FaceDeer

And is there any risk of people turning these kinds of models around and using them to generate images?

There isn't really much fundamental difference between an image detector and an image generator. The way image generators like stable diffusion work is essentially by generating a starting image that's nothing but random static and telling the generator "find the cat that's hidden in this noise."

It'll probably take a bit of work to rig this child porn detector up to generate images, but I could definitely imagine it happening. It's going to make an already complicated philosophical debate even more complicated.

The Darvaza gas crater is a hole in Turkmenistan that's leaking natural gas and is on fire. I'm quite sure they don't have a "poet laureate", it's literally just a hole in the ground.

But even if it was some metropolis, yeah, he'd be just some guy.

You can get whatever result you want if you're able to define what "better" means.

Why publish books of it, then?

The whole point of poetry is that it’s an original expression of another human.

Who are you to decide what the "point" of poetry is?

Maybe the point of poetry is to make the reader feel something. If AI-generated poetry can do that just as well as human-generated poetry, then it's just as good when judged in that manner.

I do get the sense sometimes that the more extreme anti-AI screeds I've come across have the feel of narcissistic rage about them. The recognition of AI art threatens things that we've told ourselves are "special" about us.

Indeed, there are whole categories of art such as "found art" or the abstract stuff that involves throwing splats of paint at things that can't really convey the intent of the artist because the artist wasn't involved in specifying how it looked in the first place. The artist is more like the "first viewer" of those particular art pieces, they do or find a thing and then decide "that means something" after the fact.

It's entirely possible to do that with something AI generated. Algorithmic art goes way back. Lots of people find graphs of the Mandelbrot Set to be beautiful.

That's not how synthetic data generation generally works. It uses AI to process data sources, generating well-formed training data based on existing data that's not so useful directly. Not to generate it entirely from its own imagination.

The comments assuming otherwise are ironic because it's misinformation that people keep telling each other.

The "how will we know if it's real" question has the same answer as it always has. Check if the source is reputable and find multiple reputable sources to see if they agree.

"Is there a photo of the thing" has never been a particularly great way of judging whether something is accurately described in the news. This is just people finding out something they should have already known.

If the concern is over the verifiability of the photos themselves, there are technical solutions that can be used for that problem.

I'm actually quite happy to see some art with tits that are just plain nice. The giant bazongas everyone likes to stick on everything just don't appeal to me, and can't be comfortable for the bazonga-bearer either.

Eh, not necessarily. Hollywood hates piracy and Trump hates Hollywood, it might actually be as simple as that.

I've found my participation slowly declining here on the Fediverse, and ramping back up again on Reddit. I think I'm never going to stop coming here entirely, there's plenty of neat links that come along to explore, but the main thing that's causing decline is that IMO the communities here are a lot "bubblier." It's probably inherent in the simple fact that they're small, and that they're populated by a very self-selected fragment of social media, but the result is that if I "say the wrong thing" I get pummeled with downvotes and snide comments a lot easier here. Makes it less interesting to comment at all. Some of Reddit's communities are pretty insular too but at least there are enough of them that I can find ones to my taste.

As a major example that comes to mind, all of the technology communities I've found here seem to be quite strongly anti-AI. I have an interest in AI, but when I click through to the comments on stories about AI topics it's often nothing but rants about how awful it is. And if I say anything - even to correct a factual error - I get piled on. So lately I just sigh and move on.