The fediverse used to feel pretty anti-ai, but over the past month or two I’ve noticed a LOT of generated memes and images, and they tend to have positive votes.
Has there been a sudden culture shift here? Or is there a substantial percentage of people just unable to tell the difference anymore?
John Oliver did a show on this recently, in summary: “not all AI is spam, but all spam is AI”. My take, legitimate accounts with a long history are cheap to generate, they’re a great purchase to help spread bad faith disinformation and look legit. It’s a business model.
I honestly don’t see much from the comms I follow (and it’s a lot thanks to piefed topics), and when I do browse all, if I find a post from a comm that allows them, I either ignore it or block the comm, for example a genAI art comms.
Idk, lemmy, mbin, piefed, etc isn’t reddit with algorithms so it’s kind of on the user if they see a lot of it, IMO.
People don’t care. as long as they can get their infinite scroll with funny picture, they’re happy.
This brings up an excellent point about addiction. A
quicklonger than I’d planned anecdote: over the last few years I’ve nearly completely dumped all social media (and big tech in general). Facebook, Insta, Twitter, all gone. The only social for the last few years I’ve had left was Reddit, and I dumped that a couple months ago (all social media is toxic, I learned).I swapped Reddit for Lemmy a few months ago and noticed a huge difference, not just the fewer toxic people, but in the lack of posts overall by comparison. I found myself scrolling through the same Lemmy posts throughout the day, my brain trying to repeat the cycle from Reddit, but stayed strong and didn’t go back to Reddit haha.
Anyway, there’s still toxicity on Lemmy, and I realized how much it affects me without the cloud of all the other socials bogging it down. Not a lot, but enough. So I made a decision and went back to my old nerd days. I didn’t want to miss out on legit articles I was interested in from social media so I set up an rss reader. I started checking out Lemmy in the morning, and my rss throughout the day, which doesn’t update often.
What I found at first was I was re-checking lemmy, re-loading rss, and thinking about what else I can put on my phone to scratch that itch. I was (am) still addicted to the dopamine hit of forever-feeds of useless garbage. So instead, I picked up a book. It’s been a long time, and it’s a slow adjustment, but wow is it ever so much better. Aside from some small interaction on Lemmy in the morning like this, I don’t see comments anymore, I read the info I’m interested in reading and make my own judgments without comments trying to sway me, and use my former doom-scrolling time to read a book.
To sum up, you’re absolutely right. Addiction is a bitch and the average person doesn’t even realize they’re addicted.
A lot of people are some combination of lazy, stupid, ignorant, and/or indifferent.
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There’s a whole instance of pro-AI users; many are toxic AF about it.
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The average person is a moron
Which instance is pro ai?
I think it’s the one I use (dbzer0). I’m pretty sure it’s explicitly pro-AI generated content.
Huh, I wouldn’t have guessed db0, interesting. I’d kinda considered exploring db0 as a future instance but maybe its not such a good fit for me. Thanks for the answer!
What I’ll say is that I really don’t mind it. Personally, I’m not a big fan of AI art at all, and I don’t really use generative AI much in any capacity. I also don’t see generative AI on my feed… Basically ever? I guess because I don’t really browse Local.
db0 is anarchist, and that does come with some lenience that some people might find to be a little off-putting, but the AI part of it is pretty much irrelevant, unless you’re seeking it out - from my experience, at least, and based on how I use Lemmy.
Not that I mean to shill for db0 tho lol use whatever instance you feel like fits you best!
They claim they are not cool with generative AI and yet, that’s 90℅ of anything to do with AI posted to/by the instance.
They claim they are not cool with generative AI
Are you sure about that? The instance description explicitly endorses generative AI. I think you might’ve misread.
We’re not against GenAI as a tech. We’re against corporate GenAI though.
I would say that the general mood here that generative AI for creative use or technical tasks is fine, enabling people is a good thing. We are primarily an anarchist community, and generally not happy with the massive corporate control over something that should belong to everyone (bc the models are the cultural output of everyone) and the amount of VC money that is used to push AI where it doesn’t belong in search of the next big thing.
Quite a few people run models on their own hardware (like me, to support me when learning stuff, or when my wife wants new seasonal pics representing our cats in cute styles) or are using AI Horde
There are users on our instance that are not cool with GenAI in general, but they are the minority.
db0
Did you know that there are no instances* defederated from dbzer0? So apart from setting up and running your own instance to defederate**, there is no way of making your feed filter out the subset of users from dbzer0 who think they should spread their instance’s values of AI content across all parts of the Fediverse, whether or not it is welcome there? Did you also know that Fediseer, the default web tool for instances to document issues and endorsements of other instances, which incidentally is maintained by the admin of db0, shows that lemmy.dbzer0.com has received no censures whatsoever from other instances? Do you think that users who avidly use AI to generate visual content for their posts may also avidly use AI to generate their text posts and comments? Countless accounts could simply be 1s and 0s from a machine instead of any actual human soul behind it (wait, isn’t that why many Lemmings left Reddit?).
*barring instances with hidden blocklists
**or instead manually blocking every user from dbzer0, which would be futile as they continue to gain users
No need to block every user from the instance, you can block the entire instance in your account settings.
