7 Comments
User's avatar
Sean Corfield's avatar

I wish this post was popped up on everyone's social media apps every time they go to share any image or video! You're spot on, but I am pretty certain nearly all of your audience here already know... If only we had a well-funded education system in America, eh?

SteveB's avatar

Unfortunately, all of the people doing this are long past any contact with our education system. Do we need to send EVERYBODY back to school?

Joseph Mangano's avatar

AI convinces people they've found their soulmate. Their therapist. That they're right about the conspiracy theories they believe. So, why wouldn't it convince them they can solve crimes before trained investigators ever could? God, we live in such a depressing timeline.

SteveB's avatar

Yes, it's the timeline of you can do ANYTHING with the help of a YouTube video, no need for those tiresome "experts." Who needs doctors when you've got influencers, right?

At this stage, it's just a general contempt for anyone who spent their life actually learning something. Doctors don't know how to doctor, teachers don't know how to teach, scientists don't know how to science. If you tell 'em otherwise, you must be part of the conspiracy.

Whipstitch's avatar

I often think about an episode of "Bones" from back in the day. Somebody finds a skull and they reconstruct the face. They then check it against a database of driver's license photos. They then rush to the person's home to tell his wife he's dead. But he's still alive! A mistake? No,(obviously) he had an identical twin!

SteveB's avatar

Ooh, was it an EVIL twin?

Chris's avatar

There is something that everyone can do to stop this, and it's play a game. A game I call "real or slop". The rules are very simple, when you find a dodgy image, you text it to the other players and you ask, "real or slop?" You can do this whether or not you know the answer to the question, EXSPECIALLY if YOU don't know

What happens is unsurprising, players get better and better at identifying slop. But the side effect is actually surprising: they start to really really hate seeing ai pictures. Everytime they see what they thought was a neat image by a human author, and the flutes of a mushroom don't line up right, or the pattern on a dress isn't symmetrical, it's like a punch in the gut.

And the players will start to internalize what an ai can do, and more importantly what it can't do.

IMPORTANT: I have some notes on feedback I have gotten about the game. It's important that you only do this with images that you post, and which other people have asked to play with. Telling everyone that the nice picture of the grand canyon they were all admiring is slop makes YOU the bad guy

The more people see slop, the more they can identify slop, the more they HATE slop