I saw my first AI video that completely fooled commenters: https://imgur.com/a/cbjVKMU
This was not marked as AI-generated and commenters were in awe at this fuzzy train, missing the "AIGC" signs.
I'm quite nervous for the future.
This was not marked as AI-generated and commenters were in awe at this fuzzy train, missing the "AIGC" signs.
I'm quite nervous for the future.
A) Most of the give aways are pretty subtle and not what viewers are focused on. Sure, if you look closely the fur blends in with the pavement in some places, but I'm not going to spend 5 minutes investigating every video I see for hints of AI.
B) Even if I did notice something like that, I'm much more likely to write it off as a video filter glitch, a weird video perspective, or just low quality video. For example, when they show the inside of the car, the vertical handrails seem to bend in a weird way as the train moves, but I've seen similar things from real videos with wide angle lenses. Similar thoughts on one of the bystander's faces going blurry.
I think we just have to get people comfortable with the idea that you shouldn't trust a single unknown entity as the source or truth on things because everything can be faked. For insignificant things like this it doesn't matter, but for big things you need multiple independent sources. That's definitely an uphill battle and who knows if we can do it, but that's the only way we're going to get out the other side of this in one piece.
[1]: e.g. tiktok https://newsroom.tiktok.com/en-us/partnering-with-our-indust...
Then there's the usual giveways for CG - sharpness, noise, lighting, color temperature, saturation - none of them match. There's also no diffuse reflection of the intense pink color.
Indeed, a great (if counterintuitive) example of this is The Wolf of Wall Street. I bet a lot of people would be surprised at just how much CGI is used in that just for set/location.
The truth is... most people will simply not care. Raised eyebrow, hm, cute, next. Critical watching is reserved for critics like the crowd on HN and the like, but they represent only a small percentage of the target audience and revenue stream.
I’ve worked in CG for many years and despite the online nerd fests that decry CG imagery in films, 99% of those people can’t tell what’s CG or not unless it’s incredibly obvious.
It’s the same for GenAI, though I think there are more tells. Still, most people cannot tell reality from fiction. If you just tell them it’s real, they’ll most likely believe it.
I've noticed people assume things are CG that turn out to be practical effects, or 90% practical with just a bit of CG to add detail.
Worse, directors often lie about what’s practical and we’ll have replaced it with CG. So people online will cheer the “practicals” as being better visually, while not knowing what they’re even looking at.
I’ve seen interviews with actors even where they talk about how they look in a given shot or have done something, and not realize they’re not even really in the shot anymore.
People just have terrible eyes once you can convince them something is a certain way.
Lawrence of Arabia or Cleopatra alone have incredible fully live shot special effects which can not be easily replicated with CG and have aged like fine wine, unlike the trash early CG of the 80s and 90s which ruined otherwise great films like the last starfighter
You’re taking the best films of an era and comparing them to an arbitrary list of movies you don’t like? Adding to that, you’re comparing it to films in the infancy of a technology?
This is peak confusion of causality and correlation. There are tons of great films in that time frame with CG. Unless you’re going to argue that Jurassic Park is bad.
Especially because I’ve done both on set and virtual production, it’s hard to suspend disbelief in a lot of films.
This goes for conversation too! My neighbour recently told me about a mutual neighbour who walks 200 miles per day working on his farm. When I explained that this is impossible he said "I'll have to disagree with you there"
https://www.reddit.com/r/Ultramarathon/comments/xhbs4d/sorok...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aleksandr_Sorokin
So, not very convenient for a non-world-champion runner to do (let alone while doing farm work) (let alone on more than one occasion).
In my opinion anyway, I'm gonna have to disagree with any counterpoints in advance.
If all opinions are equal, and we’ve reinforced that you can find anything to strengthen an opinion, then facts don’t actually matter.
But I don’t think it’s actually all that recent. History is full of people saying that facts or logic don’t matter. The Americas were “discovered” by such a phenomenon.
A related phenomenon is not being able to hear the difference between 128kbps and 320kbps. I find the notion astonishing, and yet lots of people cannot tell the difference.
But also in the case of the fluffy train there's nothing to compare it against. The reason CGI humans look the most fake is because we're trained from birth to read a human face. Someone that looks at trains on a regular basis will probably discern this as being fake quicker than most.
But what I was thinking while enjoying the show was: people wouldn't do that, if it didn't work.
This is the point. There is no such thing as "completely fools commenters". I mean, it didn't fool you, apparently. (But don't be sad, I bet you were fooled by something else: you just don't know it, obviously.) But some of it always fools somebody.
I really liked how Thiel mentioned on some podcast that ChatGPT successfully passed Turing test, which was implicitly assumed to be "the holy grail of AI", and nobody really noticed. This is completely true. We don't really think about ChatGPT, as something that passes Turing test, we think how fucking stupid useless thing mislead you with some mistake in calculations you decided to delegate to it. But realistically, if it doesn't it's only because it is specifically trained to try to avoid passing it.
You can't assume that with scams. Quite often, scams are themselves sold as a get-rich-quick scheme, which like all GRQ schemes, they wouldn't be if they worked well.
Videos like these were already achievable through VFX.
The only difference here is a reduction in costs. That does mean that more people will produce misinformation, but the problem is one that we have had time to tackle, and which gave rise to Snopes and many others.
It also took me a while to find any truly unambiguous signs of AI generation. For example, the reflection on the inside of the windows is wonky, but in real life warped glass can also produce weird reflections. I finally found a dark rectangle inside the door window, which at first stays fixed like a sign on the glass. However it then begins to move like part of the reflection, which really broke the illusion for me.
[1]: https://web.archive.org/web/20120829004513/http://stuffucanu...