Its time to start talking about “memetic effluent.” In the same way corporations polluted our physical world, they’re pollution our memetic world. AI spewing garbage data is just the most obvious way, but corporations have been toxifying our memetic space for generations.
This memetic effluent will make sorting through data harder and harder over the years. But the oil and tobacco industries undermined science and democracy for decades with it’s own memetic effluent in order to protect their business for decades. Advertising is it’s own effluent that distorts and destroys language. Jerry Rubin said it in 1970, “How can I tell you ‘I love you’ after hearing ‘cars love shell?’”
While physical effluent destroys our physical environment making living in the world harder, memetics effluent destroys meaning and makes thinking about and comprehending the world harder. Both are the garbage side effects of the perpetuation of capitalism.
This example of poisoning the data well is just too obvious to ignore, but there are so many others.
It’s interesting, because the idea is basically that knowledge and ideas should be constructive, so as not to pollute the sum of human knowledge.
So that raises the question, what is the constructive conclusion to “memetic effluent”? Without one, is the concept itself an example of such effluent?
I don’t think that’s the implication here. Following the metaphor, pottery and arrow points have been waste products for a while. Prior to the industrial revolution, and specifically prior to the chemical revolution, industrial waste streams haven’t been as major of a problem (ignoring cholera for a bit). It’s been the development of selling chemicals for profit and the extensive use of petroleum that’s really caused massive problems threatening humanity as a whole.
The implication then is that people should be responsible for their memes. Corporations are inherently irresponsible because there exit economic incentives to externalize costs, be that environmental or informational. AI garbage as a waste stream would be fine if the data was clearly labeled as such. Unfortunately at least some AI garbage is intended to be deceptive. There exists an economic incentives to produce AI garbage that is hard to distinguish from human output. Since AI garbage can be produced at an industrial scale, there’s a massive waste data stream that’s able to overload the systems we’ve built to parse and organize data.
There are probably a lot more implications here, but “what are we doing with our information world” is something worth thinking about before we make it completely unusable.
This feels like the precursor to the information Apocalypse referenced in the comic Transmetropolitan.
Not as bad as the AI-generated articles showing up in search results. Some websites I get driven to make absolutely no sense, despite a lot of words being written about all kinds of topics.
I’m looking forward to the day when “certified human content” is a thing, and that’s all search engines allow you to see.
Eventually all content will just be AI generated on the fly. No need to keep dumb content on precious storage that could be used to increase model size.
Or, you know, we go back to the time when the news media had real gatekeepers and not just any random jackass could churn out some bullshit copy and broadcast it to the world, let alone have it get published by their local paper.
It’s nice that the Internet has democratized access to a national or even global audience, but let’s not pretend for a moment that it hasn’t caused a ton of problems in the process such that now many people have no idea of what to believe while others believe whatever they want.
Yeah, a lot of repair sites come up with pages that have just hundreds of Q&A’s, but often times they don’t make sense or aren’t even related to the topic! Once you realize how much time was wasted on these garbage sites, you don’t even feel motivated to keep looking for answers.
I’m looking forward to the day when “certified human content” is a thing, and that’s all search engines allow you to see.
I can’t wait for that. I get the feeling it’s gonna get real messy before we figure out solutions to all the problems caused by AI-generated content.
I mean yeah, there’s already plenty of human-generated misinformation and shit, but it seems to me (not an expert) like ai is capable of fucking with society on a whole new scale.
The big difference is that high quality human generated content is often based on reputation, a history of quality content, and frequently reviewed by experts in the field (very common for medical articles).
But AI has none of that. It’s 100% quantity over quality, and that’s just internet pollution as far as I’m concerned.
We really do have to figure something out, though.
China is already using it to generate shorts on YouTube. I hope Google has the balls to invest in fighting it, but that company has been downhill lately.
Not to defend China in any way, but its influence over the world is far more economic and profit-driven than militaristic. Often it’s hard to separate China from for profit corporations simply due to how much those corporations rely on chinese industries.
A US-Based For Profit Corporation has some accountability.
A Hostile Dictatorship Military Op would gut you and take everything you own at a cost because they just love seeing you suffer, if they could get away with it en masse.
Look, I’m Latin American. If you are gonna tell me US is more trustworthy and less likely to attempt to undermine other countries and inflict inhumane conditions upon them, I’d suggest for you to read a bit more international history and all the dictatorships they have backed in other countries.
Do US corporations have any accountabilty? These days, looks like that only applies to their shareholders. I remember those leaks revealing that the US government has more access to internet company data than it lets on.
Still, I wouldn’t want to live in China either. But as far as getting screwed by companies from other countries, I don’t see much reason to trust one over the other. Any rights and protections that you may have do not apply to me.
All that considered, between Tiktok or Instagram? They are equally bad as far as I see.
Instagram isn’t State Run. Instagram isn’t funding a coup in the 1970s. If you had used Facebook as an example then maybe you’d have a great point, although I don’t use their platforms either, tbh.
It just feels to me like people who use TikTok and compare it to lesser threats to human life are watering down evil for easy consumption. I feel very strongly about it and I would love for everyone to please fucking stop.
Technically TikTok is not actually state run either. But in both cases the governments in question can simply pressure the owners to submit to their demands.
If you don’t use Facebook maybe you can speak out against it, but as far as watering down evil goes, no major technology company is innocent.
It’s still pretty easy to tell the difference. You have to have a pretty low level of media literacy to not be able to easily spot it. Unfortunately we already know that most people don’t have a clue when it comes to mass media, and even if they did, we also know that people tend to believe whatever reinforces their priors.
For now, just like it was easy to identify AI art by the fucked up hands for a few months before that was mostly ironed out. AI really doesn’t need to get that much “smarter” to start fooling people in their native tongue, it just needs to be able to string the right words together more often. And there’s a few billion guinea pigs out there to test on.
