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Comment by damsta | Hacker News Reader

I don't think audio, image or video generation should exist. I haven't seen enough positive applications to justify the amount of harm these tools are being used to cause.

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What are the positive applications? This all seems to be generating fake images/videos just because we can, not because it solves any real problems. It makes me wonder where the money is coming from to fund this stuff. Why would a regular person want to generate fake videos except for purposes of deception or debauchery?

Benefit: entertainment

Downsides: *

(Well <all> minus entertainment)

The lack of creative understanding is astounding: all these generative media AI are fantastic for education applications. Sure, the vast majority want to use them to jerk off, but that's what humanity does anyway. Education is where these are extremely useful, and that is for the aid in conveying understanding to those that need the Jazz Hands of an image or audio or a video presentation to grasp the concept they are not.

It's been here for a while, where are the numbers?

Youtube is also great for education, yet 99% of the watch time is pure brainrot entertainment

The numbers reflect the vast majority jerking off, self entertaining. To find the 1% of the 1% that use anything for self improvement, one needs to look at the statistical tails. Because that market is so small, and their skills so advanced, you will not hear about them because they represent too small a market for our pop culture to try to leverage them for profits, other low hanging fruit is far too sweet, such as all the idiots that want to jerk off and will pay.

> What are the positive applications?

Generating large training video datasets for robotics is going to be huge. Google used generative AI to make training data for self-driving cars (Waymo). This is by far the most promising facet of this tech, IMHO, and hugely underestimated in potential future impact.

I was a content moderator for Midjourney for many years. I’ve seen more AI-generated debauchery than I could ever hope to convey. I also saw 100,000x more joy, creativity, beauty and expression in that same community.

Unfortunately, millions of people playing around having low-key fun making low-effort art is a boring headline. One person getting caught trying to be gross with AI drives a million times more media engagement than a million people trying to be creative for once. So, guess which one the media focuses on.

It seems like the race to the bottom slowed down with audio, video and image generation models.

OpenAI has completely shifted focus, Google still is working on various toolings/models but ultimately most people are unwilling to pay for these generations, whereby code, can easily be burned (and paid for) by businesses.

image gen isn't a proven market (at least not yet).

While I generally think it's balanced against a lot of negative applications (misinformation, deepfakes, etc.), there are some good applications. I think regulation just hasn't sufficiently caught up with the harm they can cause.

To give a good use case (audio generation specifically), the 2002 game Morrowind has had a resurgence lately and it's a really great game, but it lacks fully voiced lines for dialogue. A community project called Voices of Vvardenfell uses ElevenAI to generate voice lines from the voiced lines that do exist in the game. They don't take away jobs from artists because it was a monumental (unpaid) undertaking from community volunteers to do this before (there was such a big project but it was abandoned last I saw).

So as with any emerging technologies, I think it just needs to be properly regulated.

> They don't take away jobs from artists

Does the game with improvements now better compete against other games with paid human voice actors?

The game is from 2002. Anybody wanting to play the game either buys it for nostalgia or as an enthusiast. All the mod does is increase accessibility.

Morrowind wasn't meant to be narrated, NPCs blur out walls of text with hyperlinks in them leading to more walls of text. If I had to sit idle while someone/something was reading all of this to me, I'd be bored out of my mind.

>To give a good use case (audio generation specifically), the 2002 game Morrowind has had a resurgence lately and it's a really great game, but it lacks fully voiced lines for dialogue.

This isn't how art works. Reminds me of this twitter post.

https://x.com/DonnelVillager/status/1741394747594318275

You can mod the game however you want, but to imply that its somehow a incomplete game because it "lacks voice acting" is just wrong.

It doesn't lack those voiced lines because of some purposeful artistic goal.

Yet adding them wouldn't make the game better, as it just wasn't designed around voiced lines. NPCs in Morrowind are much more numerous and verbose than in Oblivion or Skyrim. To some like me, the sequel games were downgrades in that regard.

Art is designed around the constraints that existed at the time when it was created, the constraints are part of the art.

All art is a compromise between artistic vision and economic reality.

I liked the vast modding community around Morrowind and had plenty of fun playing around with it in my younger years.

If the concept of art one has in mind limits creative endeavour and acts as a gatekeeper to art, then it is probably better not to have a concept of art at all.

I'm glad I'll never find out how much fun, skill gain and artful cultural production I might have missed if I had carried a false, limiting idea of art back then.

Cause chaos and let society fall into disarray, and upgrade an old game with some trifle, or not having either of those? Tough choice.

> They don't take away jobs from artists

In this particular case. In other cases, they do.

I can't believe you think this feeble example justifies anything.

My comment addresses this.

Regulation around the world needs to catch up to address the harmful nature of the technology, as it is currently moving faster than the politicians can / want to move.

First, it is notoriously difficult to regulate such things.

Second, why bother? Media generation has a small number of barely beneficial use cases, and a whole bunch of large to potentially catastrophic negatives.

You comment is completely unethical it's funny you think you are saying something good

Now they cause harm because there's people that may believe a fake video is real. But people is developing skepticism about what they see in videos and learning to think that they may be generated, before taking them as true.

What kind of harms do you have in mind?

No longer being able to tell whether any image or video is real due to the extreme ease of creating realistic fakes, is itself a harm.

It might actually be helpful to push through and out to the other side.

Think about how many completely fake videos are going to be flying around for the next election. Nobody is going to believe anything the see online.

What is the the next stage, where the only things you believe are things you see with your own eyes.

>things you see with your own eyes

Oh I wouldn't trust myself!

  In his study, "Nearly 2,000 witnesses can be wrong", Buckhout performed an experiment with 2,145 at-home viewers of a popular news broadcast. The television network played a 13-second clip of a mock robbery, produced by Buckhout. ... The people at home could call a number on their screen to report which suspect they believed was the perpetrator. The perpetrator was suspect number 2. ... Approximately equal contingents of participants chose suspects 1, 2, or 5, while the largest group of participants, about 25 percent, said they believed the perpetrator was not in the lineup. Even police precincts called in and reported the wrong man as the one they believed committed the crime.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eyewitness_testimony#Reliabili...

Also-mentioned concepts: misinformation effect, source misattribution, confirmation bias.

You've seen movies before. You know that they can make fake videos look realistic. We have an entire industry built around it, so why is it only a harm now?

Since it took a certain amount of time and effort, as well as skill in the past, it was a significantly lesser problem than it's becoming now. Especially with video footage.

plus all the money and people involved created a paper trail, which meant proving something was "faked" much easier

that no longer exists with genAI models

It will be solved. Walleted, vertically integrated Apple can do a digital authenticity signature and guarantee that the video you see was at least shot on iPhone, and I won’t be surprised if it will happen soon. This + some lidar info will be enabled and everybody except minority will say that this is a great thing to have.

until models will be trained to fake that too

I’m not talking about watermarks, I’m talking about hardware digital signature.

Couldn't I just take a photo of an AI image with my phone? I suppose that'd where the LIDAR comes in.

> I haven't seen enough positive applications

If in the future they can create a reward model to aid with creating super human levels of appeal tailored to me, I would considered it one of the best technologies ever made. I'm not sentimental about the source, pretty videos and pictures make me happy

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