A well-written article tainted by the ugly AI slop banner plastered up front. Instantly makes it seem lower effort. It would look just fine without a photo at all!
Eh. Honestly if you hadn't mentioned it I probably wouldn't have even paid attention to it. I'm almost sure it's a near carbon copy of a real 3D render.
It saddens me. Innovations in AI 'art' generation (music, audio, photo) have been a net negative to society and are already actively harming the Internet and our media sphere.
Like I said in another comment, LLMs are cool and useful, but who in the hell asked for AI art? It's good enough to fool people and break the fragile trust relationship we had with online content, but is also extremely shit and carries no meaning or depth whatsoever.
everyone who has ever used stock photography, custom illustrators, and image editing. as AI improves, it will come after all of those industries.
that said, it is not OpenAI's goal to beat shutterstock, nor is it the goal of anthropic or google or meta. their goal is to make god: https://ia.samaltman.com/ . visual perception (and generation) is the near-term step on that path. every discussion of AI that doesn't acknowlege this goal, what all of these billions of dollars are aiming for, is myopic and naive.
There was a recent discussion in another HN thread that I think summed it up well. Good art rewards a careful viewer; the more you look at and think about good art, the more you get out of it. AI art does the opposite and punishes thoughtful consumers. There's no logical underpinning to the various details, it's just stuff mashed together in a superficially nice looking way.
I think AI "art" can be as useful as the text generators, i.e. only within certain limits of dull and stupid stuff that needs to exist but has little to no value.
For example, you need to generate a landing page for your boring company: text, images, videos and the overall design (as well as code!) can be and should be generated because... who cares about your boring company's landing page, right?
One could ask why the boring company landing page exists in the first place though. If it's not providing value to humans to warrant actual attention being paid to it...
The world is in need of soap. Not the fancy beautiful artistic kind, but the kind that comes in containers and you put in bathrooms. This objectively saves lives and is one of those boring things I can imagine.
Then you don't understand the purpose of a landing page. If the boring company hires somebody to make the landing page who actually understands their job, the landing page will have great importance.
Most companies don't need this. They need a page that has their contact info and some general information about services they provide so they can have a bare minimum internet presence and show up on google maps.
Absolutely, if your company doesn't want to make sales or if you want to be bothered all the time by people calling and mailing only for them to find out your product isn't a fit for them. Or if you want third party sellers to take over most of your business like Booking.com, AirBnB DoorDash or Amazon.
Companies who understand the importance of a customer friendly and functional web presence get a great return on their investment. And it's much better for the customer.
I have an ice cream shop by me that doesn't even have a website. They're mobbed every day, because good ice cream is fairly self explanatory, and doesn't need a web presence
Your ice cream shop doesn’t need a landing page because of word of mouth and foot traffic.
Some project management platform for plumbers needs a highly tuned webpage because they’re competing with 20 other such systems, and there’s no line to walk past and assume it’s there because the software is good.
Believing that if you build great plumbing SAAS software people, paying customers will magically appear, is naive.
A great product can sell itself. But that doesn’t mean that marketing and sales aren’t necessary in order to get the product in front of people, assuage their concerns, reassure them that it solves their problems, show social proof from others using it, and close the deal. A good landing page will do all of this ;)
> Like I said in another comment, LLMs are cool and useful, but who in the hell asked for AI art?
I did. I started messing around with computer graphics on DOS with QBASIC and consider AI art to be just an extension of that.
On the other hand I don't care all that much for LLMs most of the time. They're sometimes useful, but while I find AI art I enjoy very regularly, using a LLM for something is more a once every couple weeks event for me.
Do add "in my opinion" or prefix with "I think", because your definite wording implied you were stating a verifiable fact. Telling opinions like they are facts and then backtracking with "oh but it was just my opinion" is a big problem in (online?) society / discourse, and has led to a lot of misinformation and anti-scientific takes spreading.
"The earth is flat" - "Can you prove it?" - "Oh it's just my opinion". It's dishonest.
I agree with the first part. For me, AI art is the chance to have a somewhat creative outlet that I wouldn’t have otherwise, because I’m much worse at painting that I can stand. Drawing by prompts helps me be creative and work through some stuff - for that it’s also nice and interesting to see that the result differs from my mental image. I will tweak the prompt to some extent and to some extent go with some unintentioned elements of the drawing. I keep the drawing on my phone in the notes app with a title and the prompt.
