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by parasti 54 days ago
A great technical achievement, for sure, but this is kind of the moment where it enters uncanny valley to me. The promo reel on the website makes it feel like humans doing incredible things (background music intentionally evokes that emotion), but it's a slideshow of computer generatated images attempting to replicate the amazing things that humans do. It's just crazy to look at those images and have to consciously remind myself - nobody made this, this photographed place and people do not exist, no human participated in this photo, no human traced the lines of this comic, no human designer laid out the text in this image. This is a really clever amalgamation machine of human-based inputs. Uncanny valley.
8 comments

No this is what life looks like on the other side of the uncanny valley. The images don't look creepy because they look artificial or wrong. They're a reminder of a creepy new reality where our eyes can no longer tell us what's real.
We've definitely passed the point where discerning between real and AI images is impossible, even for a very detail-oriented eye.
It's not really a new problem though, as image forgery was a thing ages ago; if there weren't laws or measures taken against photoshopped images or instagram filters or faceapp things then, why would there be laws or measures taken against AI generated images now?

Granted, a nontrivial difference is that the barrier to entry is lower; photo editing is something that requires active effort and learning.

Absolutism isn’t very useful. Scale and magnitude always need to be considered. “I can buy plates with uranium in them, why can’t I enrich it at scale for my own personal use???” “Humans have been hunting for thousands of years. Why can’t i deploy automated sentry machine guns at my property line??”
Online.
Can't wait for all scams to rip of older folks and people who aren't there but aren't so far gone they still have that nobody has power of attorney over them.
Yep. Just like motion pictures. Why, it's just a facsimile! People were meant to see performances by real people. These motion pictures fool your eye and surely will unravel the very fabric of civilized society! No longer shall the thespian be well employed! And the minds of the children will lay in ruins from such filth!
I get your point, but it's not even really that. It's that an AI generated photo evokes the same feelings in me that human-made photographs do and I have to catch that and turn that off consciously.
It shouldn't bother you. Just enjoy stuff. It's ok to think computer art is pretty. It's not some kind of personal or societal moral failing.
well it is. what if you found out that your wife is actually a robot that you cant tell apart from real human. your real wife. well at least not by cutting her open. would you feel the same being with here?
That's not as bad as when I learned my wife is really just the product of cell division.
... damn, when you say this like that ... i'm now in existential crisis ...
where can i buy one of these robot wives?
I get this attitude--I really do. But I think the world moves on, and our children are not going to think this is even slightly strange. As always, it's us old-timers who have the hardest time with change.

I also think this is "art" in service of commerce. This is OpenAI advertising their goods using art/design/writing. That's no different than cereal companies using Elmer's glue instead of milk for their photoshoots. I don't have a high-bar for that kind of "art".

The good news is that the cutting edge of art will (for a while longer) still be a human domain. The more popular these models become, the more of their images we see in our lives, the more we will value things that look different.

Right… I’m sure Zuckerberg thought the same about metaverse.

This is the last place to get a reasonable take of how the average person feels about this stuff.

I never tried the metaverse. I don't own any Bitcoin. But I literally use AI every day.

I acknowledge that I'm not particularly good at predicting the future, but I'm confident that AI is here to stay.

Uncanny Valley means the content directly evokes that creepy feeling, because the 'unrealness' is somehow subjectively apparent.

But you say yourself you "have to consciously remind [yourself]" it isn't real. The Uncanny Valley is not applicable when true subjective realness is imparted.

That's not the uncanny valley. It's literally the other side of the uncanny valley.

The uncanny valley is when it's just slightly imperfect which makes things feel "off".

When we've reached the point that the AI is indistinguishable from humans, we've exited the uncanny valley.

The wolf photo for the article was the most eerie example for me... if I am reading about the natural world, I want to see a real photo of the natural world.
Why are so many on HN unable to see through the B.S. and hype? Everything in the trailer feels unvaried and derivative. It does text and filters well (grit/grain, UI etc) but all the posters, comics, and infographics feel the same. They've all got matching structure and color palettes and once you've seen enough of them, you can easily spot them in a crowd. I'm not sure why people are falling for this, the AI voices in the trailer are ridiculous too.
No taste.

No point trying to reason with them.

These products don’t stick - just like sora they’re seemingly cool initially but then people go back to what were already doing ex-ante.

For me it feels off that we don't have as much interest and attention in validating fakes and lies from real ones. I remember seeing a lot of media about that, and recently its just.. fizzled out. I want to know when someones lied with the photo they presented to me.