Comment by bluegatty
19 hours ago
This an oddly cynical comment, that I think says more about the observer than the observed.
People are having fun making images.
Like they do all sorts of things on the web.
Making an image is as simple as visiting a web-page.
That's it.
This i did like 15 images just today, mostly just editing and fixing one of my wifes photos that she wanted the lighting and stuff leaned up with so i decided to test out 2.5... it did a great job, but that was easily 15 images 1 of which was the end result but all 15 count toward that figure, i'd honestly guess its more 1:100-1:500 that actually makes it outside the chatgpt servers
This is the most normal thing, and this is the best example
AI is: 'my wife wanted better lighting in our reno pic thingy'
This is healthy and way in the range of normal, not dystopian.
I assume the comment I am responding to was made in sarcasm, so I'm basing my response on that register, so apologies in advance if I have got this wrong.
I don't understand what is dystopian about this: With the exception of mildly elevated resource consumption to achieve the end goal (a nicer photo), is this not the sort of things that humans have been wanting and doing for as long as photographs have been a thing?
It was previously mostly unachievable for regular people to have their snapshots processed in such a way, but it feels like it's just making what used to be special mildly trivial. Anyone who has had their wedding photographed for the past 20 years has had the photos touched up on the way through. Any school portrait for just as long.
100 years ago people would dodge and burn photographic prints to improve them as much as the technology allowed. This is just the forward evolution of that old tale.
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If twitter and reddit have demonstrated anything is that the fun people are having with image generation is not healthy.
How so? I don't have twitter or reddit, what are people doing?
If my social circle (in real life) is anything to go by, mostly testing out home renovation/decoration ideas.
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I don't have twitter or reddit either, I've just seen what people post online
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I know, right? And the worst part is, they didn't check with you first.
> That's it.
Yeah ignoring the massive environmental, social, and moral implications I suppose it’s not a big deal at all.
The 'environmental' consideration is much less than the argument over 'paper or plastic'.
That's going to be an issue of regulation and cost - not some arbitrary decision over 'whether I should make an image or just use text'.
Second - there are really not much in the way 'social or moral implications' for the most part.
This is a dystopian delusion that I'm hinting at here.
Folks are blowing this way out of proportion, and cynically so.
People now have 'automated Photoshop' and a slightly more power to express themselves. It's not going to change that much, and it's not a bad thing, it's a good thing. Mildly.
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The 'environmental' consideration is much less than the argument over 'paper or plastic'.
Citation needed.
More to the point: both can be bad. We don't let people run stop signs because running red lights is worse.
oh no... it's fun... you got us...
It is 100% not. You can create a whole lot of misinformation with an image. You cannot do that by visiting a website. To dismiss the concern with “people are having fun” is, at best, a naive idea and, at worst, a deliberately deceitful and malicious comment.
Here is a guy tweaking photos of 'girls on a beach' in 1990 with Photoshop, which anyone can use to do, relatively easily ...
... for almost the last 40 years
"a deliberately deceitful and malicious comment."
This is a 'lost contact with reality' type of thing to say.
This thread is not about AI, it's entirely about people's ability to ground reality.
[1] https://petapixel.com/2015/02/20/a-blast-from-the-past-demos...
"which anyone can use to do, relatively easily" this is not true at all. Not anyone can use Photoshop, you need to first buy or get the software, then you need to learn how to use it, then work on the images. Whereas now you can just use Grok and immediately create pedophilia. Another deliberately deceitful and malicious comment
I hate it because I hate having to look at these AI generated images. In fact I want an internet where I have to explicitly opt-in to see AI generated content in general.
I was watching a friend stream a dead game lately.
That game was developed before generating images became widespread, and sunset as that "art form" started really taking off (game-as-a-service... probably partly reverse engineered and retooled with AI too). So during its lifetime, it was pretty much AI free.
I remember having been seduced by that game's art style at the time. It wasn't "the usual guys with futuristic guns and armor", it had some stylization as well, nice color...
Watching the stream, it occurred to me that it was in fact artwork from "the days before", in a way I hadn't been hit with until that point, even as a returning artist looking at pre-AI works.
"People came up with the concepts and developed and rendered them themselves", I thought to myself. Not in a "oh look, floppy disks. How quaint!" way, either.
Weird feeling.
Today I got stuck with a hairy frontend problem, which even AI couldn't help me with. Luckily, I managed to find a Medium article from like 2019. It was joyfully absent of 'comparisons that actually hold up' and 'X that is only a part of the picture' and nothing was load-bearing in there.
I forgot that once there existed a magical time when human beings used to write Medium articles by hand.
I would imagine a lot of it is mundane shit like getting ChatGPT to render the same room with different coloured walls or provide inspiration on plant pots. I have a decent amount of image usage and it's all things like this, not generating content I intend to distribute.