To get back to the beginning: I really do agree that the societal impact on the whole appears to be negative. But there are some positives and I wanted to share my example of that.
Much of the time I don't want "meaning or depth", I just want a pretty picture of whatever it was. AI art is great, it's just that the people it most benefits are the people you don't see or hear much from (and, rude as this is to say, people who write less convincingly).
The past few years' innovation in AI has roughly been split into two camps for me.
LLMs -- Awesome and useful. Disruptive, and somewhat dangerous, but probably more good than harm if we do it right.
'Generative art' (i.e. music generation, image generation, video generation) -- Why? Just why?
The 'art' is always good enough to trick most humans at a glance but clearly fake, plastic, and soulless when you look a bit closer. It has instilled somewhat of a paranoia in me when browsing images and genuinely worsened my experience consuming art on the internet overall. I've just recently found out that a jazz mix I found on YouTube and thought was pretty neat is fully AI generated, and the same happens when I browse niche artstyles on Instagram. Don't get me started on what this Sora release will do...
It changed my relationship consuming art online in general. When I see something that looks cool on the surface, my reaction is adversarial, one of suspicion. If it's recent, I default to assuming the piece is AI, and most of the time I don't have time or effort to sleuth the creator down and check. It's only been like a year, and it's already exhausting.
No one asked for AI art. I don't understand why corporations keep pushing it so much.
There's this FinTech ad on the NYC subway right now. I can't remember the company, but the entire ad is just a picture of a guitar and some text.
Anyway, the guitar is AI generated, and it's really bad. There are 5 strings, which morph into 6 at the headstock. There's a trem bar jammed under the pickguard, somehow. There's a randomly placed blob on the guitar that is supposed to be a knob/button, but clearly is not. The pickups are visually distorted.
It's repulsive. You're trying to sell me on something, why would you put so little effort into your advertising? Why would you not just...take a picture of a real guitar? I so badly want to cover it up.
> You're trying to sell me on something, why would you put so little effort into your advertising? Why would you not just...take a picture of a real guitar?
Is this not evident? Because using AI is much cheaper and faster. Instead of finding the right guitar, paying for a good photographer, location, decoration, and all the associated logistics, a graphics designer can write a prompt that gets you 90% of the vision, for orders of magnitude less cost and time. AI is even cheaper and faster than using stock images and talented graphic designers, which is what we've been doing for the past few decades.
All our media channels, in both physical and digital spaces, will be flooded with this low-effort AI garbage from here on out. This is only the beginning. We'll need to use aggressive filtering and curation in order to find quality media, whether that's done manually by humans or automatically by other AI. Welcome to the future.
I don't understand why you see a distinction between models that generate text, and those that generate images, video or audio. They're all digital formats, and the technology itself is fairly agnostic about what it's actually generating.
Can't text also be considered art? There's as much art in poetry, lyrics, novels, scripts, etc. as in other forms of media.
The thing is that the generative tech is out of the bag, and there's no going back. So we'll have to endure the negative effects along with the positive.
Simple: I am equally offput when LLMs are used for generating poetry, lyrics, novels, scripts, etc. I don't like it when low-effort generated slop is passed off as art.
I just think that LLMs have genuine use for non-artistic things, which is why I said it's dangerous but may be useful if we play our cards right.
I see. Well, I agree to an extent, but there's no clear agreement about what constitutes art with human-generated works either. There are examples of paintings where the human clearly "just" slapped some colors on a canvas, yet they're highly regarded in art circles. Just because something is low-effort doesn't mean it's not art, or worthy of merit.
So we could say the same thing about AI-generated art. Maybe most of it is low-effort, but why can't it be considered art? There is a separate topic about human emotion being a key component these generated works are missing, but art is in the eyes of the beholder, after all, so who are we to judge?
Mind you, I'm merely playing devil's advocate here. I think that all of this technology has deep implications we're only beginning to grapple with, and art is a small piece of the puzzle.
You make a good point. I'm just spitballing here, but I think what sets generative art apart for me is the element of deception.
I'd be perfectly fine with a hypothetical world in which all generated art is clearly denoted as such. Like you said, art is in the eyes of the beholder. I welcome a world in which AI art lives side-by-side with traditional art, but clearly demarcated.
Unfortunately, the reality is very different.
AI art inherently tries to pass off as if it were made by a human. The result of the tools released in the past year is that my relationship with media online has become adversarial. I've been tricked in the past by AI music and images which were not labelled as such, which fosters a sort of paranoia that just isn't there with the examples you mentioned.
the offensive part is that it's creative theft by digesting other people's creative works then reworked and regurgitated. It's 'fine' when it's technical documentation and reference work, but that's not human expression.
