Sora is here

That's exactly the kind of logical conclusion I had hoped for someone here to reach in this bizarre sea of emotional pleas.

After over two decades of careful preparation, we're the stroke of a legislative pen away from having all of the software on our computers regulated by our friends in the government.

It's not even a slippery slope argument. In order to be effective, "We must regulate AI!" means the same thing as "We must regulate computer software!"

The two things are so identical that they're not even so different as two sides of the same coin are.

(Be careful what you wish for; you might just get it.)

>>given that they are aware that videos can easily be faked in 2024?

That's a ridiculous assumption. In my experience no one outside of tech circles is even remotely aware that this kind of thing is possible already.

[dead]

> I think we are OK as long as normal humans prefer to create real news rather than fake news, and create innovative art rather than cliched art.

So we're not OK.

I think I need to state my assumptions/beliefs here more explicitly.

First of all, "AI slop" is just the newest iteration on human-produced slop, which we're already drowning in. Not because people prefer to create slop, but because they're paid to do it, because most content is created by marketers and advertisers to sell you shit, and they don't want it to be better than strictly necessary for purpose.

It's the same with fake news, really. Fake news isn't new. Almost all news is fake news; what we call "fake news" is a particular flavor of bullshit that got popular as it got easier for random humans to publish stories competing with established media operations.

In both cases, AI is exacerbating the problem, but it did not create it - we were already drowning in slop.

Which leads me to related point:

> Anyway, "the AI slop will win" is based on a similar misconception, that total creative output will not increase.

It will. But don't forget Sturgeon's law - "ninety percent of everything is crap"[0]. Again, for the past couple decades, we've been drowning in "creative output". It's not a new problem, it's just increasingly noticeable in the past years, because the Web makes it very easy for everyone to create more "creative output" (most of which is, again, advertising), and it finally started overwhelming our ability to filter out the crap and curate the gems.

Adding AI to the mix means more output, which per Sturgeon's law, means disproportionately more crap. That's not AI's fault, that's ours; it's still the same problem we had before.

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[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon%27s_law

Did you read the article? Respondents performed barely better than chance. Sure, no one was actually 100% wrong[0]. Just almost always wrong, with a noticeable bias towards liking AI art more.

The detailed breakdown you mention? Maybe it's accurate to that artist's thought process, maybe it's more of a rationalization; either way, it's not a general rule they, or anyone, could apply to any of the other AI images. Most of those in the article don't exhibit those "telltale signs", and the one that does - the Victorian Megaship - was actually made by human artist with no AI in the mix.

EDIT:

Another image that stands out to me is Riverside Cafe. Myself, like apparently a lot of other people, going by articles' comments, assumed it's a human-made one, because we vaguely remembered Vang Gogh painted something like it. He did, it's called Café Terrace at Night - and yet, despite immediately evoking the association, Riverside Cafe was made by AI, and is actually nothing like Café Terrace at Night at any level.

(I find it fascinating how this work looks like a copy of Van Gogh at first glance, for no obvious reason, but nothing alike once you pause to look closer. It's like... they have similar low-frequency spectra or something?)

EDIT2:

Played around with the two images in https://ejectamenta.com/imaging-experiments/fourifier/. There are some similarities in the spectra, I can't put my finger on them exactly. But it's probably not the whole answer. I'll try to do some more detailed experimentation later.

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[0] - Nor should you expect it - it would mean either a perfect calibration, or be the equivalent of flipping a coin and getting heads 30 times in a row; it's not impossible, but you shouldn't expect to see it unless you're interviewing fewer people than literally the entire population of the planet.