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Comming soon "Artificial Intelligence"...


hjoseph7

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Thanks.

 

I’m more afraid of what seems to be a human lack of intelligence than I am of artificial intelligence, though I get the fear factor in this technology. Certain humans, if you can call them that, have already pretty successfully blurred the lines between true and false, fact and fiction. And large swaths of the population are being led by lies. This technology is bound to help in the ongoing disinformation campaign, but the evil of lies has been around for a long time even with just the more evil human brains disseminating those lies. Now, the job ahead is fighting all these oral and visual lies and restoring and protecting truth and sanity. Maybe a big ol’ computer can be programmed to figure that one out. In the meantime, I’ll continue pushing the shutter with my own hand and hoping that people appreciate my efforts and allow their imaginations to wander without confusing that with reality.

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"You talkin' to me?"

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Yet another reason why I am hesitant to post my "people pictures" on the internet.

Yes , just about everything posted in the popular "media" is designed to manipulate in one way or another , it has always been like this.

However , there are those who will embrace this "technology" in a big way.

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Moreover

“Once the line between truth and fake is eroded, everything will become fake. We will not be able to believe anything.”— Wael Abd-Almageed

And in spite of that, somehow many, many, all too many people do believe anything anyway.

What is missing in the above quote is that today people just do not care whether truth or fake.

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Skillful painters have generated false images and distorted the 'truth' ever since humans could create a mark on a surface. And it wasn't long after the invention of photography that the likes of Oscar Rejlander were creating fantasy montages, spirit photographs and countless other fakery.

 

And a quick saunter into any library or bookshop will reveal that fiction is far more popular (and commercial) than anything factual.

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Skillful painters have generated false images and distorted the 'truth' ever since humans could create a mark on a surface. And it wasn't long after the invention of photography that the likes of Oscar Rejlander were creating fantasy montages, spirit photographs and countless other fakery.

 

The problem is in the volume of it and the degree of efficiency of production. It still took skills and most importantly time to pull off something that fools everybody. Not like today, where thousands of algorithmically generated fake imagery can flood the internet within seconds.

 

And a quick saunter into any library or bookshop will reveal that fiction is far more popular (and commercial) than anything factual.

 

Most people enjoy fictional novels knowing what it is, but fiction under the disguise of truth is the most dangerous thing.

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The problem is in the volume of it and the degree of efficiency of production. It still took skills and most importantly time to pull off something that fools everybody. Not like today, where thousands of algorithmically generated fake imagery can flood the internet within seconds.

 

 

 

Most people enjoy fictional novels knowing what it is, but fiction under the disguise of truth is the most dangerous thing.

I think this AI tech is a double-edged sword, because we've had weasel-worded, psychologically manipulative advertising, political, religious and management systems working on our beliefs and attitudes for a veerry long time. It just took them a bit longer to craft their fakery and control, and all behind closed doors. Now, this technology is out in the open and allows anyone to do the same, instantly.

 

Then the light will hopefully dawn - "Wait! If I'm able to fool the world with a quick phrase, what the heck are those with more power able to do? Gosh, maybe all the 'truth' I've been fed has been garbage all along".

 

The democratisation of fakery is probably a better thing than having it only in the hands of an elite. Because now you don't have to be a skilled PhotoShopper, caricaturist or sculptor to, Spitting Image style, show how ridiculous our 'betters' actually are.

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Fakery is not the problem. There is no such thing as truth except that which we all (enough of us) agree on, are ready to accept as such. Always has been so.

Not even caring whether something is or isn't, no critical thought or examination, is. People accept absolutely everything nowadays. Evidence of that is abundant, all around us.

And that is not down to Nietzsche, but to John Stuart Mill c.s.

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Best not to generalize. All the ‘truths’ we’ve been fed all along are not suspect. Some of them are. The last thing we want to continue doing is undermining the very notion of truth. There are forces that have been successfully doing that. And lemmings that have been duped by it. In a sane world, we will continue to develop means of trust and means of evidence and verification. The source of photos is as important as any photo. And verification is and will continue to be a thing.
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"You talkin' to me?"

