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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Some voices are “$politicalParty should win at all costs” and “my ex-spouse should be humiliated” and “my boss should go to jail for the pittance they pay me”, and instead of text opinions posted or voices shouted, there’s video gen to amplify them. They didn’t have the skill to make a convincing fake video themselves but if tools are at their fingertips… temptation.
Really not ideal although obviously amazing artists will do incredible things with the technology that many of us will enjoy.
Well, you can imagine how the first and third examples could go far beyond protected speech.
Boss example -
The First Amendment wouldn’t protect the whole process of making deepfake videos created with the goal of spurring a false imprisonment in retaliation for perceived poor leadership, and sending them off to the company board and town police chief as if they’re real, asking for immediate action.
The long tail dream didn’t really happen in any single market which was democratized the same way in the past. Why do you expect something else now, especially on an already oversaturated market?
It's going to be just like social media. A flood of content from the talentless masses exposing us to their lazy and shallow ideas they just cannot keep to themselves. Once in a while a diamond in the rough will be found, but at what cost?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
