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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

#91

Post by smallerize »

Amezarak wrote: post #78
smallerize wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 fol…

I don't know what you're complaining about but I don't think it's this. There is no "ban" on generating AI images. The backlash is not about new tech because there is no new tech here, it's just Nano Banana 2. And I haven't seen any privacy implications.

The button makes it socially acceptable to generate misinformation. That's it. You can do the misinformation if you want, but we should discourage it. The button should go.

Re: Google kills Earth AI generator after one day

#92

Post by steveBK123 »

fragmede wrote: post #74
steveBK123 wrote: post #55

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.

Replacing “okay” with “safe” also fails

https://imgur.com/a/PgCzK1H

Kind of unbelievable 4 years into this hype cycle we still have basic issues like answering the inverse of users question

Re: Google kills Earth AI generator after one day

#93

Post by Amezarak »

card_zero wrote: post #90
Amezarak wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 fol…

That's reasonable, except "It can be dealt with by cultural understandings of any imagery shifting, and a general return to older (not unprecedented) information environments". What does that mean? Is the older information environment books and newspapers? Then only a tyrant could arrange a return to that state, which didn't prevent the readers being credulous anyway. So the problem can't be dealt with in this way, t…

> What does that mean? Is the older information environment books and newspapers? Then only a tyrant could arrange a return to that state, which didn't prevent the readers being credulous anyway.

No, not a return to books and newspapers, but a return to where there was a huge array of distributed and untrustworthy information sources, with the central authorities often having only a weak influence on them. The world was rife with gossip, rumors, and misinformation that spread mainly through word-of-mouth and papers and pamphlets of various kinds many of which had very little regard for the truth. As was complained of very often and sometimes led to quite amazing consequences.

Of course, in this environment, most people recognized that everything should be taken with a grain of salt, because they knew quite well that people could just make things up and there was no easy way to disprove it. That would be the environment we'd be returning to, to some degree - we'd actually still be better off, in that an educated and informed person would usually still be quite capable of determining if it was true or not in many instances, thanks to the good part of the Internet.

Re: Google kills Earth AI generator after one day

#94

Post by Amezarak »

smallerize wrote: post #91
Amezarak wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 fol…

I don't know what you're complaining about but I don't think it's this. There is no "ban" on generating AI images. The backlash is not about new tech because there is no new tech here, it's just Nano Banana 2. And I haven't seen any privacy implications. The button makes it socially acceptable to generate misinformation. That's it. You can do the misinformation if you want, but we should discourage it. The button sho…

The people writing about this are complaining that this is even possible, not just that Google was enabling it.

> The button makes it socially acceptable to generate misinformation. That's it.

No, it does not. It makes it socially acceptable to use AI for fun. Yes, moralizing scolds hate that idea and want to talk about how bad actors can and will use it for misinformation purposes as well. Even some of the examples in the thread starter are clearly just from people having fun. In general the whole "safety" and "policy" thing is stupid - consider the "Eiffel Tower" example. I guess that's "unsafe", even if I just generated it to laugh at, or to use in my forthcoming webnovel about kaiju. No, we can't allow Google Maps to let me generate that image because what if I was a Russian bot using it to generate misinformation to convince gullible people who believe random social media accounts that the Eiffel Tower collapsed? It is very obvious where this line of thought leads.

Re: Google kills Earth AI generator after one day

#96

Post by witx »

ofjcihen wrote: post #42
angrydev wrote: post #17

Here is the original blog post, in case anyone is curious about the 'good path' https://blog.google/products-and-platforms/products/earth/na... > Ex: Help students visualize the past instead of just reading about it. Teachers can show their classroom a historic site and type, “Render a hyper-realistic view of what these Pompeii ruins looked like in 78 A.D.” The modern-day ruins will instantly transform into a bustlin…

There are a metric boatload of these visualizations created to accompany history texts etc. AI for image generation is great but I’m struggling to figure out why you would ever use this if it’s confined to satellite imagery.

Google is gasping hard for any meaningul AI use

Re: Google kills Earth AI generator after one day

#97

Post by smallerize »

Amezarak wrote: post #94
smallerize wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know what you're complaining about but I don't think it's this. There is no "ban" on generating AI images. The backlash is not about new tech because there is no new tech here, it's just Nano Banana 2. And I haven't seen any privacy implications. The button makes it socially acceptable to generate misinformation. That's it. You can do the misinformation if you want, but we should discourage it. The button sho…

The people writing about this are complaining that this is even possible , not just that Google was enabling it. > The button makes it socially acceptable to generate misinformation. That's it. No, it does not. It makes it socially acceptable to use AI for fun. Yes, moralizing scolds hate that idea and want to talk about how bad actors can and will use it for misinformation purposes as well. Even some of the examples…

Can you show me an example of someone calling for government regulation or a ban?

Re: Google kills Earth AI generator after one day

#99

Post by tavavex »

steveBK123 wrote: post #68
coldpie wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The bubble needs to burst already. Everyone so braindead that they actually build and ship a product like this fucking garbage needs to be out on the street. Like, read that fucking prompt again. If that doesn't make you want to stick forks in your eyes, you're deep, deep in the psychosis.

Yes, at some point the world needs to accept that these tools are very good, to a limit, for specific human augmentation uses (coding, text manipulation) and stop pretending the TAM is "replace all white collar work across the globe".

That's not good enough for investors. Right now, either something is worthless or it is literally the most influential invention in history that must succeed. Even if/when the AI industry suffers a setback, the trend of investors becoming more psychotic will continue. Every additional dollar that they need to extract for infinite growth is harder to get than the previous, so we'll likely see more financial Hail Marys in the future that people will desperately load their money into - maybe the next big thing is what will finally give us more growth again!

Re: Google kills Earth AI generator after one day

#100

Post by inigyou »

fullstop wrote: post #35
VCFundedGenYer wrote: post #5

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?

I got Bard to execute a fork bomb, I think, when it was first launched. I noticed that it was evaluating the flow of a shell script incorrectly and it allowed execution, then refused to respond for 20 or 30 minutes. Now, for some users, sharing a YouTube link adds some sort of tracking which then asks people who open the link to be "friends" with the person who shared it. Who thinks that this is a good idea, and why…

Always delete the si= or is= parameter from a shared YouTube link. This will work until they copy Reddit's idea of encoding both the video ID and sharing indicator together as one big opaque encrypted string.
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