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by solfox 549 days ago
On the other hand, because these tools like this are being made available before output is perfected, you and many others are being trained in AI discernment; being able to detect fake things will be a helpful skill to have for some time: another form of critical thinking.

It would be FAR worse if a privately held advanced AI's outputs were unleashed without the population being at least somewhat cautious of everything. The real danger imho comes from private silos of advanced general intelligence that aren't shared and used to gain power, control, and money.

2 comments

I think as these things will get bigger and better much faster than we can learn to discern.
With zero doubt. Faster than we expect. And yet, it's nice that we are learning to distrust what we see before the "real real" stuff comes out.
Open source has already caught up with SOTA:

https://www.reddit.com/r/StableDiffusion/comments/1hav4z3/op...

These are even unfair comparisons because they're leveraging text-to-video instead of the more powerful image-to-video. In the latter case, the results are indistinguishable.

Video generation is about to be everywhere, and we're about to have the "Stable Diffusion" moment for video.

Look at the comments: people are already fawning over open source being uncensored.

Cat's out of the bag.

Very convenient for those who are waiting for the waters to get muddier.
I'm wondering that as well but I also wonder if it's a bit like CGI where it's somewhat hit a limit on realness. I'm not saying CGI doesn't get better but is a 2024 Gollum that much more realistic than 2004 Gollum? Maybe I'm wrong but I wonder if that plastic feel to AI lessens but still sticks around.
>you and many others are being trained in AI discernment

HN is a hyper specialized group of people. The average person can not do this and as we've seen devours up misinformation with no second thoughts.

On one hand, I like to think that society is getting trained to recognize AI and distrust it. But at the same time my retired boomer parents are over for the holidays and I catch them watching youtube videos completely oblivious to the fact it's an AI voice and just reading an LLM generated script with B roll for eye candy. Often times it's just stolen auto generated captions from larger creators regurgitated by an AI voice. I'll point it out and they don't believe me that the voice is fake.
AI voices have gotten scarily good. They are easy to recognize because most creators use the same voices with the same intonations and don't care to cut out the mistakes. But if you don't recognize the voice it takes a couple sentences to discern that it's AI even with an ear trained on the difference.

But it is funny to see how much stuff gets uploaded with zero quality control and still gets traction. These models really don't deal will with "innocent" letter substitutions, Iike using I instead of l.

I've heard enough slop using the ElevenLabs voices that I can recognize them almost immediately now. But you're right. Higher end models with less familiar voices are harder to notice. One consistent failing is that they are always too perfect. No mistakes or signs of cuts to edit out where a human VA would have made a mistake. Its all very smooth and perfect. As if they nailed it in the first shot. Once the cheap/free models manage to fix that then we are in real trouble. Also, some really lazy slop creators don't bother to fix issues with pronunciation. But that's not the fault of the model really.
"More human than human" is our motto. https://youtu.be/ZbgmYhqFO-4?t=30
And yet, OP referred to a thread where the reality of the shorts were being questioned by "average" people. Imagine a world where OpenAI were the first out the gates with this and just started producing their own videos without telling anyone about their technology or letting creators play with it. They'd make loads of money, probably could topple governments... I'm glad these tools are being made generally available versus the alternative.