The fediverse used to feel pretty anti-ai, but over the past month or two I’ve noticed a LOT of generated memes and images, and they tend to have positive votes.
Has there been a sudden culture shift here? Or is there a substantial percentage of people just unable to tell the difference anymore?
Which instance is pro ai?
I think it’s the one I use (dbzer0). I’m pretty sure it’s explicitly pro-AI generated content.
Huh, I wouldn’t have guessed db0, interesting. I’d kinda considered exploring db0 as a future instance but maybe its not such a good fit for me. Thanks for the answer!
What I’ll say is that I really don’t mind it. Personally, I’m not a big fan of AI art at all, and I don’t really use generative AI much in any capacity. I also don’t see generative AI on my feed… Basically ever? I guess because I don’t really browse Local.
db0 is anarchist, and that does come with some lenience that some people might find to be a little off-putting, but the AI part of it is pretty much irrelevant, unless you’re seeking it out - from my experience, at least, and based on how I use Lemmy.
Not that I mean to shill for db0 tho lol use whatever instance you feel like fits you best!
Thanks for your input! I’ll have to take a minute some time to go to the web interface and just look around db0 and see for myself whether it feels like a good fit for me, I appreciate you sharing your thoughts!
They claim they are not cool with generative AI and yet, that’s 90℅ of anything to do with AI posted to/by the instance.
Are you sure about that? The instance description explicitly endorses generative AI. I think you might’ve misread.
We’re not against GenAI as a tech. We’re against corporate GenAI though.
I would say that the general mood here that generative AI for creative use or technical tasks is fine, enabling people is a good thing. We are primarily an anarchist community, and generally not happy with the massive corporate control over something that should belong to everyone (bc the models are the cultural output of everyone) and the amount of VC money that is used to push AI where it doesn’t belong in search of the next big thing.
Quite a few people run models on their own hardware (like me, to support me when learning stuff, or when my wife wants new seasonal pics representing our cats in cute styles) or are using AI Horde
There are users on our instance that are not cool with GenAI in general, but they are the minority.
db0
That is genuinely really interesting, I didn’t expect it to be db0. Thanks!
Did you know that there are no instances* defederated from dbzer0? So apart from setting up and running your own instance to defederate**, there is no way of making your feed filter out the subset of users from dbzer0 who think they should spread their instance’s values of AI content across all parts of the Fediverse, whether or not it is welcome there? Did you also know that Fediseer, the default web tool for instances to document issues and endorsements of other instances, which incidentally is maintained by the admin of db0, shows that lemmy.dbzer0.com has received no censures whatsoever from other instances? Do you think that users who avidly use AI to generate visual content for their posts may also avidly use AI to generate their text posts and comments? Countless accounts could simply be 1s and 0s from a machine instead of any actual human soul behind it (wait, isn’t that why many Lemmings left Reddit?).
*barring instances with hidden blocklists
**or instead manually blocking every user from dbzer0, which would be futile as they continue to gain users
No need to block every user from the instance, you can block the entire instance in your account settings.
Copied from another comment of mine:
Its not even just instance z. If they post to instance x, you will also see the user. You only will not see the posts to instance Y.
Which is counter-intuitive to how one would assume an instance-wide block should work.
I don’t know about specific instances but AI has both good and bad sides, so it’d be stupid IMO to just go with a black’n white stance.
Most loudmouths don’t know what they are talking about too (on both sides).
That doesn’t really help me or add anything to the conversation. I already have views on ai, I was really just asking about the dynamics and cultures of different instances because I find learning about those cultural differences interesting.
I’m personally not a fan. Its a commercial product built on the theft of intellectual labor by creatives and the primary selling point of generative ai is that it can replace the people who do that creative labor. I’ve tried using it at various points and it straight up made stuff up and ended up not helping me find what I was looking for at all. I tried to use it to generate practice text I could translate into Japanese for language learning and it constantly used words other than the ones provided- words I didn’t know in japanese.
It has hypothetically useful usecases, that I pretty much never see anyone actually implement, and it feels very clear that the only reason anyone is investing in it is because it can reduce the need to pay actual humans, generating more money for people who already have tons, while wasting huge amount of electricity and resources.
Telling me, apropos of nothing, that having a stance other than neutral is “stupid” doesn’t add anything, give me anything to consider, substantiate any stance, provide any details, etc. I don’t really need to know that you think I’m stupid for not liking ai.
