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Comment by weinzierl | Hacker News Reader

"I don't think anyone has reliable information about post-2021 language usage by humans."

We've been past the tipping point when it comes to text for some time, but for video I feel we are living through the watershed moment right now.

Especially smaller children don't have a good intuition on what is real and what is not. When I get asked if the person in a video is real, I still feel pretty confident to answer but I get less and less confident every day.

The technology is certainly there, but the majority of video content is still not affected by it. I expect this to change very soon.

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There are a series of challenges like:

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/09/09/technology/ai...

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/01/19/technology/ar...

These are a little bit unfair, in that we're comparing handpicked examples, but I don't think many experts will pass a test like this. Technology only moves forward (and seemingly, at an accelerating pace).

What's a little shocking to me is the speed of progress. Humanity is almost 3 million years old. Homosapiens are around 300,000 years old. Cities, agriculture, and civilization is around 10,000. Metal is around 4000. Industrial revolution is 500. Democracy? 200. Computation? 50-100.

The revolutions shorten in time, seemingly exponentially.

Comparing the world of today to that of my childhood....

One revolution I'm still coming to grips with is automated manufacturing. Going on aliexpress, so much stuff is basically free. I bought a 5-port 120W (total) charger for less than 2 minutes of my time. It literally took less time to find it than to earn the money to buy it.

I'm not quite sure where this is all headed.

+100w chargers are one of the products I prefer to spend a little more on, so I get something from a company that knows it can be sued if they make a product that burns down your house or fries your phone.

Flashlights? Sure, bring on aliexpress. USB cables with pop-off magnetically attached heads, no problem. But power supplies? Welp, to each their own!

And then you plug your cheap pop-off USB cable into the expensive 100w charger?

Yeah, sure, what could possibly go wrong? :-P

But seriously, it's harder to accidentally make a USB cable that fries your equipment. The more common failure mode is it fails to work, or wears out too fast. Chargers on the other hand, handle a lot of voltage, generate a lot of heat, and output to sensitive equipment. More room to mess up, and more room for mistakes to cause damage.

> One revolution I'm still coming to grips with is automated manufacturing. Going on aliexpress, so much stuff is basically free. I bought a 5-port 120W (total) charger for less than 2 minutes of my time. It literally took less time to find it than to earn the money to buy it.

Is there a big recent qualitative change here? Or is this a continuation of manufacturing trends (also shocking, not trying to minimize it all, just curious if there’s some new manufacturing tech I wasn’t aware of).

For some reason, your comment got me thinking of a fully automated system, like: you go to a website, pick and choose charger capabilities (ports, does it have a battery, that sort of stuff). Then an automated factor makes you a bespoke device (software picks an appropriate shell, regulators, etc). I bet we’ll see it in our lifetimes at least.

> so much stuff is basically free

It really isn't. Have a look at daily median income statistics for the rest of the planet:

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/daily-median-income?tab=t...

  $2.48 Eastern and Southern Africa (PIP)
  $2.78 Sub-Saharan Africa (PIP)
  $3.22 Western and Central Africa (PIP)
  $3.72 India (rural)
  $4.22 South Asia (PIP)
  $4.60 India (urban)
  $5.40 Indonesia (rural)
  $6.54 Indonesia (urban)
  $7.50 Middle East and North Africa (PIP)
  $8.05 China (rural)
  $10.00 East Asia and Pacific (PIP)
  $11.60 Latin America and the Caribbean (PIP)
  $12.52 China (urban)

And more generally:

  $7.75 World

I looked around on Ali, and the cheapest charger that doesn't look too dangerous costs around five bucks. So it's roughly equal to one day's income of at least half the population of our planet.

> "The revolutions shorten in time, seemingly exponentially."

The Technological Singularity - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_singularity

Democracy is 200? You're off by a full order of magnitude.

Progress isn't inevitable. It's possible for knowledge to be lost and for civilization to regress.

Okay. You're right about what I wrote. Let me rephrase what I meant. I was missing the words "the widespread adoption of"

Athens had a democracy over 2500 years ago. A few Native American tribes had long-lasting democracies. Ukrainian cities were democratically self-governing 500 years ago, and Poland had elected kings.

Those were isolated examples. This was not a revolution. We also haven't regressed; isolated examples continued throughout history. If you point to a year, you can probably find some democracy somewhere. The only major regression I know in history was around 1000BC. Regressions are rare.

What changed was a revolution. From just before 1800 to just a little after 1900, virtually every country had a revolution which led to either being some form of democracy, or pretending to be one. Democracy was no longer isolated. We had the creation of a free world covering much of the world's population, and the creation of what was pretending to be a democracy (today, even the Democratic People's Republic of Korea pretends to be a democracy).

The number of countries which claim to not be a democracy, you can count on your fingers. Iran. Vatican City. Saudi Arabia. UAE. Oman. Eswanti. Did I miss any?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_system_of...

Democracy (and Republics) are thousands of year old. Computation is also quite old though it only sky-rocketed with electricity and semiconductors. This is not the first time the global world created a potential for exponential growth (I'll consider the Pharaohs and Roman empires to be ones).

There is the very real possibility that everything just stalls and plateau where we are at. You know, like our population growth, it should have gone exponentially but it did not. Actually, quite the reverse.

> When I get asked if the person in a video is real, I still feel pretty confident to answer

I don't share your confidence in identifying real people anymore.

I often flag as "false-ish" a lot of things from genuinely real people, but who have adopted the behaviors of the TikTok/Insta/YouTube creator. Hell, my beard is grey and even I poked fun at "YouTube Thumbnail Face" back in 2020 in a video talk I gave. AI twigs into these "semi-human" behavioral patterns super fast and super hard.

