably discern this as being fake quicker than most.
It also took me a while to find any truly unambiguous signs of AI generation. For example, the reflection on the inside of the windows is wonky, but in real life warped glass can also produce weird reflections. I finally found a dark rectangle inside the door window, which at first stays fixed like a sign on the glass. However it then begins to move like part of the reflection, which really broke the illusion for me.
[1]: https://web.archive.org/web/20120829004513/http://stuffucanu...
But what I was thinking while enjoying the show was: people wouldn't do that, if it didn't work.
This is the point. There is no such thing as "completely fools commenters". I mean, it didn't fool you, apparently. (But don't be sad, I bet you were fooled by something else: you just don't know it, obviously.) But some of it always fools somebody.
I really liked how Thiel mentioned on some podcast that ChatGPT successfully passed Turing test, which was implicitly assumed to be "the holy grail of AI", and nobody really noticed. This is completely true. We don't really think about ChatGPT, as something that passes Turing test, we think how fucking stupid useless thing mislead you with some mistake in calculations you decided to delegate to it. But realistically, if it doesn't it's only because it is specifically trained to try to avoid passing it.
You can't assume that with scams. Quite often, scams are themselves sold as a get-rich-quick scheme, which like all GRQ schemes, they wouldn't be if they worked well.
Videos like these were already achievable through VFX.
The only difference here is a reduction in costs. That does mean that more people will produce misinformation, but the problem is one that we have had time to tackle, and which gave rise to Snopes and many others.
My prediction is that next year they will catch up a bit and will not be shy about releasing new technology. They will remain behind in LLMs but at least will more deeply envelope their own existing products, thus creating a narrative of improved innovation and profit potential. They will publicly acknowledge perceived risks and say they have teams ensuring it will be okay.
The latest Gemini version (1206) is at least tied for the best LLM, if not the best outright.
Like I said in another comment, LLMs are cool and useful, but who in the hell asked for AI art? It's good enough to fool people and break the fragile trust relationship we had with online content, but is also extremely shit and carries no meaning or depth whatsoever.
For example, you need to generate a landing page for your boring company: text, images, videos and the overall design (as well as code!) can be and should be generated because... who cares about your boring company's landing page, right?
Most companies don't need this. They need a page that has their contact info and some general information about services they provide so they can have a bare minimum internet presence and show up on google maps.
Companies who understand the importance of a customer friendly and functional web presence get a great return on their investment. And it's much better for the customer.
Your ice cream shop doesn’t need a landing page because of word of mouth and foot traffic.
Some project management platform for plumbers needs a highly tuned webpage because they’re competing with 20 other such systems, and there’s no line to walk past and assume it’s there because the software is good.
Believing that if you build great plumbing SAAS software people, paying customers will magically appear, is naive.
A great product can sell itself. But that doesn’t mean that marketing and sales aren’t necessary in order to get the product in front of people, assuage their concerns, reassure them that it solves their problems, show social proof from others using it, and close the deal. A good landing page will do all of this ;)
That's what HN is for
Somewhere there's a site for "hackers" where it isn't, and I hope I stumble across that site at some point.
"The earth is flat" - "Can you prove it?" - "Oh it's just my opinion". It's dishonest.
To get back to the beginning: I really do agree that the societal impact on the whole appears to be negative. But there are some positives and I wanted to share my example of that.
everyone who has ever used stock photography, custom illustrators, and image editing. as AI improves, it will come after all of those industries.
that said, it is not OpenAI's goal to beat shutterstock, nor is it the goal of anthropic or google or meta. their goal is to make god: https://ia.samaltman.com/ . visual perception (and generation) is the near-term step on that path. every discussion of AI that doesn't acknowlege this goal, what all of these billions of dollars are aiming for, is myopic and naive.
I did. I started messing around with computer graphics on DOS with QBASIC and consider AI art to be just an extension of that.
On the other hand I don't care all that much for LLMs most of the time. They're sometimes useful, but while I find AI art I enjoy very regularly, using a LLM for something is more a once every couple weeks event for me.
"just be privileged as I was to get all the necessary education to be able to not be fooled by this tech". Yeah, very realistic and compassionate.
That's a ridiculous assumption. In my experience no one outside of tech circles is even remotely aware that this kind of thing is possible already.
My family is mostly working class in an economically depressed part of the Virginia/West Virginia coal country, and every single one of them is aware of this. None of them work in tech, obviously. None have college degrees.
I maintain that the attitude driving this paternalistic, censorious attitude is arrogance and condescension.