So pre-LLM were you offended when someone posted their personal poetry or artwork on internet if it was clear they had put little effort into it? Somehow I doubt it.
You don't have the same paranoia with LLM? So often I find myself getting a third of the way into reading an article or blog post and think: "wait a minute...".
LLM tone is so specific and unrealistic that it completely disengages me as a reader.
I have found a channel that curates and cleans some AI generated music. I really enjoy it, it's nothing I heard before, it's unique, distinct, and devoid of copyright.
I understand your take but it's only going to get better and incredibly fast.
I'm a huge film nerd and I can only dream of a future where I could use these type of tools (but more advanced) to create short films about ideas I've had.
Running a VM gives the parent the ability to read/write arbitrary memory without [even rootkit] anticheat being able to detect, which can facilitate cheating, and therefore can earn you bans. The whole point of the rootkit is that the game can confirm that you don’t have any way to read/write arbitrary memory.
Isn't Windows running under a hyper-v hypervisor these days anyway?
In practice, I'd settle for a peer Windows OS, like the WSL2 kernel, with the rootkit seperate from my main work one. Can I run two copies of Windows simultaneously as peers?
It doesn’t follow to me, that since all clients are running their own simulation, Lua scripts must run on every client too.
If a client runs a Lua script, why can’t we just run it on their machine and propagate any game state changes (if the script adds an inserted, for example,) as if the player made those changes themselves?
> why can’t we just run it on their machine and propagate any game state changes (if the script adds an inserter, for example,)
Because that's an unbounded amount of traffic. You can reliably write data into RAM at many gigabits per second, whereas network connections are variable and many of them won't carry more than a few kilobits at the 99th percentile (note that you roll that 100-sided die like 30 times per second, so "1% situation" lag spikes are something you'd run into constantly)
I sometimes use Lua commands in single player to clear biters from a certain region for example, which removes many entities. Propagating those sorts of changes on multiplayer (or take a more plausible example: wave defense that eventually spawns loads of entities at once) would cause a big lag spike if you have a few players that all need to receive this data, whereas simulating it locally on each machine is no problem
Factorio multiplayer bandwidth is like a dozen kilobytes per second from what I remember, and this post agrees https://forums.factorio.com/viewtopic.php?p=125328#p125328 (couldn't quickly find an exact number though it must surely be out there). If you make it O(n) for every lua-touched entity in the game, it would quickly balloon into the megabits constantly and many mods would just not be viable for multiplayer for most people
The mechanism Factorio uses is to sync user inputs, not game state changes (the reason isn’t explained, but I strongly suspect it’s because user inputs are less data; small inputs can cause big game state changes, but not vice versa).
If the user types a command, in order to preserve synchronization, the game must:
- Run the command on all other clients.
- OR it could sync changes made to the game for just commands; in other words, the other clients apply the changes caused by the command instead of running the command directly. But that would be an unreasonable amount of extra work just for a small feature and to make exploits harder.
- OR the server simply disallows clients from running Lua commands, which is the case for some servers.
I don’t get the second part though: why a map can store arbitrary Lua code that runs when the map loads.
(Some time ago, Factorio did not have a built-in mod synchronization system for multiplayer, with the result that the most popular servers did not run any mods, but rather used complicated scenarios instead.)
> If a client runs a Lua script, why can’t we just run it on their machine and propagate any game state changes (if the script adds an inserted, for example,) as if the player made those changes themselves?
The game already has to run Lua scripts as part of the simulation, potentially as part of in-game events which aren't directly triggered by players. A player running a script from the console is handled by that same interpreter -- making it run in a completely different operating mode where any changes to game state are replicated would be much more complicated and prone to error.
Or, from the other direction: the game's multiplayer model is all based around a replicated simulation where player inputs are fed into the simulation. Treating a player running a script as a special kind of event involving the text of that script is the simplest and most obviously correct way to implement that.
Running the scripts outside the simulation and syncing their commands alongside user input would definitely work on a technical level.
But I think you're massively underestimating how much these scripts can do. Many mods would flood the network connections. And there would also be an awkward delay for all script actions.
If clients don't run the same code they will desync the moment their state diverges. I haven't played multiplayer factorio but I expect you can't even join a server unless you're running the same factorio version and mods as other players.