There is a video floating around with pairs of young ladies with "This is real"/"This is not real" on signs. They could be completely lying about both, and I really can't tell the difference. All of them have behavioral patterns that seems a little "off" but are consistent with the small number of "influencer" videos I have exposure to.

> When I get asked if the person in a video is real, I still feel pretty confident to answer

I don't. I mean, I can identify the bad ones, sure, but how do I know I'm not getting fooled by the good ones?

That is very true, but for now we have a baseline of videos that we either remember or that we remember key details of, like the persons in the video. I'm pretty sure if I watch The Primeagen or Tom Scott today, that they are real. Ask me in year, I might not be so sure anymore.

I never thought about that. Humans losing their ability to detect AI content from reality ? It's frightening.

I find issue with this statement as content was never a clean representation of human actions or even thought. It was always driven by editorials, SEO, bot remixing and whatnot that heavily influences how we produce content. One might even argue that heightened content distrust is _good_ for our society.

It's worse because many humans don't know they are.

I see a lot of outrage around fake posts already. People want to believe bad things from the other tribes.

And we are going to feed them with it, endlessly.

Did you think the same thing when photoshop came out?

It's relatively trivial to photoshop misinformation in a really powerful and undetectable way- but I don't see (legitimate) instances of groundbreaking news over a fake photo of the president or a CEO etc doing something nefarious. Why is AI different just because it's audio/video?

"AI" is different because it's low-effort and easily automated, making it easy to absolutely flood public spaces. Quantity has a quality all its own.

I did.

And it's not the grounbreaking the problem, it's the little constant lies.

Last week a photoshopped Musk tweet was going around, people getting all up in arms against it despite the fact it was very easy to spot as a fabricated one.

People didn't care, they hate the guy, they just wanted to fuel their hate more.

The whole planet run on fake content, magazin covers, food packaging, instagram pics of places that never looks that way...

And now, with AI, you can automate it and scale it up.

People are not ready. And in fact, they don't want to be.

It's worse: they don't even care.

This video's worth a watch if you want to get a sense of the current state of things. Despite the (deliberately) clickbait title, the video itself is pretty even-handed.

It's by Language Jones, a YouTube linguist. Title: "The AI Apocalypse is Here"

https://youtu.be/XeQ-y5QFdB4

It's even worse than that. Most people have no idea how far CGI has come, and how easily it is wielded even by a couple of dedicated teens on their home computer, let alone people with a vested interest in faking something for some financial reason. People think they know what a "special effect" looks like, and for the most part, people are wrong. They know what CGI being used to create something obviously impossible, like a dinosaur stomping through a city, looks like. They have no idea how easy a lot of stuff is to fake already. AI just adds to what is already there. Heck, to some extent it has caused scammers to overreach, with things like obviously fake Elon Musk videos on YouTube generated from (pure) AI and text-to-speech... when with just a little bit more learning, practice, and amounts of equipment completely reasonable for one person to obtain, they could have done a much better fake of Elon Musk using special effects techniques rather than shoveling text into an AI. The fact that "shoveling text into an AI" may in another few years itself generate immaculate videos is more a bonus than a fundamental change of capability.

Even what's free & open source in the special effects community is astonishing lately.

Plus, movies continue (for some reason) to be made with very bad and obvious CGI, leading people to believe all CGI is easy to spot.

This is a common survivorship bias fallacy since you only notice the bad CGI.

I'm certain you'd be shocked to see the amount of CG that's in some of your favorite movies made in the last ~10-20 years that you didn't notice because it's undetectable

I won’t be, I’m aware that lots of movies are mostly CGI.

But, yeah, I do think it is some kind of bias. Maybe not survivorship, though… maybe it is a generalized sort of Malmquist bias? Like the measurement is not skewed by the tendency of movies with good CGI to go away. It is skewed by the fact that bad CGI sticks out.

Actually wait I take it back, I mean, I was aware that lots of Digital Touch-up happens in movie sets, more than lots of people might expect, and more often that one might expect even in mundane movies, but even still, this comment’s video was pretty shocking anyway.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41584276

This is an amazing demo reel of effects shots used in "mundane" TV shows - comedies and produce procedurals. - for faking locations.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=clnozSXyF4k

That is really something even as somebody who expects lots of CGI touch-up in sets.

And keep in mind - that video is 14 years old!

Luckily, for those of us who prefer when film photography meant at least mostly actually filming things, there’s plenty of very good film and TV (and even more of lesser quality) to keep a person occupied for a couple lifetimes.

I hate this. I did not notice the vast majority of them. So many backgrounds/sets are just green screens :(

And you see things like the The Lion King remake or its upcoming prequel being called "live action" because it doesn't look like a cartoon like the original. But they didn't film actual lions running around -- it's all CGI.

I mean, it's already apparent to me that a lot of people don't have a basic process in place to detect fact from fiction. And it's definitely not always easy, but when I hear some of the dumbest conspiracy theories known to man actually get traction in our media, political figures, and society at large, I just have to shake my head and laugh to keep from crying. I'm constantly reminded of my favorite saying, "people who believe in conspiracy theories have never been a project manager."

Oh they definitely are. A lot of people are now calling out real photos as fake. I frequently get into stupid Instagram political arguments and a lot of times they come back with "yeah nice profile with all your AI art haha". It's all real high quality photography. Honestly, I don't think the avg person can tell anymore.

I've reached a point where even if my first reaction to a photo is to be impressed, I then quickly think "oh but what it this is AI?" and then immediately my excitement for the photo is ruined because it may not actually be a photo at all.

I don't get that perspective at all. Who cares what made it.

You don't find a difference between things that exist and things that don't?

>Humans losing their ability to detect AI content from reality ? It's frightening.

And it already happened, and no one pushed back while it was happening.

It's a defense lawyer's dream.

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