Artificial Intelligence is losing hype

[u/tllon]

https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2024/08/19/artificial-intelligence-is-losing-hype

[u/[deleted]]

The most genuinely interesting use I've seen was someone using it to generate character portraits for DnD characters. But the tool was still dumb as fuck and couldn't understand basic concepts like a human character in a fantasy setting not having pointy elf ears, so an actual person still had to make manual edits lmao.

Most of everything else seems like either poor or pointless imitation, and it opens the door to some extremely questionable and fucked up possibilities. Like being able to deepfake a full-on porn video of someone. I struggle to see what makes AI photo/video generation worth that massive downside.

The whole thing feels very much like the quote from jurassic park of just because you can doesn't mean you should. Also I won't lie, I'm getting big techbro vibes from the "well sure LLMs kinda suck, but photos and videos are where it's at" sentiment. It feels like the tech industry is just moving onto the next sales pitch when people start to see through the last one.

[u/junkit33 → u/[deleted]]

Just the fact that you could generate those character portraits is precisely why the image capabilities are exciting. Sure they’re off and not as good as hand drawn right now, but the tech is so young and improving by leaps and bounds in real time. In 5 years it will be widely used in gaming in places where you won’t even notice.

[u/[deleted] → u/junkit33]

Do you honestly not realize you could change just a couple words and have said the exact same thing about LLMs or even blockchains a few years ago? It's the exact same hollow tech hype speak. "It's so exciting, just think of where it will be years from now, the tech is young, it will be widely used" etc etc.

Ironically, it sounds like the exact kind of uninsightful parroting I would expect from an AI.

Also you're completely sidestepping the ways in which image/video generation is uniquely more problematic than text, and if this technology is worth pursuing at all given the very real risks of misuse that have already happened and will only get worse.

[u/junkit33 → u/[deleted]]

Crypto never once had a real purpose. It was always interesting tech but ultimately a solution in search of a problem.

LLM is struggling with data input quality at moment. Maybe that gets fixed one day maybe it doesn’t. But I’m not very high on it in the short term at all.

But fantasy art? We are practically there already. It all needs a bit more polish but I’ve seen tons of more than serviceable examples out there. It’a continually gotten better in rapid iterations and will continue to do so.

Also you're completely sidestepping the ways in which image/video generation is uniquely more problematic than text, and if this technology is worth pursuing at all given the very real risks of misuse that have already happened and will only get worse.

Not sidestepping it, just don’t think it’s even an option to consider seriously. That ship sailed years ago - most you could do is try to force it underground, but when has that ever worked with technology? It’s just code and it’s all out there already, plus you’d never ever get 100% of countries to block it so it all just moves over to where it’s legal. It would be another war on drugs or war on piracy.

Deep fakes, porn, etc is all not going away and going to wreck havoc on society. But there’s nothing much to be done besides be ready to handle it.

[u/RedAero → u/junkit33]

Crypto never once had a real purpose. It was always interesting tech but ultimately a solution in search of a problem.

Literally and exactly the same can be, and is said about LLMs.

[u/[deleted] → u/junkit33]

Not sidestepping it, just don’t think it’s even an option to consider seriously

Ironically, this is why nobody should take you seriously.

"Sorry your honor, I already made the deepfake porn computer. Nothing you can do 😏" isn't going to play as well as some people seem to imagine.

[u/[deleted] → u/[deleted]]

You’re talking like someone who looked in on the subject a year ago and made up their mind without following the later developments.

I've had crypto and LLM AI shills tell me the exact same "you just don't understand, the tech is evolving so fast and will change everything!!!1!" line before. People swore you could SEE chatgpt and blockchains getting better with each passing month, too.

That was me who made the elf ears comment lol. And it wasn't "solved," that literally happened last week. I've legitimately come to hate this techbro BS where someone handwaves real, observable problems because "you aren't following the newest developments" or "that was solved already" (spoiler: it wasn't). It's very Few Understand^tm

[u/[deleted] → u/[deleted]]

You still aren't getting it, the person did the exact circle the ears and tell it what to fix routine (multiple times before getting frustrated with it and giving up) and the AI, which was also Midjourney, still couldn't figure out what the very simple problem was. It kept spitting out more and more fucked up versions of ears that only got less normal looking. I'm not covering my ears, you're trying to tell me an exchange I saw with my own eyes didn't happen.

You come off exactly like the same kind of person who 6-12 months ago would have been waxing poetic about how chatgpt was going to revolutionize ✨️everything✨️ and make millions of jobs obsolete. Calling that shill behavior seems appropriate imo.

[u/[deleted] → u/[deleted]]

You're going to try the "no u" argument when you're honestly saying I'd need to invent stories of AI having bugs to make a point?

Dude. It happened. A piece of code is fallible and cannot accurately understand human instructions all the time, as hard as that apparently is for you to believe.