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?
I honestly don’t see much from the comms I follow (and it’s a lot thanks to piefed topics), and when I do browse all, if I find a post from a comm that allows them, I either ignore it or block the comm, for example a genAI art comms.
Idk, lemmy, mbin, piefed, etc isn’t reddit with algorithms so it’s kind of on the user if they see a lot of it, IMO.
John Oliver did a show on this recently, in summary: “not all AI is spam, but all spam is AI”. My take, legitimate accounts with a long history are cheap to generate, they’re a great purchase to help spread bad faith disinformation and look legit. It’s a business model.
I’ve noticed a LOT of generated memes and they tend to have positive votes
What’s the issue with that one in particular? Isn’t the entire point of a meme just whether it’s funny or not?
I mean, they’re low effort and unoriginal to begin with. The AI isn’t really changing anything about that.
I feel like memes is one of the few places where AI doesn’t hurt anyone at all.
People don’t care. as long as they can get their infinite scroll with funny picture, they’re happy.
This brings up an excellent point about addiction. A
quicklonger than I’d planned anecdote: over the last few years I’ve nearly completely dumped all social media (and big tech in general). Facebook, Insta, Twitter, all gone. The only social for the last few years I’ve had left was Reddit, and I dumped that a couple months ago (all social media is toxic, I learned).I swapped Reddit for Lemmy a few months ago and noticed a huge difference, not just the fewer toxic people, but in the lack of posts overall by comparison. I found myself scrolling through the same Lemmy posts throughout the day, my brain trying to repeat the cycle from Reddit, but stayed strong and didn’t go back to Reddit haha.
Anyway, there’s still toxicity on Lemmy, and I realized how much it affects me without the cloud of all the other socials bogging it down. Not a lot, but enough. So I made a decision and went back to my old nerd days. I didn’t want to miss out on legit articles I was interested in from social media so I set up an rss reader. I started checking out Lemmy in the morning, and my rss throughout the day, which doesn’t update often.
What I found at first was I was re-checking lemmy, re-loading rss, and thinking about what else I can put on my phone to scratch that itch. I was (am) still addicted to the dopamine hit of forever-feeds of useless garbage. So instead, I picked up a book. It’s been a long time, and it’s a slow adjustment, but wow is it ever so much better. Aside from some small interaction on Lemmy in the morning like this, I don’t see comments anymore, I read the info I’m interested in reading and make my own judgments without comments trying to sway me, and use my former doom-scrolling time to read a book.
To sum up, you’re absolutely right. Addiction is a bitch and the average person doesn’t even realize they’re addicted.
A lot of people are some combination of lazy, stupid, ignorant, and/or indifferent.
Many people don’t care about it. Me included, for instance.
I would give the reason why but I don’t know if anyone is truly interested in knowning.
I don’t consider things being made by AI as something terrible. If the post is fine I upvote and comment like any other post. If the content is lazy, clickbaity or plain bad then it’s bad. But if it’s good I don’t care that it was produced using some AI tool or other.
It’s true that the fediverse it’s still hostile towards AI conversation (this very comment have high possibilities to be drowned with downvotes) but I’m glad the general stance is changing little by little. I hope in a few years the hostility would be much more marginal, specially if the fediverse keeps growing and more people with more diverse opinions come in.
I like to talk about topics, seeing different opinions about it, and when everyone have the same opinion the discussion is not really interesting. With AI, it’s something new that sparks a lot of though process about may topic. For instance the morality of it, or the limits, trying to find the gray areas between the black and the white. It can be very interesting, and I’m glad, little by little we can start talking about it.
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
After you use ChatGPT for a bit, you will start recognizing its style of writing in posts and comments. I’ve seen dozens of obviously ChatGPT generated posts or replies on Reddit and Lemmy. Usually there will be a person who already replied to them something like “Thanks, ChatGPT”, because it is that obvious. This only happens with naive prompts though, if you ask ChatGPT to present its answer to your prompt in a different style (for example, mimic some famous writer, or being cheerful/angry/excited and avoid overly safe language), it will immediately start writing differently and there’s likely no limit on variety of writing styles you can pull out of it with enough effort of just asking it to write this or that way.
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
Is this post AI generated?
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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.
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.
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 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.
One useful usecase that’s being exploited a lot is roleplay.
Using AI to generate a bot to do a roleplay with and maybe images to add flavour. It’s something that people like to do, and that’s totally harmless.
Like, yes, the llm was trained the books of grrm without his explicit consent and now someone is roleplay a fantasy scenario with John Snow, but who cares?
It’s not like GRRM is available to be hired as a play partner, and no one is getting profit out of it, specially if people just selfhost the models. People is just having fun. And the AI is not substituting anyone. As people didn’t hire “actors” to play their roleplay sessions anyway.
And it’s not like people who use it it like this even post the results in social media and call themselves “AI artist” or anything like that. They just play for themselves or their group of friends, and, at most you can share online the “bot card” so others can use it.
Yeah, I’m not really mad at that. I don’t think it changes my sentiment towards generative ai, but I don’t mind people finding ways to create their own fun and roleplaying or whatever
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.
I work in Game Making.
There’s a ton of stuff in it which has been called “AI” for literally decades and almost none of it is Machine Learnrning: for example the A* pathing algorithm for characters in a game is called “AI”, as are Steering Behaviours that can be used in things like simulating bird flocks, and both are entirelly algorithmic, not ML.
In my own experience ML is seldom useful in games, mainly because algorithms are lighter and generally work more reliably.
You’re confusing use of “AI” in the Marketing of the present day tech bros trying to make money pumping up a Tech Bubble on top of certain very specific forms of Machine Learning, with the actual general meaning of the acronym.
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.
Translation tools (like DeepL and Google Translate), proof assistance for mathematicians, camera settings optimisations, data analysis assistance in pretty much any field of research, anomaly detection, compression algorithms, ADAS systems like following a lane or self-parking, I can’t remember the specifics, but I know Nokia uses ML/AI methods for signal transmision/receiving optimisation, noise removal, image recognition for various purposes, I recall a system for automatic tree pruning, etc etc.
And before I get the usual “only GenAI is AI”, the underlying methods for creating a generative model and something like a model that detects street signs or abnormalities in medical scans are based on the same principles, they are the same field of computer science.
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.
All of those use AI as a way to filter and group information
Is there any resource I can read on or start from that’s useful for the average person? Just pointers so I don’t go on slop rabbit holes which I’m sure there are a lot of.
Not sure how detailed you want to get, but the two that I know of off the top of my head are looking for exoplanets and signs of where humans used to live. Here are a couple of easy reads on the application.
https://blog.tensorflow.org/2019/11/identifying-exoplanets-with-neural.html?m=1
https://www.themirror.com/news/world-news/groundbreaking-ai-uncovers-lost-ancient-945182
Useful medical applications are similar, where the pattern matching can be used to narrow down what to look for, but there is a human step afterwards to verify.
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.
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.
Most people like me don’t care especially if the post is supposed to be a shitpost
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.
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.