A prime example of how broadly aware the public all over the world is of AI faked videos was the reaction in the Arab world to the October 7th videos posted by Hamas. A shocking (and depressing) percentage of Arabs, as well as non-Arab Muslims all over the world, believed the videos and pictures were fakes produced with AI. I don't remember the exact number, but the polling I saw in November showed it was over 50% who believed they were fakes in countries as disparate as Egypt and Indonesia.
These two are very different things. My family believes all kinds of videos on the internet are fake. None of them have any idea what a tool like Sora can do. The gap between "oh this was probably special effects" to "you have to notice pixels shimmering around someone's hand to tell" is enormous.
>>My family is mostly working class in an economically depressed part of the Virginia/West Virginia coal country, and every single one of them is aware of this.
Your working class family has time to keep up with the advancements in generative AI for video? They have more free time than I do then. If we're sharing anecdotes about families then my family is from Polish coal country and their idea of AI is talking to your car and it responding poorly.
>>I maintain that the attitude driving this paternalistic, censorious attitude is arrogance and condescension.
I'm confused - who is displaying this "censorious" attitude here?
>> and your source of data for this is "your own experience"? Really?
Yes, really. I mean do you have anything else? You are also quoting things from your own experience.
While the average person overestimates their own intelligence, the average techy dramatically underestimates the intelligence of the average member of the public. The weirdos that latch onto every fake video and silly conspiracy theory are dramatically overrepresented in every online comments thread, but supposed geniuses in the tech/NGO/academic community forget this and assume a broad swath of the public believes in stuff like "Pizza gate" because nuanced thinking is a skill only the enlightened few possess.
See the part of my comment you are replying to where I specifically stated that the motivation for all of this is that "Jethro doesn't vote the way I want him to". You've proven my point.
The censorious attitudes on HN were non-existent before Trump won in 2016. I know this for a fact. I've had my account on here since 2012, after 2 years of being just a reader.
Meanwhile, you overestimate how immune to misinformation and lies the average HN techy is. Just a few years ago, the majority of people on here believed, with utter conviction, that the bat-borne coronavirus lab in Wuhan had absolutely no connection with the bat-borne coronavirus epidemic that started in Wuhan and that only bigots and ignoramuses could draw such a conclusion. I experienced this whenever I brought up the blatantly obvious, common sense connection in these same comment threads in late 2020 or into mid 2021. The absolutely absurd denial of common sense by otherwise intelligent people was reminiscent of trying to talk to a religious fundamentalist about evolution while pointing at dinosaur fossils and having them continue to deny what was staring them in the face.
For example, some people can be very intelligent, yet not be discerning of information that resonates with prior biases. You see this in those who are devoutly religious, politically polarized, etc.
There is reason to believe that such biases will lend to ontological misinterpretations from algorithmically generated information.
You can see mistakes in interpretation on a day to day basis by the population at large. There are swaths of widely held beliefs that aren't based in truth. Pretty much anyone is likely to believe at least some stereotype, folklore, urban legend, or myth.
This has nothing to do with privilege, a person in Indian slums on his 2005 PC with internet access can have better internet BS radar than an Ivy League student.
I think though, that if you are in the position of doing serious critical reflection about this stuff, which is in my opinion necessary for being in a position of discernment wrt this stuff, then you are privileged. This is the idea I wanted to convey.
Of course, as knowledgeable people in tech we can look at the last few years of AI improvements as technically remarkable. pen2l is talking about social impact.
I hope our trade can collectively become adults at the big table of Real Engineers. Consider the impact on humanity of your work. If you don’t care, then you are either recklessly irresponsible, don’t know any better, or are intentionally causing harm at scale.
Tech is a very powerful tool that can automate the most mundane tasks and also automate harm like mass surveillance and erosion of ownership rights of your devices. The sheer ability to create new markets and replace inefficient non-automated markets leads to huge $$$ making opportunities which people may mistake as being good in itself (good for economy / GDP = good for humanity)
Every value oAI has claimed to have hasn't lasted a milisecond longer than there was profit motive to break it, and even anthropic is doing military tech now.
(This is my latest favorite prompt and interview/conversation question)
(This is the hash of a string randomly popped in my mind. An LLM will write this with almost 0 probability --- until this is crawled into the training sets)
Anything that you or others can answer to this which isn’t some stupid “gotcha” puzzle shit (lol it’s video cus LLMs aren’t video models amiright?) will be wrong because of things like structured decoding and the fact that ultra high temperature works with better samplers like min_p.
https://openreview.net/forum?id=FBkpCyujtS¬eId=mY7FMnuuC9
99% of the times it's either useless or wrong.
https://www.reddit.com/r/uBlockOrigin/comments/1ct5mpt/heres...
