Father, Hacker (Information Security Professional), Open Source Software Developer, Inventor, and 3D printing enthusiast

  • 0 Posts
  • 11 Comments
Joined 3 years ago
Cake day: June 23rd, 2023
  • Riskable@programming.devtoNo Stupid Questions@lemmy.world•Are there any technology-oriented content creators that are still good?English
    1·
    17 hours ago

    Don’t call it theft. Theft is what happens when the original owner doesn’t have that thing anymore.

    Nothing was “stolen”. AI just lowered the value of generic “thumbnail artists” and probably increased their value as artisans for those willing to pay for a premium service.

    That’s what generative AI does: It makes stuff of mediocre quality that’s “good enough” for the masses. However, if you want something better than that, you have to pay a professional.

    My hypothesis is that Baumol’s Cost Disease combined with AI is going to result in the collapse of capitalism. Where bespoke service work (e.g. hiring a thumbnail artist) is going to become more expensive over time while generic stuff that doesn’t need to be high quality is going to become cheaper and cheaper, to the point where it’s basically free. We’re almost there, actually.

  • Riskable@programming.devtoNews@lemmy.world•Judge denies xAI’s request to block Minnesota ban on ‘nudify’ appsEnglish
    11·
    3 days ago

    No. LLMs and AI image models are fundamentally, a different technology. They use completely different mathematical models, data models, and target different platform spaces.

    As a simple example, to train an LLM you need to feed it lots of text and not much else. To train an image model, you need to feed it billions of tagged images. That is, images that have every stupid little thing in the image “tagged” with a bounding box and text describing what’s inside said bounding box.

    Also, these terms might not mean anything to you, but LLMs use transformer decoders (autoregressive causal retention) while image models use diffusion networks. The way they work is different at a fundamental level. Text is 1-dimensional and an LLM acts as a word prediction machine whereas image models start with chaos (random garbage pixels) and refine it over and over again in n steps until the chaos starts looking like the prompt.

    The way prompting works is also different.

  • Riskable@programming.devtoNews@lemmy.world•Judge denies xAI’s request to block Minnesota ban on ‘nudify’ appsEnglish
    02·
    7 days ago

    AI image generation is such a weird thing. When you self-host it (run it on your own GPU), you get vastly superior capabilities but at the same time you get all the awful results too.

    Example: When you use ChatGPT or Gemini or similar “Big AI” service to generate an image, you get one image. However, in the background, those services were actually generating a whole bunch of images and at the end, using AI to pick the best one.

    When you DIY, you tell it to generate say, 50 images, hoping you get lucky (haha) and that’s when you see the weird shit. Sure, 10 out of those 50 will be OK-ish—something to work with (using additional tools to say, fix those wonky hands), but in “the bad 40”, there will be a random naked person.

    Like… Why‽ I mean, I actually know why (AI image models only work well if they’re trained on nude people! Why? Because that’s how they learn proper human anatomy/ratios! Just like a doctor, actually), but it’s mildly disturbing when I’m trying to visualize a scene in a novel where a girl is holding a doll and it mixes up the doll and the girl and somehow the girl ends up naked (looking like a doll). Ugh! W T F! I didn’t ask for that!

    Can’t delete shit like that fast enough!

    Note that “Big AI” has that problem on occasion too! It’s basically impossible to fix with 100% accuracy, which is why AI companies are fighting laws like this tooth and nail.

    Also, the detection algorithms/AI don’t work very well! They know this. I know this. We all know this. That’s why these public Big AI models are regularly generating nudity despite having system prompts that are supposed to stop it.

    So what can we do? Many people would say, “just ban AI image generators” or “make it so they can only generate cartoon/non-realistic images”. That’s called “banning a core technology” and it never works if said tech doesn’t have some sort of rare supply chain ingredient (e.g. uranium).

    I don’t know. On the one hand, Big AI and smaller AI companies are definitely offering a depraved service. On the other hand, it’s all fake!

    All these “nudify” tools and apps are generating 100% totally made up bullshit. Why do we need to ban fake, digital things?

    Think about it from a tech standpoint: Let’s say we ban using AI to “generate nudes of people without their permission.” All that users of these services will do is generate generic nudes and then use a different model to place the person’s face on the body. There’s nothing at all you can do to stop that because the user could just crop the image so that only the face and neck are showing and then just paste the result back into the original image.

    This is a people problem. That is: People are using tools in ways we don’t want them used.

    You can’t solve people problems with technology. It’s one of those “laws” as old as tech.

    IMHO, the best we can probably do is to hold people accountable when they behave inappropriately, but the anonymous nature of the Internet makes that extremely hard to do. So… 🤷