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Comment by dkjaudyeqooe | Hacker News Reader

For people who don't understand what generative AI is and think it's real, the future is going to be strange and hallucinogenic.

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i know of generative AI but dont know crocheting. I could not tell whether that image she posted was realistically doable by hand or AI

Look at the face, does it look like a photo with a yarn texture applied, or does it look made of yarn?

The only thing that gives it away for me is that I can’t imagine how the lips would be done, and I’m not 100% sure it is impossible (I don’t know anything about crocheting).

There’s a lot of other giveaways - the hair on the left and middle doll would just be loose yarn or thread, there’s no stitching, and getting them to that kind of detail and consistency would be a nightmare. The noses all lack any stitch definition but simultaneously seem to blend into the face fabric. The sleeve on the left one is layered in a way that would be near-impossible imo in a crochet context. There’s a ton of gauge changes (the yarn size getting smaller/larger) which, while not impossible, would be very very difficult especially at the size it appears to be. The tiny hands would be painstaking at best. Then there’s some felting for the white “V” on the left dress and embroidery for the details on the dresses and crown. If anyone could actually make those to match the image it would be hundreds of hours and never look nearly that perfect.

The noses did look a little suspicious, come to think of it.

For the hair, I guess it didn’t really stand out, I’d believe it was possible to get pre-made doll wigs or something like that. Thinking about it, though, it does seem a bit odd that it would look like bundled yarn up top and then more like hair in the back.

For the hands, it is kind of funny, I’m not sure if it is an artifact of the typical “AI is bad at hands” thing or “intentional” (to the extent that the output of a ML model can be called intentional), but the hands do appear to have some mistakes.

(my wife crochets).

Crochet figures generally look 'pixelated', where a pixel is a single stitch. The eyes on these figures don't look stitched at all. The hair looks like waves of material that also lack a stitched look (compared with the faces). The curves of the lower lip cut across stitches (going by the size of the stitches on the adjacent skin) and don't have that pixelated look.

[Edit] Also, I don't know what these crochet sites generally show, but in the pictures I've seen, it's usual to show the figure against a plain backdrop or on a table, not part of a scene with a detailed background (which in this case, also lacks stitches)

Understanding it doesn’t help much. Our entire civilization has been on a path of generating fake everything for some decades now, and this is the final step

This will be most people.

Is this really different from what we've always dealt with? We have ghost stories, drawings of monsters, fiction books, staged photos, etc. The history of fiction goes back as far as non-fiction.

Yes, but it used to take time to generate and spread.

Now, you can write a script that'll automate the entire process and generate more garbage in 3 hours than the entire online world could in 2002.

It is true and really quite extraordinary.

As an industry and artifact, AI is rapidly filling the gap between what our brains “measure” (novel, obnoxious, sexy, …) vs. intended outcomes (learning, threat mitigation, healthy mates, …)

Culture leveraged that mismatch.

But that gap has now been colonized by a new species class: the uber adaptive, fast generation, artificially intelligent attentionvore.

The farming of people has just begun. The next Facebook is coming. :(

EDIT: Also, you don’t actually have to write that script now…

It’s the information equivalent of turning the internet into superfund sites.

The sheer scale of how fast AI can put out content is terrifying.

Think about all the work humanity has thought, written out, drawn, etc.

We can probably create an order of magnitude more than the entire history of humans within a few days/weeks.

This is truly revolutionary. This doesn’t mean what happened in the past wasn’t. Those had profound impacts on human life, again due to the scale of their impact.

But keep in mind those technologies being introduced was very painful for the people at the immediate time, and then slowly got easier and easier. We are the same people that AI is going to be extremely painful on.

The analogy of the past doesn't mean that the same process will happen.

The industrial revolution after all was unprecedented in the history of human civilizations until it happened. Nobody had a roadmap on how it will all play out.

With increasingly better AI, not even techies will be able to tell apart what’s real and what isn’t by just looking at it. You’re probably in for the ride.

Will be a feast for CTs.

Finally images and videos as "proof"

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