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?
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.
The internet is steadily becoming Facebook. Full of idiots being force fed AI slop. Alarmingly confident in their wrongness about almost everything.
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.
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.
i’ll embrace AI when it actually works reliably, we’re still in the “this is cool but it’s obviously making up nonsense” phase.
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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.
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 mean if a person spends enough time tweaking the prompt and stuff to get preciely what they want, then it’s to some degree reflecting the human who “”“made”“” it, like someone putting together a collage is selecting the images to use.
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Is this post AI generated?
If people would stop talking about AI all day then it probably wouldn’t be used as much as it is every day.
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 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.
what i’ve thought about for a while now is that when it becomes efficient enough that you can generate multiple images per second you can tweak settings and prompts live, which makes it a hell of a lot more of an actual tool rather than just a gamble that it makes something good enough.
when people can actually iterate on it and easily influence the result it’s no longer just algorithmic slop, it’s basically an image editor and drawing software in one, and you just start with a computer-generated base
of course there’s still the issue of unethical training of the models, but that will hopefully be solved in the near future as people collate ethical datasets.
I made this. Do you care now? Are you offended and outraged?
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 stick it to the office fridge or some filing cabinet 😁
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.
It’s annoying that people are downvoting you just for asking an honest question. I think the anti-ai sentiment is strong enough that in many communities, people just oppose it in any context. The arguments I usually see against using ai are:
- It takes business away from actual human artists
- It takes a lot of energy, thereby contributing to climate change
- It is a privacy concern
All are real concerns, but I agree that making memes should be an effectively harmless use of it even if you otherwise oppose it. 1 and 3 aren’t really applicable to your average meme. 2 could apply depending on how you measure it, but most of the cost of ai is from training, not generation. For someone using the tool and not developing it, that training is a sunk cost they are not responsible for. I’ve seen estimates that you can generate about 9 images with the energy it takes to fully charge a phone. I think that’s more than worth it if you share it with a few other people to enjoy.
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.
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.
Almost like… it’s the content that matters not the medium used to make 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
Straight up vibes a lot of the time these days. It gets better and better