The Google AI that pre-loads the results query isn’t able to distinguish real photos from fake AI generated photos. So there’s no way to filter out all the trash, because we’ve made generative AI just good enough to snooker search AI.
That still requires a uniform method of tagging art as such. Which is absolutely a thing that could be done, but there’s no upside to the effort. If your images all get tagged “AI” and another generator’s doesn’t, what benefit is that to you? That’s before we even get into what digital standard gets used in the tagging. Do we assign this to the image itself (making it more reliable but also more difficult to implement)? As structured metadata (making it easier to apply, but also easier to spoof or scrape off)? Or is Google just expected to parse this information from a kaleidoscope of generating and hosting standards?
Times like this, it would be helpful for - say - the FCC or ICANN to get involved. But that would be Big Government Overreach, so it ain’t going to happen.
Why bother looking anything up when you can just make it fresh right now. I figured this might start happening once I heard of people using chatGPT as a search replacement (tell me lies, pretty pretty lies).
Just wanted to point out that the Pinterest examples are conflating two distinct issues: low-quality results polluting our searches (in that they are visibly AI-generated) and images that are not “true” but very convincing,
The first one (search results quality) should theoretically be Google’s main job, except that they’ve never been great at it with images. Better quality results should get closer to the top as the algorithm and some manual editing do their job; crappy images (including bad AI ones) should move towards the bottom.
The latter issue (“reality” of the result) is the one I find more concerning. As AI-generated results get better and harder to tell from reality, how would we know that the search results for anything isn’t a convincing spoof just coughed up by an AI? But I’m not sure this is a search-engine or even an Internet-specific issue. The internet is clearly more efficient in spreading information quickly, but any video seen on TV or image quoted in a scientific article has to be viewed much more skeptically now.
There can be 2 major difficulties with tracking to origin.
Time. It can take a good amount of time to find the true origin of something. And you don’t have the time to trace back to the true origin of everything you see and hear. So you will tend to choose the “source” you most agree with introducing bias to your “origin”.
And the question of “Is the ‘origin’ I found the real source?” This is sometimes referred to Facts by Common Knowledge or the Wikipedia effect. And as AI gets better and better, original source material is going to become harder to access and harder to verify unless you can lay your hands on a real piece of paper that says it’s so.
So it appears at this point in time, there is no simple solution like “provenance” and " find the origin".
And as AI gets better and better, original source material is going to become harder to access and harder to verify unless you can lay your hands on a real piece of paper that says it’s so.
One of the bright lines between Existing Art and AI Art, particularly when it comes to historical photos and other images, is that there typically isn’t a physical copy of the original. You’re not going to walk into the Louvre and have this problem.
This brings up another complication in the art world, which is ownership/right-to-reproduce said image. Blindly crawling the internet and vacuuming up whatever you find, then labeling it as you find it, has been a great way for search engines to become functional repositories of intellectual property without being exposed to the costs associated with reprinting and reproducing. But all of this is happening in a kind-of digital gray marketplace. If you want the official copy of a particular artwork to host for your audience, that’s likely going to come with financial and legal strings attached, making its inclusion in a search result more complicated.
Since Google leadership doesn’t want to petition every single original art owner and private exhibition for the rights to use their workers in its search engine, they’re going to prefer to blindly collect shitty knock-offs and let the end-users figure this shit out (after all, you’re not paying them for these results and they’re not going to fork out money to someone else, so fuck you both). Then, maybe if the outcry is great enough, they can charge you as a premium service to get more authentic results. Or they can charge some third party to promote their print-copies and drive traffic.
But there’s no profit motive for artistic historical accuracy. So this work isn’t going to get done.
Humans will need to use digital signatures eventually. Chains of verifiable claims from real humans would be used. Still doesn’t prove anything by itself, but it saves a ton of effort. That, plus verifiable timestamping.
Its arguably the same topic and part of the problem. Sites that host digital copies of originals are underweighted relative to “popular” sites like Wikipedia or Pintrest or Imgur, which are more likely to host frauds or shitty duplicates.
Not really. However much Google might index everything, they decide how to prioritize search results. The order of results makes or breaks a search engine. This argument likely wouldn’t be happening if AI output were left several pages away from the top.
If someone is searching for reference images, it should not put AI generated output over photography and original art, because by its very nature AI generated images can’t be the ultimate origin of any kind of image.
Even if AI detecting tools are flawed, most pages that feature AI art have it explicitly stated in their own text, which it’s something their crawlers could definitely pick up on.
This isn’t really a realistic answer, since the issue is that these images aren’t labeled as being AI generated, and constantly mixing generative content into everything we consume risks blurring reality for a lot of people.
Personally, I would prefer to see as little AI content as possible when searching for images unless that’s the kind of image I am looking for, and I would like those images to be labeled as such whenever possible.
Everything has been fake since the invention of photography. The degree varies, but images have never been used in mass media to document the truth in any way shape or form, and especially not on the click-driven Internet and doubly so on Google Images. Even if an image comes right from the camera, you still have heavy bias in the selection process of what images get shown to begin with and which remain hidden.
If you are looking for truth in photography, you are about a 150 years too late.
I wonder what would happen in the future as future AI’s get trained with AI generated images that they got from the internet. Would the generated images start to degrade or have somekind of distinct style pop out.
Not really. Check midjourney v6 generated images. I found many images, which look undistinctable from real images. So i dont see, why image generation should get worse. What matters is the dataset and only dataset. It doesnt matter if the model is trained on ai images, as long as the dataset is good
Yeah something like that. I imagine it would be something like jpeg which degrades as you keep converting over and over. But not sure how would AI generated images would look like.
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