The fediverse used to feel pretty anti-ai, but over the past month or two I’ve noticed a LOT of generated memes and images, and they tend to have positive votes.
Has there been a sudden culture shift here? Or is there a substantial percentage of people just unable to tell the difference anymore?
Most people like me don’t care especially if the post is supposed to be a shitpost
People don’t care. as long as they can get their infinite scroll with funny picture, they’re happy.
A lot of people are some combination of lazy, stupid, ignorant, and/or indifferent.
Is this post AI generated?
I don’t see it, which is horrific considering that others do. can you show a few examples that you think is AI slop?
Its usually deleted by mods fairly quickly because its often being posted into comms that specifically ban it. I saw it in politics comms, shitposts, 196 and more
and how unambiguous is it that those are AI generated content? is it like blurry colors on images, 6 fingers and 3 hands, or what do you recognize on them?
I think I can identify generated images, but text… well I can’t even decide. Probably I just can’t so far, because I don’t remember any posts or comments that were suspicious
Identifying them is a skill for sure. You learn what you have to look for, but it depends heavily on the art style that was used. Most people are usually better at identifying hyperrealism ones than comic style ones for example.
Straight up vibes a lot of the time these days. It gets better and better
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There’s a whole instance of pro-AI users; many are toxic AF about it.
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The average person is a moron
Which instance is pro ai?
I think it’s the one I use (dbzer0). I’m pretty sure it’s explicitly pro-AI generated content.
Huh, I wouldn’t have guessed db0, interesting. I’d kinda considered exploring db0 as a future instance but maybe its not such a good fit for me. Thanks for the answer!
What I’ll say is that I really don’t mind it. Personally, I’m not a big fan of AI art at all, and I don’t really use generative AI much in any capacity. I also don’t see generative AI on my feed… Basically ever? I guess because I don’t really browse Local.
db0 is anarchist, and that does come with some lenience that some people might find to be a little off-putting, but the AI part of it is pretty much irrelevant, unless you’re seeking it out - from my experience, at least, and based on how I use Lemmy.
Not that I mean to shill for db0 tho lol use whatever instance you feel like fits you best!
They claim they are not cool with generative AI and yet, that’s 90℅ of anything to do with AI posted to/by the instance.
They claim they are not cool with generative AI
Are you sure about that? The instance description explicitly endorses generative AI. I think you might’ve misread.
We’re not against GenAI as a tech. We’re against corporate GenAI though.
I would say that the general mood here that generative AI for creative use or technical tasks is fine, enabling people is a good thing. We are primarily an anarchist community, and generally not happy with the massive corporate control over something that should belong to everyone (bc the models are the cultural output of everyone) and the amount of VC money that is used to push AI where it doesn’t belong in search of the next big thing.
Quite a few people run models on their own hardware (like me, to support me when learning stuff, or when my wife wants new seasonal pics representing our cats in cute styles) or are using AI Horde
There are users on our instance that are not cool with GenAI in general, but they are the minority.
db0
That is genuinely really interesting, I didn’t expect it to be db0. Thanks!
Did you know that there are no instances* defederated from dbzer0? So apart from setting up and running your own instance to defederate**, there is no way of making your feed filter out the subset of users from dbzer0 who think they should spread their instance’s values of AI content across all parts of the Fediverse, whether or not it is welcome there? Did you also know that Fediseer, the default web tool for instances to document issues and endorsements of other instances, which incidentally is maintained by the admin of db0, shows that lemmy.dbzer0.com has received no censures whatsoever from other instances? Do you think that users who avidly use AI to generate visual content for their posts may also avidly use AI to generate their text posts and comments? Countless accounts could simply be 1s and 0s from a machine instead of any actual human soul behind it (wait, isn’t that why many Lemmings left Reddit?).
*barring instances with hidden blocklists
**or instead manually blocking every user from dbzer0, which would be futile as they continue to gain users
No need to block every user from the instance, you can block the entire instance in your account settings.