One useful usecase that’s being exploited a lot is roleplay.
Using AI to generate a bot to do a roleplay with and maybe images to add flavour. It’s something that people like to do, and that’s totally harmless.
Like, yes, the llm was trained the books of grrm without his explicit consent and now someone is roleplay a fantasy scenario with John Snow, but who cares?
It’s not like GRRM is available to be hired as a play partner, and no one is getting profit out of it, specially if people just selfhost the models. People is just having fun. And the AI is not substituting anyone. As people didn’t hire “actors” to play their roleplay sessions anyway.
And it’s not like people who use it it like this even post the results in social media and call themselves “AI artist” or anything like that. They just play for themselves or their group of friends, and, at most you can share online the “bot card” so others can use it.
Yeah, I’m not really mad at that. I don’t think it changes my sentiment towards generative ai, but I don’t mind people finding ways to create their own fun and roleplaying or whatever
Well, it seems you only judge AI on large language models, not when it’s used in other ways like in research. I integrated AI (Tensorflow) in a massive project in 2016, it outperformed other AI at the time and makes real differences in particle detection. For example.
So just know that AI isn’t just chatgpt or midjourney, that’s the products people try to shove into everything and upsell.
let me get this straight. you like AI because a model outperformed another? how is that a real argument for any kind of question? the topic was not about whether they evolve.
that “black and white stance” is not really bad here, because it’s not actually black and white. their stance is against generative AI, not the kind you use for research. and guess what, forums are flooded by gen AI slop, the only kind of AI today that highly affects our forums.
I just expressed that AI is good in some places, like research.
while dissing someone for not wanting AI in forums, for “not knowing what are they talking about”. right, they didn’t specify what kind of AI they don’t want, but I think it comes from the context that they don’t want generative AIs, because that’s what affects them negatively regularly
Is that generative ai or machine learning? I really don’t have the same issue with machine learning
Its not just llm’s, I find calling ai generated images “art” frankly offensive and demonstrates a fundamental misunderstanding of what art is and why it’s important to us as humans. But my issue is really just generative ai
I don’t really think people have an issue with machine learning, it’s useful for all kinds of stuff, and doesn’t really come with the same ethical problems as best I’m aware, so I have no reason to complain about it.
AI is machine learning. It was just called “machine learning” before every C-suit had to try to sell it.
I’m with you when it comes to shitty images, but there is interesting approaches too IMO, especially when they will get better, if they do. As for art, it’s just another tool in the toolbox. Painters treated photography similarly, and do you remember (if you’re old enough) when digital cameras became affordable and everyone and their grandma became “a photographer” and flooded the planet with soulless photos? I do 😅
Art is art, no machine will change that, but maybe it will help people get into the arts, with the cost of a lot of slop ofc. Which is cool IMO.
Generative ai and machine learning are pretty broadly considered different if adjacent technologies if I’m not mistaken
https://www.forbes.com/sites/bernardmarr/2024/06/25/the-vital-difference-between-machine-learning-and-generative-ai/ probably not the best source, I just grabbed what came up
They don’t really do the same thing, and have different types of outputs compared to one another, even if both use a neural network of weights or whatever
As a person who has spent a huge amount of my life making art I think the idea that it will get more people into art is naive, and I think being devoid of understanding artistic principles it makes poor reference compared to anything else, which is part of why artists communities loathe generative AI. I follow tons of artists online and they all periodically have to stop and vent their frustration.
A youtuber artist did a whole video explaining how finding reference on the internet is now borderline impossible due to ai content, and after problem solving explained you can avoid that problem by only looking at images older than when gen ai became widespread. It reached a pretty big audience and was extremely well recieved by artists, broadly, hate gen ai and want nothing to do with it 😅
Also just wanna clarify- I’m not downvoting you. I try to downvote when a comment is bad behaviour or doesn’t add anything, not just when I don’t agree with someone
Interesting, my art friends, around 50% just love using generative AI for images to use, the other just don’t care. No one does digital art though, or not as their main style for what I know (acrylics, oil paint, gouache, aquarelle etc ).
I don’t like AI gen images because there is always tons of crap in colors and lighting, I guess for composition it could be useful but I don’t use images for that personally, so I like go on pinterest.co.kr with an ad blocker and use my imagination.
Yeah there is someone on a downvote spree lol, no problems & thanks for your post!
I work in Game Making.
