I get the “gotcha” but at the same time I don’t get why people fell for it.

The OP’s question to his audience is “what makes this AI generated version of a Monet painting inferior to an actual Monet painting?”

And the answer is incredibly fucking obvious: it’s not a Monet painting, it’s a computer program imitating his work.

That’s like asking what the difference is between an original painting and a forged copy, or between one of Monet’s paintings and a painting by one of the probably hundreds of thousands of art students who’ve imitated Monet style for practice.

One is original work, the other is derivative.

One is creating, the other is copying.

Whether the actual image shown is a real Monet or a generated image doesn’t matter - because even if an AI tool, or an art forger, or a professional artist, was able to imitate Monet’s style so closely as to be indistinguishable from Monet himself, they’re still just copying.

The commenters who responded by trying to find flaws and pick holes in the image embarrassed themselves, and yeah, they should be embarrassed. But they should be embarrassed for buying into OP’s premise. If you criticize AI “art” by saying it’s bad art, or technically inferior art, or whatever, you’re missing the point. AI generated images are not art. They are computer generated copies of art.

Sheesh.

The product they are selling is justifiable exploitation.

Thank you. So, so much of AI is designed to manufacture a justification for what the entity using it already wanted to do.

Will AI replace actors and scriptwriters? No, but it gives studios an excuse to fire expensive, unionized workers and quietly replace them with cheap overseas labor.

Will AI replace coders? No, but it gives big tech an excuse to fire expensive, experienced, American coders earning American salaries, and replace them with a dozen new graduates out of Hyderabad.

Will AI replace police work? No, but it’ll send bad facial recognition results falsely labeling innocent black men as criminals, and give racist police more excuses to arrest black men for being black in public.

Will AI replace military intelligence? No, but it’ll rubber stamp an “assessment” saying any village or church or hospital or fishing boat or girls’ school we want to destroy is a legitimate military target, and give the US military that fig leaf of justification that lets the people actually pulling the trigger sleep at night.

Finally, will AI replace sound judgment about the human being in front of you? No, but it sure as hell will provide “objective” support for whatever prejudices you already have.

Okay, so, my first Reddit account was back when I was a clueless teenager. I posted all sorts of information that, in retrospect, was pretty foolish to post, including my specific location, my personal interests, and different clubs and organizations I belonged to.

I was using a pseudonym, of course. And I thought I was being safe by not giving my real name, my real address, or anything that I thought could identify me specifically. But there were probably hundreds of people in my high school who could have identified me by correlating my different posts and profiling the one person with that particular combination of interests and organizations.

And if I was still using that account, it would absolutely be possible to link me, security conscious as I am, to my high school self, and link that to my LinkedIn account. And quite possibly get me fired for my clueless teenage shit posting 😆

What I’m getting at is, one, lots of people do post personal information. And two, PII is a much broader category than people think, and if your account has a long post history you probably gave up a lot more information than you think you did.

Don’t give it too much credit. It’s Reddit level shit. Current models are so good at providing the kind of reports mods want because Reddit’s automated mod tools have been running these assessments on hundreds of thousands of users for years and feeding the results back as training data.

And let’s be real, a tool that assesses the public posts of a specific account isn’t doing anything different than mods already did. (Not to mention users - how many people, when they get into an online argument with someone, start going through their post history to find something to gotcha them with?). The LLM just does it faster.

That’s arguably true, albeit a rather uncharitable interpretation of canon, but I don’t think Anakin is capable of articulating it at that point.

I mean, that’s a calm and logical argument about the flaws in the Jedi Order.

The trouble is, Anakin has gone full Sith at that point and is running off emotion - “the Jedi are evil because they treated me like shit, they killed my mother, they want to kill my wife and child, and they’re trying to overthrow and execute the one person who ever treated me like a human being”.

As bad as the dialogue in that scene is, it would be worse if Anakin stopped to debate philosophy in the middle of his rage-fueled murder attempt.

Before the open web was an slop machine, it was a lying machine.

Anyone can post anything they want, and it can be read anywhere in the world, and that has made the Internet the most powerful propaganda weapon, the biggest advertising tool, the greatest source of lies and misinformation, the greatest tool for scammers and thieves, and the single greatest danger to the mental and physical health of the public, in all of history.

A lie can run around the world before the truth has its boots on, as the saying goes. Just to give one of a million examples, twenty people were murdered by angry mobs in India after a fake video about Pakistanis kidnapping children off the street went viral. It didn’t matter how fake the video was, or how hard Indian authorities worked to convince WhatsApp users there was no epidemic of foreigners kidnapping Indian children.

The problem is that the internet exists, and that lies and misinformation can be posted on it at all. Because people will be killed - have been killed, over and over and over again - before the authorities can catch and stop the lie that’s motivating the murder. And millions of people will see the lie and not see, or not believe, the correction - how many people in the United States today still believe Haitian migrants in Springfield were stealing and eating people’s pets? Or that horse dewormer cures COVID, cancer, and autism? Or that CCP party loyalists traveled to the United States decades ago and had children on US soil so those children, trained as spies and agent provocateurs, could return to the United States and undermine its elections?

The single greatest impact on world politics the Internet has had so far was the so-called Arab Spring - a so-called crowdsourced, bottom up, revolutionary movement across Africa and the Middle East. And every country that experienced an Arab Spring is worse off today. The “first online revolution” baited out and killed tens of thousands of the most passionate young revolutionaries while either entrenching dictatorships or replacing them with worse ones, depending on whether ambitious leaders or organized opposition movements took control of the mass protests and used them to take power, or just left those mass protests to thrash without organization or purpose until they died in the street.

And the Arab Spring couldn’t have happened without the free and open Internet.

The information revolution and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race.

And if that same freedom, to use the internet however you want, is what’s going to kill the internet by unleashing swarms of AI bots that force the Internet’s free protocols to change or die, good. Replace it with something that humanity can use responsibly, because we sure as hell can’t use the current one right.