Yeah seriously, the cultural mindset is so damn kneejerk negative to everything right now. It's pathetic. This is an exciting time, and lots of good things are happening.
Maybe? Transformers and neural networks in general can do lots of interesting things for sure. But an image with the default ChatGPT aesthetic mindlessly produced by a generic prompt isn't one of them.
Seriously, it’s so fucking lame and boring to read these cynical takes. I might just make a HN comment that filters these people out, they’re ruining the site.
To be clear, I don’t mind a well-reasoned negative take on something, but much of the negatives takes I see here these days isn’t much better than Reddit, just hyper-exaggerated bitching and moaning about everything.
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The weirdly narrow and cynical purview of your example proves my point.
It echos sentiments of painters, intellectuals and odd religious moralists and other rabble rousers who spent decades raving against 'tHe eVIL pHoToGRaPH' in late 19th and early 20t century.
People can now make more expressive images than they could before, which is generally a good thing.
Of course, people could always use new technology for negative purposes - and - people have been using Photoshop for decades already to make 'fake nudes' - this is not a new phenomenon.
None of this is even a very big deal. We can make images now much more easily, that's it.
> imagine being someone being blackmailed by photos created by ChatGPT Images
If anything, the fact that I know for a fact that I can, in 45 seconds, generate an image of any arbitrary person holding Solo cups at a party arm in arm with Vladimir Putin (to crib an idea from one of the demos) should make everyone less and less susceptible to blackmail in general - in fact, even if the source material is real! There was a time 40 years ago when a photograph's existence was considered proof of a fact - the existence of Photoshop-like tools made that into a weak proof, and the existence of genAI has made "a photograph" into a format that is known to be as malleable as a .txt file.
Whether we like that or not, no one will stop bad actors from attempting to abuse this technology, so democratizing its use does help people to understand how they work and make potential victims much less credulous.
this is an oddly dismissive comment that says more about the commenter then what is commented on.
generating an ai image is vastly more costly than loading a webpage…but still not that costly compared to most other things.
this is depressing in the same way content slop or fyp feeds are fun.
if you want a silly pic with ur kids, just pay someone on fiver. it will be only slightly more expensive and likely far more exciting for kids as they have to wait for the dopamine hit.
> if you want a silly pic with ur kids, just pay someone on fiver.
Incredible alternative. Talk about depressing.
"if you want a silly pic with ur kids, just pay someone on fiver. it will be only slightly more expensive and likely far more exciting for kids as "
???
You mean to imply there's something 'more authentic' about paying $5 for a random Philippino guy to use Photoshop to mix-up some family photos with sticker overlays?
What are you even talking about?
On what level is that either more authentic, better for the environment, more novel ... of frankly better in any way?
That is 'not even an argument' - and so you're making my point for me:
People can now make images.
It's mostly for fun, some of it will be used professional, some Tweets will be a bit more visual - but that's it.
It's not going to change that much, and it's generally better on the whole for people to be able to create what they want.
People are putting this out of proportion.
Maybe I'm too old, but I've been around - this is not a big deal in the grand scheme.
And it's 'net slightly positive'.
>if you want a silly pic with ur kids, just pay someone on fiver. it will be only slightly more expensive and likely far more exciting for kids as they have to wait for the dopamine hit.
Or, y'know, learn how to draw, or accept that it's not exactly going to be Chuck Jones caliber stuff.
its not “oddly” and u know full well
>People are having fun making images.
3 billion images per week isn't people, it's automated farms, dogshit marketing companies and other attacks on your brain.
All of it?
What percentage is benign?
Do you have a source?
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They're having fun asking a robot to make a picture when they could have learned to make it themselves.
It's incredibly depressing.
Yea, “fun”, sure. I’m sure none of those billions of images were used to lie, mislead, or cheat anyone. I’m sure none of those images were used to create fake news narratives, used in advertisements to bait people into buying fake products, or create misleading mockups of rental properties. Definitely not.
Nevermind the fact that the examples in OpenAI’s blog post are examples of creating images that have no plausible purpose other than to fake stuff that didn’t happen.
But yea sure, it’s all just “for fun”. Sure.
Yesterday my wife used ChatGPT to generate an image of our cat as a toilet, which was very funny for the both of us. She's also used it to turn him into a basketball getting dunked, a tsetse fly, a clown and a napkin. It's hard to say whether she uses it more to generate inside joke images about our cat, or to generate mockup plans and layouts for her flower gardens, but it is safe to say she does it all for fun.
This was routed internally to CatGPT which runs only Vera ribbon.
Do you purposefully not use any products that could be used to do anything harmful?
A hammer is great for pushing nails into wood. It also can crack someone’s skull with efficiency. I’m assuming you do not use hammers then, right?
Knives are freely sold at shops on every street.
...making a kitten tangled up on a networking cabinet was fun.
Some of us find opportunities for the small joys that help offset the background radiation of despair.