gerryflap

Haha thanks

I looked at these videos with very mixed emotions. On the one hand, I marveled at how far we've gotten. In a few years we went from generating sort of okay images in a very confined domain and essentially uncontrollable, to generating high resolution video that on first glance looks real.

But then the sadness struck me. I think we're entering the post-truth era, where the truth is harder and harder to find because all the fake stuff looks so real. We can generate text, images, sound, and now also video of whatever we want in the blink of an eye. Combine this with the tendency of people to accept any "information" that fits their view, and the filter bubbles that already exist, and we can see that humanity will start living in separate bubbles. Every bubble will have their own truth, and even if someone proves that a video or image is fake, that information will probably not even reach them because the truth doesn't generate enough clicks.

I want to stay optimistic, we've overcome so much stuff as a species, maybe we'll right the ship at some point. But with all the shit that is already going on in the world, the last thing we need is the ability to fake videos like this in no time at all. At some point the separate filter bubbles will tear our stable western world as we knew it apart, and we'll see shit like WW II again. The situation is already heating up.

Opera is also Chromium though, so that wouldn't really change anything

I've done a lot of stuff with generative models called GANs, like StyleGAN (2?) which I believe these pictures to be from. My main focus is the "hair bubble effect". This works best for people with longer hair, which is why I had 30% wrong in this test. Basically, by starting at images generated by these models for a long time, I started noticing that it is bad at creating the few loose hairs that stand out from the main pack. These plucks of hair often seem to go around some invisible "bubble" or weirdly flow together with the background. So my main point of focus is often the transition between hair and background, or just the hair in general, since that's where it's most likely to mess up. But the images picked here were also intentionally picked to be the most confusing according to the rest of the article, so it's not that weird that these are hard to classify. Some of the real ones looked extremely AI to me, and it was only after the first false positive that I got a lot more careful with labeling some as "AI" than I normally would.

Example, the strands of hair here (though admittedly the effect is not very convincing here):

This is probably a difference between countries, but personally I love it here in the Netherlands. I go to the store after work multiple times a week and I have yet to encounter a queue or problem that stalled me longer than 1-2 minutes. Usually I can just directly walk to a self-checkout machine, check out my stuff, pay by holding my debit card (or phone) against the payment terminal, and be on my way. I like it way more than the old way of doing things, because I now have time to properly pack my bag and I don't have to talk to anyone. It's also way more space efficient. There's even the option to take a scanner with you so you can scan while shopping, though I have yet to try that.

I'm kinda annoyed that somehow better assets also have the RTX on/off symbol even though they have nothing to do with RTX, but other than that it looks cool.

I'm very interested in machine learning, or AI as it's usually referred to in hyped-up content, and have also done research in the topic of generative AI. It hurts me so much that such interesting and useful technology has become another empty hype word. Nobody is waiting for this kind of gimmicky shit. It does nothing but hurt the public's view of this technology, similar to all the copyright issues and privacy concerns. Why must companies take things that can ultimately do something good in some cases and apply it to absolutely everything with no regards for the impact on their customers.

Most companies don't need "AI" and would be much better of spending those resources on actually improving their products. Useful places for generative AI would be something like Photoshop incorporating it, or a video game with better AI or more natural NPC conversations. Not some gimmicky AI assistant in a car, or some annoying AI chat window bothering you when visiting a news site. Soon people will be completely done with all this gimmicky "AI" bullshit and the useful applications will constantly have to deal with the stigma created by these greedy mindless corporations forcing "AI" on everyone in places where it adds nothing.

At our office (and probably in many) the developers mostly use Linux and the other people often use windows for Microsoft stuff like Word, Excel, and other windows specific software. We can't really choose, everyone is forced to use Linux for development so we all have a more or less the same environment

Even if it wasn't about the money, I'd personally still be very pissed if someone would claim my work as their own and there's no law to prevent it. I'm not saying that today's system is great, because it sucks in many ways, but some copyright system needs to be in place for the good of everyone.

It's not so much an argument, it's my personal experience. My experience was just not great. Maybe I did something wrong, but I've had a way better experience with Antergos, Arch, Fedora, and Ubuntu.

Idk what was wrong then, but I constantly had issues with packages being out of date due to the kernel and not wanting to update. Dependencies were constantly a mess. I'd rather just have normal Arch or Antergos/Endeavor

Manjaro. I had previously already used Antergos and Ubuntu, but after Antergos stopped I needed something like it. So I installed Manjaro in my secondary PC (with old components). I constantly got into trouble with the manual kernel version selection thingy. I was used to kernel updates being part of the normal update process, and suddenly I had to manually pick the new one. I constantly ran into incompatibility issues with older or newer kernels, vague update deadlocks where I couldn't update things because they depended in each other, and I absolutely hated having to use a separate program for updating the kernel. Now the PC runs Fedora and I'm liking that a lot more so far...