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?
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There’s a whole instance of pro-AI users; many are toxic AF about it.
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The average person is a moron
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!
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.
They claim they are not cool with generative AI
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.
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…
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.
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
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.
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 :-)
db0
That is genuinely really interesting, I didn’t expect it to be db0. Thanks!
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I don’t see it, which is horrific considering that others do. can you show a few examples that you think is AI slop?
Its usually deleted by mods fairly quickly because its often being posted into comms that specifically ban it. I saw it in politics comms, shitposts, 196 and more
and how unambiguous is it that those are AI generated content? is it like blurry colors on images, 6 fingers and 3 hands, or what do you recognize on them?
I think I can identify generated images, but text… well I can’t even decide. Probably I just can’t so far, because I don’t remember any posts or comments that were suspicious
Identifying them is a skill for sure. You learn what you have to look for, but it depends heavily on the art style that was used. Most people are usually better at identifying hyperrealism ones than comic style ones for example.
Straight up vibes a lot of the time these days. It gets better and better
A lot of people are some combination of lazy, stupid, ignorant, and/or indifferent.
I just haven’t noticed really. The reality is that memes, even ones that were made by hand with a lot of effort, are disposable content. Most of them will get looked at for like 10 seconds tops before you either move on or maybe check out the comments. Nobody who isn’t obsessed with finding the AI slop is going to notice the difference between an AI meme and just a shitty photoshop job.
That’s not to say I’m not concerned by the effects of that. Lower effort needed means more low effort stuff, but it’s not really something I’ve clocked as being particularly out of the ordinary.
People don’t care. as long as they can get their infinite scroll with funny picture, they’re happy.
This brings up an excellent point about addiction. A
quicklonger than I’d planned anecdote: over the last few years I’ve nearly completely dumped all social media (and big tech in general). Facebook, Insta, Twitter, all gone. The only social for the last few years I’ve had left was Reddit, and I dumped that a couple months ago (all social media is toxic, I learned).I swapped Reddit for Lemmy a few months ago and noticed a huge difference, not just the fewer toxic people, but in the lack of posts overall by comparison. I found myself scrolling through the same Lemmy posts throughout the day, my brain trying to repeat the cycle from Reddit, but stayed strong and didn’t go back to Reddit haha.
Anyway, there’s still toxicity on Lemmy, and I realized how much it affects me without the cloud of all the other socials bogging it down. Not a lot, but enough. So I made a decision and went back to my old nerd days. I didn’t want to miss out on legit articles I was interested in from social media so I set up an rss reader. I started checking out Lemmy in the morning, and my rss throughout the day, which doesn’t update often.
What I found at first was I was re-checking lemmy, re-loading rss, and thinking about what else I can put on my phone to scratch that itch. I was (am) still addicted to the dopamine hit of forever-feeds of useless garbage. So instead, I picked up a book. It’s been a long time, and it’s a slow adjustment, but wow is it ever so much better. Aside from some small interaction on Lemmy in the morning like this, I don’t see comments anymore, I read the info I’m interested in reading and make my own judgments without comments trying to sway me, and use my former doom-scrolling time to read a book.
To sum up, you’re absolutely right. Addiction is a bitch and the average person doesn’t even realize they’re addicted.
Haven’t seen a difference but I also block / downvote everybody / community that posts ai slob so …
Haven’t seen a difference, but I also focus almost exclusively on the communities I’ve subscribed to. Checking the all or local feed has been annoying and useless since day one, so nothing has changed.
As long as it’s intentionally made by a human and the end result is high quality, I personally don’t really care what AI or other tools they did or didn’t use to create that result
I made this. Do you care now? Are you offended and outraged?
Lol, that’s great. I don’t know why you think I’d be outraged though
O don’t give a shit and 100% skip useless posts clearly created using AI.
But interesting posts, I do read them even if made with AI.
Is this post AI generated?
The internet is steadily becoming Facebook. Full of idiots being force fed AI slop. Alarmingly confident in their wrongness about almost everything.
Many people don’t care about it. Me included, for instance.
I would give the reason why but I don’t know if anyone is truly interested in knowning.
I don’t consider things being made by AI as something terrible. If the post is fine I upvote and comment like any other post. If the content is lazy, clickbaity or plain bad then it’s bad. But if it’s good I don’t care that it was produced using some AI tool or other.
It’s true that the fediverse it’s still hostile towards AI conversation (this very comment have high possibilities to be drowned with downvotes) but I’m glad the general stance is changing little by little. I hope in a few years the hostility would be much more marginal, specially if the fediverse keeps growing and more people with more diverse opinions come in.
If people would stop talking about AI all day then it probably wouldn’t be used as much as it is every day.
No lie. If anything, this site reminds me that ChatGPT might handle a task for me.
I think I have most AI stuff I encountered blocked, and I assume so do other anti AI people, so there’s probably just not enough people downvoting/commenting on AI since they don’t get it on their feed
Probably this.
I blocked any and all AI shit I came across. Then I read that they cried about getting downvoted. So I unblocked them, distributed downvotes on their crap like candy and blocked them again. Got a good chuckle out of that.
That was my last interaction with them. It might sound weird, but I actually have better things to do than continue downvoting stuff that literally isn’t art and their posters aren’t artists. That last part has been written solely to trigger these non-artists.
Tfw i use AI as a tool to get stuff done, not to feel good about the process and get to call myself an artist.
Most people like me don’t care especially if the post is supposed to be a shitpost
They are flooding the zone, there are countless pro-AI generated content instances. It’s like playing whack-a-mole, I often downvote obvious and human-altered slop (it’s all slop to me). Unfortunately, there are going to be images that have positive votes despite the general dislike of said AI-slop, especially because I tend to block those slop instances these days. Naturally, most of it is objectifying women (something I don’t want to see anyway) so those will naturally get a lot of votes because people weren’t thinking with the right head.