There’s a ton of stuff in it which has been called “AI” for literally decades and almost none of it is Machine Learnrning: for example the A* pathing algorithm for characters in a game is called “AI”, as are Steering Behaviours that can be used in things like simulating bird flocks, and both are entirelly algorithmic, not ML.
In my own experience ML is seldom useful in games, mainly because algorithms are lighter and generally work more reliably.
You’re confusing use of “AI” in the Marketing of the present day tech bros trying to make money pumping up a Tech Bubble on top of certain very specific forms of Machine Learning, with the actual general meaning of the acronym.
I have 10 years of game dev under my belt, and I wonder where your idea that I think A* is AI come from.
Do you know how machine learning works? Please tell me about this new AI that isn’t based on it!
Don’t get me wrong, I think you’re not wrong, Dijkstra isn’t AI, techbros are trying to shovel “AI” into everything for the buzz, but you’re explaining yourself a bit haphasardly IMO.
Because shit like that has been called “Pathing AI” for ages.
(For example)
Also I’m very familiar with Machine Learning having actually learned it 3 decades ago when it was mainly just Neural Networks (there were other techniques schu as Genetic Algorithms, but ultimately NNs became dominant and is most of what we today call Machine Learning) and its most advanced commercial use was to read postal codes in mail envelopes for automated mail sorting.
The acronym AI has been thrown around for decades, even before Neural Networks were invented and well before Machine Learning was even called “Machine Learning”.
There’s really nothing good about ai if you really look into it. MAYBE medical advances, and thats it.
They have been doing machine learning for novel proteins for over 15 years now. “AI” is just a buzzword grant writers have to add these days to have any chance at funding is all
There are a massive number of scientific research and other pattern matching positive uses that all involve using the AI to help narrow down what to focus on. All of those use AI as a way to filter and group information, not as the end result like the current trend is for the AI being shoved into everything.
Heck, there are some positive uses that could be made with the right guardrails like as a supplemental tool when learning a language (with an educator for oversight!) or as a natural language output for something that is created through an algorithm that returns accurate results.
Mainly, the exact opposite of what is being forced on everyone right now which is inaccurate slop that is full of errors but presented as reliable and helpful.
Is there any resource I can read on or start from that’s useful for the average person? Just pointers so I don’t go on slop rabbit holes which I’m sure there are a lot of.
Not sure how detailed you want to get, but the two that I know of off the top of my head are looking for exoplanets and signs of where humans used to live. Here are a couple of easy reads on the application.
https://blog.tensorflow.org/2019/11/identifying-exoplanets-with-neural.html?m=1
https://www.themirror.com/news/world-news/groundbreaking-ai-uncovers-lost-ancient-945182
Useful medical applications are similar, where the pattern matching can be used to narrow down what to look for, but there is a human step afterwards to verify.
Thanks. Starting easy is fine. At least I now have a place to start from.
I have to correct you here, machine learning (AI) is extremely important in research. There is just no doubt about it.
Is AI image generators beneficial for society? Probably, I have artist friends who use AI images to help them paint for example, but is it out weighing the cost? Dunno.
Is AI slop beneficial? Orobably not :-)
Translation tools (like DeepL and Google Translate), proof assistance for mathematicians, camera settings optimisations, data analysis assistance in pretty much any field of research, anomaly detection, compression algorithms, ADAS systems like following a lane or self-parking, I can’t remember the specifics, but I know Nokia uses ML/AI methods for signal transmision/receiving optimisation, noise removal, image recognition for various purposes, I recall a system for automatic tree pruning, etc etc.
And before I get the usual “only GenAI is AI”, the underlying methods for creating a generative model and something like a model that detects street signs or abnormalities in medical scans are based on the same principles, they are the same field of computer science.
Personally I’m pro GOOD ai content. Most of it is not.
I think the appeal of seeing stuff that people make is that it reflects the humans who made it.
I’m generally not especially interested in what an algorithm produces, at least not in the same way or for the same reason as I am things made by people.
I don’t know what gen ai could produce that I would sincerely find good, it lacks the humanity that gives that product any worth.
Yeah, so much of it is a mediocre/old joke overlayed on a generated image.
I’m guessing, there’s people out there, who genuinely just flood social media with these mediocre posts to try to grow accounts or similar…
What constitutes good AI content?
That I like it - at a high level anyways. I’d guess that usually it’s someone using it as part of their workflow to create something, rather than doing the creation entirely on it’s own.