A.I. imagery may destroy history as we know it • Hacker News Board

Re: A.I. imagery may destroy history as we know it

#111

Post by jebarker » Tue, Apr 25, 2023, 4:36 PM UTC

Balgair wrote: post #74

Related: Peter Jackson's They Shall Not Grow Old [0] is a great counterpoint to the general idea put forth here. If you've not seen it, do yourself and ANZAC Day treat and watch it this evening. It's from just before all this AI stuff went off. Jackson (of LoTR fame) is a huge WWI buff and was approached by the Imperial War Museum and the BBC for this film. He takes old archival footage and then uses a lot of compute…

I totally agree that _They Shall Not Grow Old_ was an excellent use of AI, but I don't think it is a great counterpoint to this article. The article is predominantly arguing wholly AI generated imagery rather than restoration and that has very different ramifications to restoration of historical footage.

Re: A.I. imagery may destroy history as we know it

#112

Post by awb » Tue, Apr 25, 2023, 4:38 PM UTC

Aeolun wrote: post #109

> history, itself, will become unalterably altered Is ‘unalterably altered’ not a contradiction? Or does it just mean there’s no way back?

They mean no way back.

Photos have been staged / forged for a long time. The big difference is the ability for AI to create fake photos in seconds which could inundate future historians unless there was an equally quick way to spot a fake photo.

Re: A.I. imagery may destroy history as we know it

#113

Post by Aeolun » Tue, Apr 25, 2023, 4:38 PM UTC

hospitalJail wrote: post #89

ericd wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your history classes sound a lot more useful than the ones I sat through in the US - ours was mostly delivered as a set of settled fact.

There is a local school that is dedicating 90 minutes to math and 90 minutes to english. Splitting science and history to a mere 45 minutes each. I completely support this. Science prior to college was basically a waste. History was full of bias and axes to grind. Don't get me wrong, teach these subjects, the scientific method is great. However, the value is low compared to the tools given in Math and English.

What tools are you given in English? And how many of the tools in Maths are you still using?

Like, I’m very happy that I got to learn probability theory, but all the differential equations that broke my mind seem entirely pointless now.

Re: A.I. imagery may destroy history as we know it

#114

Post by loudmax » Tue, Apr 25, 2023, 4:39 PM UTC

tokai wrote: post #22

foob wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's also a technique for lucid dreaming where you make a point to look carefully at your hands throughout the day until it becomes an unconscious habit. The idea is that they won't look quite right in a dream, and you'll therefore realize that you're dreaming. I wonder if there's any particular significance to hands beyond them being conveniently accessible, or if any similar ritual would work as long as the indi…

Any similar ritual works. The dreaming brain is super bad at consistency. If you know something really well, like looking at your hands, wristwatch, or something else. You'll see obvious distortions and other weirdness while dreaming. I think the distortions are always there. We are just not in a state of mind where details matters when dreaming.

Playing around with Stable Diffusion yields a lot of images that are kind of dream-like. The pictures can be fascinating, but a lot of the details are weird or inconsistent, or somehow "off". I suspect this isn't a coincidence. Neural nets are modeled after organic brains, and the mechanism that produces our dreams may have similarities with the noise generation functions in AI image models.

Re: A.I. imagery may destroy history as we know it

#115

Post by bugglebeetle » Tue, Apr 25, 2023, 4:42 PM UTC

coolbreezetft22 wrote: post #103

whatwhaaaaat wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We didn’t stop trusting “authenticated sources” because of “crowdsourced information”. We stopped trusting “authenticated sources” because they constantly lie to fit whatever agenda is being pushed. I can say with certainty that genie is not going back in the bottle no matter how much censoring websites past their prime implement.

eyeroll I read the economist on a weekly basis and can confidently say that that form of curated professional journalism is much better than random partisans on twitter loudly shouting about everything

This is somewhat hilarious because the Economist is famous for its unsigned articles and IIRC lacks citations, such that you have no way to verify whether the person writing them has any expertise in whatever they’re spouting off about. It’s effectively a middle-brow subreddit in print.

Re: A.I. imagery may destroy history as we know it

#116

Post by ratg13 » Tue, Apr 25, 2023, 4:43 PM UTC

johnla wrote: post #42

drmacak wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, exactly I remeber when I was younger and experimenting with lucid dreaming, when I spotted something weird I checked my hands and told myself "ten fingers, not a dream" every time. And trully when I was dreaming my hand was deformed, so if I paid attention to it I could start lucid dreaming. So maybe we are not that much off with NN

How did you forcefully lucid dream?

You don't really forcefully lucid dream, you learn techniques that help you determine whether you are dreaming or not.

Some examples are not being able to turn a light on or off (because lighting in a dream is often fixed) .. or trying to focus on text (often in dreams you will read words or numbers, but it's your brain telling you what something says .. if you actually try and focus on text it often is just squiggles)

Once you start to apply these techniques in dreams, the real trick is not waking yourself up once you realize you're dreaming.

Re: A.I. imagery may destroy history as we know it

#117

Post by loudmax » Tue, Apr 25, 2023, 4:46 PM UTC

lofaszvanitt wrote: post #17

This can be easily fixed by camera creators.

Cameras designed for this purpose can mitigate the issue, but "solving" it is not easy.

Cameras can digitally sign photos to authenticate provenance. You can add timestamps and GPS coordinates to the signature, though you may be able to subvert those with enough effort. You still need to trust that whoever held the camera when it took the photo was pointing it at an actual event, not at a screen.

Re: A.I. imagery may destroy history as we know it

#118

Post by confoundcofound » Tue, Apr 25, 2023, 4:46 PM UTC

mym1990 wrote: post #108

Animats wrote: post #95

This is not a historian. It's some guy who's into wet-plate photography. His style can now be easily replicated. His wet-plate work is now just an unimportant hobby.

So as everyone's photographic style becomes easily replicated, that means all of photography will become an unimportant hobby?

Maybe it does mean that.

I'm really looking forward to the great humbling that AI will bring artists who for some reason feel their craft is sacred and thereby should be gatekept and protected.

Don't get me wrong, I love art and think it's important. But so is medicine and plumbing.

Re: A.I. imagery may destroy history as we know it

#119

Post by lowbloodsugar » Tue, Apr 25, 2023, 4:48 PM UTC

mattlondon wrote: post #70

Meh - I don't know. At least in the UK, "History" classes at school were less about memorising the facts, and more about questioning the who, what, why of some source of information. One thing that stands out in my memory is multiple different teachers always drilling into us: "never trust photos" (you don't always know who took them, for what reason, and if they were real or staged or whatever) If 12 year old kids a…

What school did you go to??? History classes were all about learning dates and being able to recite or write the True History of the Righteous British Empire.

Re: A.I. imagery may destroy history as we know it

#120

Post by IIAOPSW » Tue, Apr 25, 2023, 4:50 PM UTC

ericd wrote: post #81

mattlondon wrote: post #70

Meh - I don't know. At least in the UK, "History" classes at school were less about memorising the facts, and more about questioning the who, what, why of some source of information. One thing that stands out in my memory is multiple different teachers always drilling into us: "never trust photos" (you don't always know who took them, for what reason, and if they were real or staged or whatever) If 12 year old kids a…

Your history classes sound a lot more useful than the ones I sat through in the US - ours was mostly delivered as a set of settled fact.

Variance on this is very high. Where your classes landed on the memorize-think axis will swing wildly from district to district, and even possibly from teacher to teacher within the same school.