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I think this AI tech is a double-edged sword, because we've had weasel-worded, psychologically manipulative advertising, political, religious and management systems working on our beliefs and attitudes for a veerry long time. It just took them a bit longer to craft their fakery and control, and all behind closed doors. Now, this technology is out in the open and allows anyone to do the same, instantly.

 

Then the light will hopefully dawn - "Wait! If I'm able to fool the world with a quick phrase, what the heck are those with more power able to do? Gosh, maybe all the 'truth' I've been fed has been garbage all along".

 

The democratisation of fakery is probably a better thing than having it only in the hands of an elite. Because now you don't have to be a skilled PhotoShopper, caricaturist or sculptor to, Spitting Image style, show how ridiculous our 'betters' actually are.

I downloaded the software to my phone. It's called DALL-E . Apparently a tone-down version is available to the public ? First impressions is that I'm not that impressed by it. Photographers that make a living recording reality like wedding photographers won't have anything to worry about. The way it works is that you enter certain promos, words, descriptions and the app generates a picture. Just to try it I typed in "Perfect girl for me' then hit ENTER. The app generates about 8 pictures of some pretty gross looking women? One had legs coming out of her nostrils! I guess I should have been more specific. Then I typed in ' 2 story house, purple with white picket fence' . Sure enough I got about 8 pictures of purple houses with white picket fences! Is it exactly what I imagined ? Nope it's what the app thought I imagined. This thing can't read your mind, but it does a pretty good job of guessing.

If anyone has an Android phone, there is an article about this app(s) that really hits the nail on the head. I mean they are talking about giving ordinary people the skills an knowledge photographers took years to learn. I thought the smart phone industry was obsessed with bringing down the photography industry but this article was ridiculous. The article also mentions doing away with Photoshop and Lightroom eventually but of course in a mild way.The irresponsibility is some of these people is amazing. I can't include the link in this post since I'm on the road but if you search hard enough you will find it. What needs to happen is for somebody to create an Android techy then we won't need techy's anymore...

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Whenever apps like this emerge, there is a lot of buzz regarding AI and it’s negative effects, however there are talented people working relentlessly towards solving important problems in medicine, astrophysics using AI. Their efforts are rarely highlighted.

 

Also, a lot of AI is silently injected everyday into the information that we gather from google searches, social media etc, that can implicitly bias us in certain directions. There are AI engines that constantly analyze human behavior/bias through online posts and ad clicking and tailor information towards those biases. These under-the-hood activities are equally, if not more dangerous than the eye-catching photo apps. Lastly, AI technology at its current state is certainly over-hyped to some extent, even some AI specialists admit that.

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  • 2 weeks later...
On 10/1/2022 at 5:53 AM, AlanKlein said:

PS and AI-generated photos will just take the fun out of photography. Why bother?

Those photographers will continue to “bother” photographing who don’t let what others do determine their own fulfillment from activities they participate in.

"You talkin' to me?"

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Something came to me a few weeks back. There is no artificial intelligence. What we call AI is human intelligence installed onto a chip which is then used to empower a human created device. Can it be smarter than anyone one of us? Of course as it is a collective. 

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2 hours ago, mjferron said:

Something came to me a few weeks back. There is no artificial intelligence. What we call AI is human intelligence installed onto a chip which is then used to empower a human created device. Can it be smarter than anyone one of us? Of course as it is a collective. 

Of course it is human intelligence, fomalised and translated into machine instructions. But as long as that machine then does things we might call intelligent, it is Artificial intelligence. It does exist. On its own.

Just like a semblance of a flower made by whatever means we invented is not a flower, but an artificial flower.

 

And what artificially intelligent machines can do is still severely limited, but also impressive. Machine learning, i.e. machines that acquire more knowledge of the world than was provided by us, is real.

And old too, already. Cyc, for instance, is almost 40 years old now.

The main change since then is raw computer power. I had to make do, in the 1980s, with 64 Kb of memory on a 8 Hz machine. Part of that memory was occupied by the code editor, so constantly swapping modules in and out. It worked, though. That raw computer power has not led to major advances in AI, except for a shift to pattern recognition and prediction given large amounts of data.

Edited by q.g._de_bakker
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