Copied from another comment of mine:
It seems as though you misunderstand how blocking instances and defederation work. If I am hosted on instance X and I block instance Y but don’t block instance Z, users from instance Y can still post onto communities hosted on instance Z and I will still see these posts. This is what I referred to when I said “subset of users from dbzer0 who think they should spread their instance’s values of AI content across all parts of the Fediverse”. Defederating does require an instance, and only by defederating from instance Y would the content made by instance Y users that is posted onto any instance become wholly filtered out for users on instance X.
Its not even just instance z. If they post to instance x, you will also see the user. You only will not see the posts to instance Y.
Which is counter-intuitive to how one would assume an instance-wide block should work.
Personally I’m pro GOOD ai content. Most of it is not.
Yeah, so much of it is a mediocre/old joke overlayed on a generated image.
I’m guessing, there’s people out there, who genuinely just flood social media with these mediocre posts to try to grow accounts or similar…
I think the appeal of seeing stuff that people make is that it reflects the humans who made it.
I’m generally not especially interested in what an algorithm produces, at least not in the same way or for the same reason as I am things made by people.
I don’t know what gen ai could produce that I would sincerely find good, it lacks the humanity that gives that product any worth.
I don’t know about specific instances but AI has both good and bad sides, so it’d be stupid IMO to just go with a black’n white stance.
Most loudmouths don’t know what they are talking about too (on both sides).
That doesn’t really help me or add anything to the conversation. I already have views on ai, I was really just asking about the dynamics and cultures of different instances because I find learning about those cultural differences interesting.
I’m personally not a fan. Its a commercial product built on the theft of intellectual labor by creatives and the primary selling point of generative ai is that it can replace the people who do that creative labor. I’ve tried using it at various points and it straight up made stuff up and ended up not helping me find what I was looking for at all. I tried to use it to generate practice text I could translate into Japanese for language learning and it constantly used words other than the ones provided- words I didn’t know in japanese.
It has hypothetically useful usecases, that I pretty much never see anyone actually implement, and it feels very clear that the only reason anyone is investing in it is because it can reduce the need to pay actual humans, generating more money for people who already have tons, while wasting huge amount of electricity and resources.
Telling me, apropos of nothing, that having a stance other than neutral is “stupid” doesn’t add anything, give me anything to consider, substantiate any stance, provide any details, etc. I don’t really need to know that you think I’m stupid for not liking ai.
Well, it seems you only judge AI on large language models, not when it’s used in other ways like in research. I integrated AI (Tensorflow) in a massive project in 2016, it outperformed other AI at the time and makes real differences in particle detection. For example.
So just know that AI isn’t just chatgpt or midjourney, that’s the products people try to shove into everything and upsell.
let me get this straight. you like AI because a model outperformed another? how is that a real argument for any kind of question? the topic was not about whether they evolve.
that “black and white stance” is not really bad here, because it’s not actually black and white. their stance is against generative AI, not the kind you use for research. and guess what, forums are flooded by gen AI slop, the only kind of AI today that highly affects our forums.
I just expressed that AI is good in some places, like research.
while dissing someone for not wanting AI in forums, for “not knowing what are they talking about”. right, they didn’t specify what kind of AI they don’t want, but I think it comes from the context that they don’t want generative AIs, because that’s what affects them negatively regularly
Is that generative ai or machine learning? I really don’t have the same issue with machine learning
Its not just llm’s, I find calling ai generated images “art” frankly offensive and demonstrates a fundamental misunderstanding of what art is and why it’s important to us as humans. But my issue is really just generative ai
I don’t really think people have an issue with machine learning, it’s useful for all kinds of stuff, and doesn’t really come with the same ethical problems as best I’m aware, so I have no reason to complain about it.
AI is machine learning. It was just called “machine learning” before every C-suit had to try to sell it.
I’m with you when it comes to shitty images, but there is interesting approaches too IMO, especially when they will get better, if they do. As for art, it’s just another tool in the toolbox. Painters treated photography similarly, and do you remember (if you’re old enough) when digital cameras became affordable and everyone and their grandma became “a photographer” and flooded the planet with soulless photos? I do 😅
Art is art, no machine will change that, but maybe it will help people get into the arts, with the cost of a lot of slop ofc. Which is cool IMO.
