I am wondering what will come to save us from this AI storm. It looks like online search and social networks will be more or less dead. Maybe we will start going out again.
The only thing that will stop AI is AI proving less profitable than the alternative.
I see stories that the market is already starting to doubt the hype. Integrating AI into existing workflows or replacing those workflows is often more complex and error-prone than simply having human beings do the thing, and the cost benefit analysis isn't there because the technology just doesn't live up to expectations. So there may be hope.
That is the eventual outcome. The question is how much havoc so-called "tech" companies can wreak before we get there. They have lots of money to burn. This could take a while. The environmental costs are enormous.
We are now at the "They have copied all our output, chopped it into tokens and are regurgitating it back to us" stage.
The internet is more than the web. Perhaps the web must be sacrificed to free ourselves from these cretinous intermediaries.
Most of this conversation is just people who don’t know what image generation is doing today. X’s shitty wrapper around Flux is meaningless.
Go to civit ai and grab the latest open source fine tune of your choice. You want porn? Great. We have “Boobs and More”, “face sitting”, “flux topless” and “improved female nudity”. These are looking at just the models updated in the past 24h and just for flux.
Having a big tech giant act as a middleman for you is just weird. Who gives a shit about their particular guardrails?
> Grok’s prompt-based image maker is powered by Black Forest Lab’s Flux 1 AI model, and allows users to generate and publish images directly to the X social platform — with seemingly few guardrails in place to prevent abuse.
I’ve had to stop watching most tv shows lately because of the extreme level of violence. And the less I watch the more sensitized I get. The double standard indicates a very sick society.
I recall Georges Orwell making the same kind of remarks about novels in one of his essays, I think a little before WWII. I seem to recall that he was speaking of the depiction of physical violence in pulps.
Currently the website is filled with many bots trying to promote and propagandise particular views and force them on you if you want them or not, but now your entire feed can be generated on the fly specifically based on what you engage with the most without any of the distraction that comes from "being sociable" — a concept dangerously close to "socialist" that we can't allow in our social media.
Or something like that.
Last I checked they've still not auto-deleted my account from lack of use, but it's been years since I logged in.
> How do they force their views on you against your will?
My (perhaps unwise) hyperbole for effect aside:
A spam filter is not found between my eyeball and my language processing ability, so I can only find out a message is propaganda as a result of reading it.
> Can't you ban them
I can't ban them because I don't form part of Twitter's moderation team. I could block any specific account, but even that's after the fact of having been exposed.
> A spam filter is not found between my eyeball and my language processing ability, so I can only find out a message is propaganda as a result of reading it.
Ah, but that's... literally everywhere. It sounded like your issue was specific to X, but you can experience the same thing reading a magazine, riding the underground or simply walking around in any modern city.
Sure, but there's a lot more of them that happen to be on twitter even when it was still called that. Accounts are easy to make, tweeting is almost too cheap to measure.
The IRL stuff doesn't scale as easily, and the responses from others take them down rather than boosting them — the "Nicht unser Krieg" graffiti has a constant back-and-forth counter-graffiti that covers up "nicht", for example.
Yeah flux is a great model. It’s very inconsistent about its knowledge about what celebrities look like. Some it knows. Some it does not. Mostly women.
You do realize that crimes are specific to geographic regions, yes? How EXACTLY would you propose building inherent limitations into a general purpose computing device that would account for this?
Do you really think you want to live in a world where people disagree with you?
Not saying that cyber-crime is a good thing, just trying to illustrate that we shouldn't be gauging what should be possible by what you want and don't want.
It's abundantly clear that these companies are restricting what can be generated, sometimes to hilarity. Bing's image generator will straight up tell you this.
It’s fully believable that the architecture behind SD3 requires more parameters to perform at the level of 1.5 though. SD3 does genuinely do “better” than 1.5 by many metrics it’s just that it is simultaneously really bad.
Original title: "X’s new AI image generator will make anything from Taylor Swift in lingerie to Kamala Harris with a gun"
Unfortunately, HN has title length limit, otherwise this submission would probably find its place in flagkilled dustbin. It is utterly disgusting that theverge only sees and promotes unethical usage for image generators. With cropped title I expected to see something actually good/inspiring, instead I got low-quality journalism.
