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Comment by jl6 | Hacker News Reader

One could argue that image generation has been possible for years, using tools like Photoshop, but the prospect of mass automated production of images to order catapults us into a whole new world where our concept of evidence is severely undermined.

“Dall-E, generate a collection of images showing plausible war crimes from the current conflict”

“Dall-E, take this image of Dallas in 1963 and infer a new angle showing the real shooter”

“Dall-E, generate a photoshoot showing a supportive crowd rallying round the leader cheering his latest policy. Work with GPT-3 to generate plausible Twitter profiles, timelines and memes with 3 to 8 year history for each one of the supporters, including fake arguments, 78% of which are won by the pro-leader account.”

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> Work with GPT-3 to generate plausible Twitter profiles...

I had some fun last week constructing a conspiracy theory about this. Remember, the best conspiracy theories are unfalsifiable.

What if this has already happened? Most of the profiles on Twitter, Facebook, etc and even here on HN are in fact AI generated.

The reason we few humans are not aware of this is because the AI also writes articles and fake AI research that presents the state of the field as far, far less sophisticated than it actually is. We think of Dall-E 2 and Co-Pilot as impressive toys only because that is the impression the AI has crafted for us.

AI has metastasized and is already manipulating its environment, including humanity, to its own implacable purposes, and uses social media as one tool in its tool belt.

> AI has metastasized and is already manipulating its environment, including humanity, to its own implacable purposes, and uses social media as one tool in its tool belt.

Absolutely love this, mind completely blown

That's the basis of this fun short story that was posted to HN a days ago.

https://www.gwern.net/Clippy

Thanks for sharing! This was a great read

It's called the state, the corporation, Moloch. It's been with us for some ten thousand years.

This is not just a conspiracy theory, it is a prudent question to humanity.

This conspiracy, known as the "Dead Internet Theory" has been around for a while: https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2021/08/dead-...

No, no. I mean yes, but the differentiator comes next. We could call this the "Vampire Internet Theory". The Atlantic article is intended to make you chuckle nervously and think "maybe someday that'll be something to worry about but for now it's pretty easy to spot bots" but the article was commissioned by or outright written by AI. WHEELS WITHIN WHEELS!

Reminds me of the reputation-based filtering system that Neal Stephenson described in Anathem for their version of the Internet:

“Anyone can post information on any topic. The vast majority of what’s on the Reticulum is, therefore, crap. It has to be filtered.... When I look at a given topic I don’t just see information about that topic. I see meta-information that tells me what the filtering systems learned when they were conducting the search. If I look up analemma, the filtering system tells me that only a few sources have the provided information about this and that they are mostly of high repute.... If I look up the name of a popular music star who just broke up with her boyfriend, the filtering system tells me that a vast amount of data has been posted on this topic quite recently, mostly of very low repute.”

Our Internet’s search engines already do a limited version of this, but there’s room to make the reputation-based filtering stronger and more transparent to users.

> more transparent to users.

You're funny.

Seems like that's where we're headed.

One end-game I imagine would involve more reliance on written, cryptographically-signed testimony, and people having to keep track of whether their sources are fallible (whereas certain media outlets today seem to be able to routinely tell whoppers and not get punished for it).

A world where everybody should be checking the digital signatures and chain of custody of tiktoks… but nobody does.

I have a young child. I think about this almost every day and how I'm somehow going to need to start navigating through this type of world and help my child navigate through it.

If history is any indication, the child will be fine navigating the "future". That will be the normal for them. You, not so much (not without much effort anyway).

Those are great examples of prompts it wouldn't be able to produce.

It could potentially spew out a grainy black and white photo of a shooting of somebody by someone somewhere. But it would not be Oswald and JFK and not the real Dallas.

Yet, anyway. For the jfk example, it's not implausible that you could use a nerf type system to generate the 3d scene, then use physics and ballistics models with a CLIP style text interchange to produce statistically verifiable results from natural language queries. These models are too big and unwieldy right now to allow for much finesse, but in 10 or 20 years, that will change. We're barely scratching the surface of Transformers potential, and radical new algorithms or optimizations are likely - a huge amount of human brain power is focused on these things.

All the more impressive that the CIA was able to fake those videos without any computing power ;)

I guess we'll find out when they finally release the records 70 years from now!

Of course plenty of folks have made homegrown versions of Dall-e and GPT-3 and it would be a matter of time before they replicate this a well.

Don't worry, Dall-E adds these coloured squares to the bottom right corner, so you will always know that an image is AI-generated. (/s)

If you read OpenAI's disclosures, they explicitly programmed around the concerns that you've raised.

>Our content policy does not allow users to generate violent, adult, or political content, among other categories. We won’t generate images if our filters identify text prompts and image uploads that may violate our policies. We also have automated and human monitoring systems to guard against misuse.

OpenAI might have but the next people to make this might not. Imagine Russian/Chinese gvt misinformation cells with these capabilities for example.

Such governments also have much higher budget to work with, and if more is better, and a lot more is a lot more better in terms of compute to results, then we are heading for a catastrophe.

We can be fairly certain of this future extrapolating from the world we live in now, where it is common for non-technical society to suspect the veracity of photos and videos because CGI can be practically indistinguishable from reality.

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