Generative ai and machine learning are pretty broadly considered different if adjacent technologies if I’m not mistaken
https://www.forbes.com/sites/bernardmarr/2024/06/25/the-vital-difference-between-machine-learning-and-generative-ai/ probably not the best source, I just grabbed what came up
They don’t really do the same thing, and have different types of outputs compared to one another, even if both use a neural network of weights or whatever
As a person who has spent a huge amount of my life making art I think the idea that it will get more people into art is naive, and I think being devoid of understanding artistic principles it makes poor reference compared to anything else, which is part of why artists communities loathe generative AI. I follow tons of artists online and they all periodically have to stop and vent their frustration.
A youtuber artist did a whole video explaining how finding reference on the internet is now borderline impossible due to ai content, and after problem solving explained you can avoid that problem by only looking at images older than when gen ai became widespread. It reached a pretty big audience and was extremely well recieved by artists, broadly, hate gen ai and want nothing to do with it 😅
Also just wanna clarify- I’m not downvoting you. I try to downvote when a comment is bad behaviour or doesn’t add anything, not just when I don’t agree with someone
There’s really nothing good about ai if you really look into it. MAYBE medical advances, and thats it.
They have been doing machine learning for novel proteins for over 15 years now. “AI” is just a buzzword grant writers have to add these days to have any chance at funding is all
I have to correct you here, machine learning (AI) is extremely important in research. There is just no doubt about it.
Is AI image generators beneficial for society? Probably, I have artist friends who use AI images to help them paint for example, but is it out weighing the cost? Dunno.
Is AI slop beneficial? Orobably not :-)
There are a massive number of scientific research and other pattern matching positive uses that all involve using the AI to help narrow down what to focus on. All of those use AI as a way to filter and group information, not as the end result like the current trend is for the AI being shoved into everything.
Heck, there are some positive uses that could be made with the right guardrails like as a supplemental tool when learning a language (with an educator for oversight!) or as a natural language output for something that is created through an algorithm that returns accurate results.
Mainly, the exact opposite of what is being forced on everyone right now which is inaccurate slop that is full of errors but presented as reliable and helpful.
Everyone is on the moron bell curve. Most people are morons all the time. Some people are only morons occasionally.
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I just haven’t noticed really. The reality is that memes, even ones that were made by hand with a lot of effort, are disposable content. Most of them will get looked at for like 10 seconds tops before you either move on or maybe check out the comments. Nobody who isn’t obsessed with finding the AI slop is going to notice the difference between an AI meme and just a shitty photoshop job.
That’s not to say I’m not concerned by the effects of that. Lower effort needed means more low effort stuff, but it’s not really something I’ve clocked as being particularly out of the ordinary.
I’m thinking it’s like ads. Some people see them, read them, click the links. Others recognize by glance and filter them out without bothering to process.
Social media, and internet in general, has always been a wild mix of top notch content and bottom of the barrel garbage sharing screen estate.
The internet is steadily becoming Facebook. Full of idiots being force fed AI slop. Alarmingly confident in their wrongness about almost everything.
If people would stop talking about AI all day then it probably wouldn’t be used as much as it is every day.
No lie. If anything, this site reminds me that ChatGPT might handle a task for me.
Haven’t seen a difference but I also block / downvote everybody / community that posts ai slob so …
Haven’t seen a difference, but I also focus almost exclusively on the communities I’ve subscribed to. Checking the all or local feed has been annoying and useless since day one, so nothing has changed.
O don’t give a shit and 100% skip useless posts clearly created using AI.
But interesting posts, I do read them even if made with AI.