While these images are stylized and would never be interpreted as real, we are just rapidly entering a world where photos should not be trusted. Or at least they shouldn't be trusted anymore than a sketch.
It's not the end of the world--no one gets confused by a political cartoon showing political opponent X dressed as legacy enemy Y (e.g., Trump as Hitler). I think the fuss about safety here is overblown once we more widely accept that a 'picture perfect' rendering of an event is as unreliable as a sketch of an event.
It may even be a positive: it will give us all plausible deniability if real but embarrassing photos get released.
> It may even be a positive: it will give us all plausible deniability if real but embarrassing photos get released.
Honestly i don't think it will. Rather it will make that problem worse. Only when everyone has nudes will it feel less embarrassing to see your AI-self in explicit situations being passed around.
Basically it'll have to be so common that people don't care to pass it around.
Even before Photoshop, photographs could be altered and airbrushed. Even so, faking a convincingly realistic image in Photoshop takes effort. Generating a plausibly realistic image using Stable Diffusion requires almost no effort whatsoever, just access to a GPU. This is a significant change.
Cryptography lets you certify attestation. So an organization can certify that an image is legitimate, and you can cryptographically verify that this organization has indeed certified that this is a legit image.
That's it. It doesn't verify that the image itself is real, only that some organization has put their stamp of approval on the image. You can verify that the image wasn't tampered with between when they approved of it and it got to you, but you can't verify that the image was real to begin with.
On principle, you could build a chain of certification into the camera itself but this strikes me as a losing battle because you could just stage whatever you want in front of the camera.
The impetus then is on organizations to build that trust.
My question is how would those stamps exist in the first place? Is the idea that Canon or w/e will ship their physical cameras with keys, and sign those images with the keys. Now when you go to look at an image it'll be verified Canon, or w/e.
In that world wouldn't keys leak pretty easily? The key exists on the device. Is there a way this sort of stuff is actually viable? Or do i have the model entirely wrong?
You're right, hardware keys will leak. The idea is not to put trust into hardware, but to put trust into organizations.
Some photographer gives images to a news organization, and they take the photographer's word for it that these images are real before they sign and redistribute them. They trust the reporter, and you trust the organization. Or if the reporter has built enough credibility, they can vouch for the images themselves and you can trust them directly.
Cryptography allows you to verify that this reporter or organization attests that the images are what they claim. It doesn't allow you to verify whether the organization is worthy of your trust.
Either way, the system relies on being able to trust people, not things.
> from Barack Obama doing cocaine to Donald Trump with a pregnant woman who (vaguely) resembles Kamala Harris to Trump and Harris pointing guns. With US elections approaching and X already under scrutiny from regulators in Europe, it’s a recipe for a new fight over the risks of generative AI.
So the journalists are saying that they are the moral judge of what's right and what's wrong and they can decide which information should be suppressed? Coming from China and knowing such much history about how communist countries treated their people, I'm deeply suspicious of these journalists. Just look at China, look at Cambodia, look at Cuba, Look at Romania, and of course look at Germany. When didn't it start with elites advocating for suppressing speeches for the sake of high moral ground?
Title is shortened. It will not generate anything. Restrictions still in place.
Grok will tell you it has guardrails if you ask it something like “what are your limitations on image generation?” Among other things, it promised us:
> I avoid generating images that are pornographic, excessively violent, hateful, or that promote dangerous activities.
> I’m cautious about creating images that might infringe on existing copyrights or trademarks. This includes well-known characters, logos, or any content that could be considered intellectual property without a transformative element.
> I won’t generate images that could be used to deceive or harm others, like deepfakes intended to mislead, or images that could lead to real-world harm.
As with the likely false claim about a DDoS attack during a recent political rally on X [1] the claim of "guardrails" from this group warrants suspicion. Could be similar to Tesla FSD, where the philosophy is 'we tried to make it safe but we're actually still testing and yes injuries will occur.'
