https://archive.md/WECC2
"In the photo, a man kneels in an outdoor sawmill next to his painstaking work:
An intricate wooden carving of his bulldog, which he proudly gazes at. “Made it
with my own hands,” the Facebook caption reads. The image has 1,300 likes, 405
comments, and 47 shares. “Beautiful work of art,” one of the comments reads.
“You have an AMAZING talent!,” another says. “Nice work, love it <3!” “Awesome
work keep it up.”
This incredible work of art, a “wooden monument to my dog,” has been posted
dozens of times across dozens of engagement bait Facebook pages. But every
time, the man and the dog are different. Sometimes the dog is hyperrealistic.
Sometimes the bulldog is a German Shepherd. Sometimes the man’s hair is slicked
back, sometimes it stands up. Sometimes the man sits on the other side of the
dog. Sometimes the man looks Latino, other times he looks white; clearly, it is
a different man, and a different dog, in most of the images.
Depending on the image, it is obvious, to me, that the man and the dog are not
real. The dog often looks weirdly polygonal, or like some wood carving filter
has been applied to an image of a real dog. Sometimes the dog’s ear has obvious
artifacts associated with AI-generated images. Other times, it’s the man who
looks fake. Variations of this picture are being posted all over Facebook by a
series of gigantic meme pages with names like “Go Story,” “Amazing World,” “Did
you know?” “Follow me,” “Avokaddo,” and so on.
Universally, the comment sections of these pages feature hundreds of people who
have no idea that these are AI-generated and are truly inspired by the dog
carving. A version of this image posted on Dogs 4 life has 1 million likes,
39,000 comments, and 17,000 shares. The Dogs 4 life account has spammed links
to buy cheap, dog-branded stuff to the top of the comments section.
In many ways, this is a tale as old as time: people lie and steal content
online in exchange for likes, influence and money all the time. But the spread
of this type of content on Facebook over the last several months has shown that
the once-prophesized future where cheap, AI-generated trash content floods out
the hard work of real humans is already here, and is already taking over
Facebook. It also shows Facebook is doing essentially nothing to help its users
decipher real content from AI-generated content masquerading as real content,
and that huge masses of Facebook users are completely unprepared for our
AI-generated future."
Via Diane A.
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