Lemmy is a mix between technology geeks and leftists, and many of us are both. The geek tend to be at least somehow interested in gen “AI” and often know the technical words behind it (if not what they mean). The leftists are more worried by the socio economic impact of AI
The issue with the leftists as youve described them is that AI IS happening. There will be no stopping it, no containing it. Its already reshaping our world. And by downplaying its future potential(ai will never be able to identify objects, oops it can now. AI will never be able to make art, whoops it can now. AI will never be able to replace a human in every industry…) you are actively stiffling discussion on how to manage those effects. Anyone who has been seriously following AIs progression over the last ten years can see the patterns on the wall. The time of human workers is over. The only question is whether were going to use AI for the benefit of everyone, or for the benefit of the elite. And by convincing consumers they shouldnt use, even though you cant convince the elite not to, you are only pushing the dial further in the wrong direction.
RIGHT NOW we need to embrace AI. Humans have already shown that we are either incapable or unwilling to run a functional society. Putting something else in charge to make the decisions humans cant or wont is the only possible future we have. Ofc Im not asking to out an llm in charge of the world. But I am asking that people actually do something about their world leaders and start getting ubi implemented today. Because soon enough we will have an AI capable of making those decisions. And make them it will. And thats either a good thing under the post scarcity society weve built, or people rolled over and ignored the problem until they decided they dont need us anymore and get rid of us.
As someone who is both, would definitely say I’m interested in generative ML. (I was an early adopter of locally run diffusion models and LLMs. I kinda ended up deeply disappointed by the tech in a lot of ways, but that’s a different discussion.)
But personally for me the issue is that I really don’t care to see posts that someone didn’t care enough to make themself, or read something that someone didn’t care to write. And it’s always super bland and uninteresting.
As long as it’s intentionally made by a human and the end result is high quality, I personally don’t really care what AI or other tools they did or didn’t use to create that result
I made this. Do you care now? Are you offended and outraged?
Lol, that’s great. I don’t know why you think I’d be outraged though
Well then ChatGPT made this as well and its even more offensive.
I think they were making a joke. Its the same vein as if you said you dont care about dad jokes then they made a really bad one and said “are you sure?”
Why is it made of cheese??
Because they probably just took the first image that was generated without even checking it. For today’s generative image AI you usually want to generate great big batches then pick the best ones.
Then if you’re looking for high quality in your meme you’ll also use inpainting and pull the result into Krita or the GIMP to make further improvements (e.g. add text with a proper outline/drop shadow). Then when you’re done you’ll use AI to upscale the image to a great big size so that it’ll look nice when you print it out and hang it on the wall in your cubicle or the stick it to the office fridge or some filing cabinet 😁
I feel like the problem with AI generated content is it’s so easy for anyone to generate stuff, so there can be a huge amount created with little effort. There is high quality AI-generated content, but whew there’s a lot that’s total slop.
I don’t know what the best response is, though. Requiring disclosure of AI-generated comment doesn’t seem like it would help because that’s going to be mostly honor system. User-flagged could be used to brigade/suppress posts. Really it’s probably just a matter of blocking users and communities where you see consistent slop.
Yeah I agree. The issue is that image generation tends to result in maximally bland outputs, and the people who post it tend to put minimal effort in.
I’m not categorically anti-ai, but I feel like I am in practice.
They are flooding the zone, there are countless pro-AI generated content instances. It’s like playing whack-a-mole, I often downvote obvious and human-altered slop (it’s all slop to me). Unfortunately, there are going to be images that have positive votes despite the general dislike of said AI-slop, especially because I tend to block those slop instances these days. Naturally, most of it is objectifying women (something I don’t want to see anyway) so those will naturally get a lot of votes because people weren’t thinking with the right head.
I think I have most AI stuff I encountered blocked, and I assume so do other anti AI people, so there’s probably just not enough people downvoting/commenting on AI since they don’t get it on their feed
Probably this.
I blocked any and all AI shit I came across. Then I read that they cried about getting downvoted. So I unblocked them, distributed downvotes on their crap like candy and blocked them again. Got a good chuckle out of that.
That was my last interaction with them. It might sound weird, but I actually have better things to do than continue downvoting stuff that literally isn’t art and their posters aren’t artists. That last part has been written solely to trigger these non-artists.
Tfw i use AI as a tool to get stuff done, not to feel good about the process and get to call myself an artist.
