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Google kills Earth AI generator after one day

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Re: Google kills Earth AI generator after one day

#71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Instead of having to go out of your way, there's an inviting "create a fiction" button. https://www.digitaldigging.org/p/how-to-plant-a-nuclear-plan... In February this year, someone manually forged a photo like this. "The Tehran Times posted it as a before-and-after of a US radar site in Qatar... AFP and BBC Verify both ran the “after” through Google’s watermark detector and got a hit, though not before it passed 95…

Right, I understand that you were able to generate these images from Google Earth. But nowhere can I find, including in that article, where other people could see your generations presented in Google Maps/Earth as if they were real imagery. The whole complaint is that people were able to generate these images at all. Or am I misunderstanding something? It seems like the complaint is that hypothetically you could gene…

That's correct. The end of the article also covers defeating the AI watermark.

Re: Google kills Earth AI generator after one day

#72
post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, they are at best misleading and often just present dangerously incomplete or misdirecting information. The more you know about a topic the more appalling the summary. I check variations of this search every month and it still fails at a reasonably high rate https://imgur.com/a/tKSQuA3

Can you elaborate? Are they not toxic? Are they toxic, but the chemical analysis wrong?

If you asked your wife "is it ok if I did X" and she said "YES, its not ok to do that.." would that be normal behavior?

Re: Google kills Earth AI generator after one day

#73
post #27

There seem to be very few adults in the room at Google as of the past few years. This also happened with Bard's (remember when they thought Bard was a good name?) racist image generator. Does nobody do QA, UAT, or UX testing anymore?

Google’s culture seems so different from Apple’s which sometimes comes across as overly mature… which I personally prefer though!

Steve Job's mantra was that what you say No to is even more important than what you say Yes to.

Arguably dragging their heels on Apple Intelligence was an inadvertent form of this. Or years of working on a car but never releasing it. Or the other various rumored long-running prototypes/projects that never see the light of day.

There is someone with taste with authority to say no before slop is pushed onto the market, at least more often than their competitors. It's gotten worse over the years, but that reflex is still there on a relative basis.

Re: Google kills Earth AI generator after one day

#74
post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's how they get you. They are trained to make you like them. They are not trained to convey true information.

Yes, they are at best misleading and often just present dangerously incomplete or misdirecting information. The more you know about a topic the more appalling the summary. I check variations of this search every month and it still fails at a reasonably high rate https://imgur.com/a/tKSQuA3

That's interesting. "mums good for cats" and a "mums bad for cats" gives the expected response, it's just "okay" being parsed funny. I've reported it to someone at Google so it'll get fixed... eventually.

Re: Google kills Earth AI generator after one day

#75
post #31

There seem to be very few adults in the room at Google as of the past few years. This also happened with Bard's (remember when they thought Bard was a good name?) racist image generator. Does nobody do QA, UAT, or UX testing anymore?

They are good products, it’s just hard to prevent people from abusing them

Proper engineering requires observing and working with real-world constraints. Ignoring constraints is a form of magical thinking.

One real-world constraint is that end-users won't always do what you intend for them to with the thing you engineered.

Re: Google kills Earth AI generator after one day

#76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you get promoted for not launching a product? The interests of the individual and the institution do not always perfectly align.

People who want to destroy you at work (which I imagine is rampant at Google) will sometimes prevent you from doing something, but they might also encourage you to do it in such a way that you fail spectacularly. Some of my favorites from my career: 1. PM enticing me to "volunteer" to build a PoC over the weekend, to have it ready by Monday morning – come Monday, PoC is shipped live to all international customers. It…

Yeah, it's way easier to argue that the product is a bad idea if they give you all the resources to build, release and grow it but there's just not enough customers showing up.

The alternative might be internal battles to kill it that take up time and energy and everybody can continue their argument forever.

Re: Google kills Earth AI generator after one day

#77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, they are at best misleading and often just present dangerously incomplete or misdirecting information. The more you know about a topic the more appalling the summary. I check variations of this search every month and it still fails at a reasonably high rate https://imgur.com/a/tKSQuA3

That's interesting. "mums good for cats" and a "mums bad for cats" gives the expected response, it's just "okay" being parsed funny. I've reported it to someone at Google so it'll get fixed... eventually.

It's also very non-deterministic. Not a 100% failure rate, seems to go up&down with time, and varies depending on plant/animal combination

Re: Google kills Earth AI generator after one day

#78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right, I understand that you were able to generate these images from Google Earth. But nowhere can I find, including in that article, where other people could see your generations presented in Google Maps/Earth as if they were real imagery. The whole complaint is that people were able to generate these images at all. Or am I misunderstanding something? It seems like the complaint is that hypothetically you could gene…

That's correct. The end of the article also covers defeating the AI watermark.

Then frankly I find this all overblown and somewhat insane. The AI safetyism moral panic is something I find very demoralizing. It seems like the main legacy of AI will be its use as leverage to annihilate computing freedom and privacy for all time.

I am sympathetic to arguments that quantity has a quality all of its own - for example, I think this has deeply impacted privacy. It may have been legal to discreetly follow someone and note their movements for most of history, but because it wasn't scalable, there was no major privacy threat for doing so. Now it can be done at scale and very cheaply. "Quantity" has qualitatively transformed privacy in practical, real terms.

But nearly all the AI panic seems to be oriented around very different core principle - rather than "technological changes are making us less free in practice" it is "technological changes threaten public harmony." This is the core concern in all authoritarian empires. The idea is that people simply shouldn't be allowed to generate images or texts The Experts have decided they shouldn't be allowed to, because (in this case) it might make journalists' jobs harder, or it might trick too many people, or its offensive, or it offends some really vague notion of "safety" (or can be construed as such by people writing breathless articles for engagement dollars that will be bad PR for the AI company involved.) Yes, doubtless many people will be deceived by AI imagery. Many people already are. This number will certainly be higher than the number of people deceived by altered photographs, which are less in number and require more work to create. But this does not represent a earth-shattering disaster that must be dealt with by banning (somewhat dumb and silly) product ideas like "generate an AI photo based on this satellite imagery" buttons on Google Maps. It can be dealt with by cultural understandings of any imagery shifting, and a general return to older (not unprecedented) information environments. I think in the West, the rise of broadcast and state media really broke people's mental models of information - it really inculcated the idea that people cannot be trusted even in a democratic society to evaluate things on their own: someone must be doing it for them, top-down. The way things worked in the pre-broadcast environment is maybe inconceivable to them now. (And to some extent, there was always a "parallel" information environment that was in the background, but not highly visible to the people in charge, full of conspiratorial nonsense - but they could ignore that because they didn't see it.)

The ultimate endpoint of AI Safetyism is local models are illegal or highly regulated, computing devices are locked down, and only a small list of government-approved AI vendors with tight restrictions are allowed to Do AI. This is totally unnecessary, but it certainly has massive financial benefits for those who thing they can get on the list.

Re: Google kills Earth AI generator after one day

#79
post #31

There seem to be very few adults in the room at Google as of the past few years. This also happened with Bard's (remember when they thought Bard was a good name?) racist image generator. Does nobody do QA, UAT, or UX testing anymore?

They are good products, it’s just hard to prevent people from abusing them

“Communism is a good political theory, it’s just hard to prevent people from abusing it.”

“Letting everyone out of prison is a good social strategy, it’s just hard to prevent people from abusing it.”

“Making all shops operate on the honor system is a good business strategy, it’s just hard to prevent people from abusing it.”

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