We don't have tech to correctly "detect ai" in 2024, which is why education has broken down over the last few years with serial cheating in every institution.
Every company so far that claimed to detect AI generated slug has failed.
Sorry for the name dropping, I have no affiliation and am just a very happy user, so I wanted to share it as it felt adequate.
This tech will make the internet even more unbearable to use, without mentioning its huge potential for abuse. This is far worse than whatever positives it might have, which are still unclear. What a shitshow.
Maybe the model is you have to pay per account to use it, or maybe the model will be something else.
I doubt this will make everyone just go back to primarily communicating in person/via voice servers but that is a possibility.
What we probably need (this is going to sound crazy, but I don’t have a better suggestion), is some kind of networked trust system.
Spammers can afford more money per bot for their operations than the average user can justify to spend on social media.
Worse, the audience is our parents and grandparents. They have little context to be able to sort out reality from this stuff
They also lie themselves: they cannot detect overt bias or reflect on themselves and be aware of their hidden motives, resentments and wishful thinking. Including me and you.
Most people hold important beliefs about the world that are comically inaccurate.
AI changes absolutely nothing how many true or false beliefs the average Joe holds.
I just hope the online, social media space gets enshitified to an such a degree that it stops playing a major role in society, though sadly that is not how things usually seem to work.
Could even argue shipping the product and not the paper would have done more for AI safety, least it would be controlled.
ie a company developing this tech, keeping under wraps and say only using for special government programmes....
Do yourself a favor and avoid that kind of content, opting instead for long-form consumption. The discovery patterns are different, but you're less inclined to encounter fake content if you develop a trust network of good channels.
It would be FAR worse if a privately held advanced AI's outputs were unleashed without the population being at least somewhat cautious of everything. The real danger imho comes from private silos of advanced general intelligence that aren't shared and used to gain power, control, and money.
https://www.reddit.com/r/StableDiffusion/comments/1hav4z3/op...
These are even unfair comparisons because they're leveraging text-to-video instead of the more powerful image-to-video. In the latter case, the results are indistinguishable.
Video generation is about to be everywhere, and we're about to have the "Stable Diffusion" moment for video.
Look at the comments: people are already fawning over open source being uncensored.
Cat's out of the bag.
HN is a hyper specialized group of people. The average person can not do this and as we've seen devours up misinformation with no second thoughts.
But it is funny to see how much stuff gets uploaded with zero quality control and still gets traction. These models really don't deal will with "innocent" letter substitutions, Iike using I instead of l.
And yet, you would not have known how to recognize those artifacts without "OpenAI's decisions to unload a lot of this before recognizing the results of unleashing this to humanity".
Yeah, and it's especially hypocrite coming from them who said they'd refuse to disclose anything about GPT-3 because they said it was dangerous. And then a few years latter: “Hey remember about this thing we told you it was too dangerous before? Now we have a monetization strategy so we're giving access to everyone, today.”
I believe the internet needs a distributed trust and reputation layer. I haven't fully thought through all the details, but:
- Some way to subscribe to fact checking providers of your choice.
- Some way to tie individuals' reputation to the things they post.
- Overlay those trust and reputation layers.
I want to see a score for every webpage, and be able to drill into what factored into that score, and any additional context people have provided (e.x. Community Notes).
There's a huge bootstrapping and incentive problem though. I think all the big players would need to work together to build this. Social media, legacy media companies, browsers, etc.
This also presupposes people actually care about the truth, which unfortunately doesn't always seem like the case.
The other day I was scrolling down on YouTube shorts and a couple videos invoked an uncanny valley response from me (I think it was a clip of an unrealistically large snake covering some hut) which was somehow fascinating and strange and captivating, and then scrolling down a few more, again I saw something kind of "unbelievable"... I saw a comment or two saying it's fake, and upon closer inspection: yeah, there were enough AI'esque artifacts that one could confidently conclude it's fake.
We'd known about AI slop permeating Facebook -- usually a Jesus figure made out of unlikely set of things (like shrimp!) and we'd known that it grips eyeballs. And I don't even know in which box to categorize this, in my mind it conjures the image of those people on slot machines, mechanically and soullessly pulling levers because they are addicted. It's just so strange.
I can imagine now some of the conversations that might have happened at Google when they choose to keep a lot of innovations related to genAI under the wraps (I'm being charitable here of their motives), and I can't help but agree.
And I can't help but be saddened about OpenAI's decisions to unload a lot of this before recognizing the results of unleashing this to humanity, because I'm almost certain it'll be used more for bad things than good things, I'm certain its application on bad things will secure more eyeballs than on good things.