Copied from another comment of mine:
It seems as though you misunderstand how blocking instances and defederation work. If I am hosted on instance X and I block instance Y but don’t block instance Z, users from instance Y can still post onto communities hosted on instance Z and I will still see these posts. This is what I referred to when I said “subset of users from dbzer0 who think they should spread their instance’s values of AI content across all parts of the Fediverse”. Defederating does require an instance, and only by defederating from instance Y would the content made by instance Y users that is posted onto any instance become wholly filtered out for users on instance X.
Its not even just instance z. If they post to instance x, you will also see the user. You only will not see the posts to instance Y.
Which is counter-intuitive to how one would assume an instance-wide block should work.
That is genuinely really interesting, I didn’t expect it to be db0. Thanks!
Personally I’m pro GOOD ai content. Most of it is not.
I think the appeal of seeing stuff that people make is that it reflects the humans who made it.
I’m generally not especially interested in what an algorithm produces, at least not in the same way or for the same reason as I am things made by people.
I don’t know what gen ai could produce that I would sincerely find good, it lacks the humanity that gives that product any worth.
Yeah, so much of it is a mediocre/old joke overlayed on a generated image.
I’m guessing, there’s people out there, who genuinely just flood social media with these mediocre posts to try to grow accounts or similar…
Everyone is on the moron bell curve. Most people are morons all the time. Some people are only morons occasionally.
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Many people don’t care about it. Me included, for instance.
I would give the reason why but I don’t know if anyone is truly interested in knowning.
I don’t consider things being made by AI as something terrible. If the post is fine I upvote and comment like any other post. If the content is lazy, clickbaity or plain bad then it’s bad. But if it’s good I don’t care that it was produced using some AI tool or other.
It’s true that the fediverse it’s still hostile towards AI conversation (this very comment have high possibilities to be drowned with downvotes) but I’m glad the general stance is changing little by little. I hope in a few years the hostility would be much more marginal, specially if the fediverse keeps growing and more people with more diverse opinions come in.
I like to talk about topics, seeing different opinions about it, and when everyone have the same opinion the discussion is not really interesting. With AI, it’s something new that sparks a lot of though process about may topic. For instance the morality of it, or the limits, trying to find the gray areas between the black and the white. It can be very interesting, and I’m glad, little by little we can start talking about it.
I’ve noticed a LOT of generated memes and they tend to have positive votes
What’s the issue with that one in particular? Isn’t the entire point of a meme just whether it’s funny or not?
I mean, they’re low effort and unoriginal to begin with. The AI isn’t really changing anything about that.
I feel like memes is one of the few places where AI doesn’t hurt anyone at all.
I don’t see it, which is horrific considering that others do. can you show a few examples that you think is AI slop?
Is this post AI generated?
Haven’t seen a difference but I also block / downvote everybody / community that posts ai slob so …
Haven’t seen a difference, but I also focus almost exclusively on the communities I’ve subscribed to. Checking the all or local feed has been annoying and useless since day one, so nothing has changed.
The internet is steadily becoming Facebook. Full of idiots being force fed AI slop. Alarmingly confident in their wrongness about almost everything.
I just haven’t noticed really. The reality is that memes, even ones that were made by hand with a lot of effort, are disposable content. Most of them will get looked at for like 10 seconds tops before you either move on or maybe check out the comments. Nobody who isn’t obsessed with finding the AI slop is going to notice the difference between an AI meme and just a shitty photoshop job.
That’s not to say I’m not concerned by the effects of that. Lower effort needed means more low effort stuff, but it’s not really something I’ve clocked as being particularly out of the ordinary.
I’m thinking it’s like ads. Some people see them, read them, click the links. Others recognize by glance and filter them out without bothering to process.
Social media, and internet in general, has always been a wild mix of top notch content and bottom of the barrel garbage sharing screen estate.
They are flooding the zone, there are countless pro-AI generated content instances. It’s like playing whack-a-mole, I often downvote obvious and human-altered slop (it’s all slop to me). Unfortunately, there are going to be images that have positive votes despite the general dislike of said AI-slop, especially because I tend to block those slop instances these days. Naturally, most of it is objectifying women (something I don’t want to see anyway) so those will naturally get a lot of votes because people weren’t thinking with the right head.
If people would stop talking about AI all day then it probably wouldn’t be used as much as it is every day.
No lie. If anything, this site reminds me that ChatGPT might handle a task for me.
As long as it’s intentionally made by a human and the end result is high quality, I personally don’t really care what AI or other tools they did or didn’t use to create that result
I made this. Do you care now? Are you offended and outraged?
Lol, that’s great. I don’t know why you think I’d be outraged though
Well then ChatGPT made this as well and its even more offensive.
I think they were making a joke. Its the same vein as if you said you dont care about dad jokes then they made a really bad one and said “are you sure?”
Why is it made of cheese??
I feel like the problem with AI generated content is it’s so easy for anyone to generate stuff, so there can be a huge amount created with little effort. There is high quality AI-generated content, but whew there’s a lot that’s total slop.
I don’t know what the best response is, though. Requiring disclosure of AI-generated comment doesn’t seem like it would help because that’s going to be mostly honor system. User-flagged could be used to brigade/suppress posts. Really it’s probably just a matter of blocking users and communities where you see consistent slop.
Yeah I agree. The issue is that image generation tends to result in maximally bland outputs, and the people who post it tend to put minimal effort in.
I’m not categorically anti-ai, but I feel like I am in practice.
