From Balenciaga Pope to the Great Cascadia Earthquake, AI images are creating a new reality

Last fall, Tumblr users raved about Martin Scorsese’s 1973 film “Goncharoff,” starring Robert De Niro and Al Pacino. They hail Scorsese’s lesser-known classic as the greatest mafia movie of all time. It was ahead of its time, and it didn’t get the acclaim it deserved.

By now, we should all know that “Goncharov” isn’t an actual movie, though Scorsese himself got in on the joke. It’s just a Tumblr meme that escalated into a site-wide gag, with users toiling away in shared Google Docs, working together to “yes, and” each other with such sincerity and subtlety that the concocted film looks legit.

With the improvement of AI image generation, the Internet is like Tumblr in the “Goncharov” moment. We create new collective realities, only this time, we accidentally produce them simply by posting without much thought.

When AI image creator Midjourney opened access to the Midjourney 5 model two weeks ago, its hyper-realistic output quickly went viral. Some of the resulting images showed the dangers of these easily accessible tools, such as a series of fake photos depicting the arrest of Donald Trump.

The set of dramatic photos shows Trump forcibly resisting arrest, then running away from a group of police officers, among other scenes. The images, which spread like wildfire around the internet, were created by Eliot Higgins, founder of investigative journalism outlet Bellingcat. Higgins’ initial tweets made it clear he was just fiddling with AI image generators, but they quickly went viral without the accompanying context.

Other viral AI images are more benign, like a widely circulated photo of Pope Francis II making a modern appearance in a stunning white Balenciaga coat. Just one of the viral tweets about the image has been viewed more than 26 million times.

This wasn’t even the only Enciaga-related AI meme that went viral in the past week. The creator, who goes by the name demonflyingfox, uses Midjourney’s images, Eleven Labs’ speech, and D-ID animation to create AI-powered parody videos. His most viral video is “Harry Potter by Balenciaga,” a haute couture-style advertisement in which synthetic versions of characters from the series say things like, “You’re Balenciaga, Harry.”

Demonflyingfox told TechCrunch that he intentionally tries to make his videos weird enough that no one can mistakenly believe they’re real. (It doesn’t take a smart viewer to know that Joe Rogan never did an interview with Jesus Christ, and unfortunately Dumbledore never wore a leather jacket and sunglasses in the Harry Potter films.) He also uses Midjourney 4 in lieu of the updated software. His characters don’t look too realistic to be believable.

“What I’m doing is so obviously fake that I don’t really worry about spreading misinformation, nor is it my intention,” said the flying demon. “But I know the power of tools and it’s very easy to do now.”

The more believable the hypothesis, the more likely it is that a synthetic image will register as fact. If you’re not an expert on papal apparel, you can practically believe that the pope has a kick-ass white puffer jacket for winter outings — this is the same pope whose prog rock album was reviewed on Pitchfork, and who once worked as a nightclub bouncer in Argentina.

Even supermodel Chrissy Teigen got in on the joke. “I thought the pope’s puffer jacket was real and never thought of it again,” she wrote on Twitter. “It is impossible for me to survive the future of technology.”

Photos of Trump’s arrest have also gone viral on Amnesty International, but the facts can be checked quickly enough by anyone willing to check their Twitter timeline for evidence of real, breaking news. This process is a little less clear for historical events generated by artificial intelligence.

A few days ago, Reddit user u/Arctic_Chilean posted a set of AI-generated images on the Midjourney subreddit, claiming to illustrate the “2001 Great Cascadia 9.1 Earthquake and Tsunami” that hit the United States and Canada. Within the confines of this subreddit, which is dedicated to experiments with Midjourney AI tools, the Great Cascadia earthquake is clearly not a real event. But if r/Midjourney is just one of the many subreddits on your feed, it’s easy to consume images without giving them a second thought.

Was I the only one who was like, ‘How can I not remember this happening? “…even seeing a subreddit?” wrote one Reddit user.

The images are parallel enough to reality that they could be true. The Cascadia Subduction Zone is a veritable fault line near the Pacific Northwest and the site of a massive devastating earthquake in the year 1700. People in the region worry that a catastrophe of this magnitude will happen again in our lifetimes, knowledge that imparts artificial intelligence-generated scenes of possible future events that haven’t happened. Unfold yet with a sense of foreboding.

Sometimes AI tools like ChatGPT and Bing AI hallucinate – a term used when they confidently answer questions with fake information. In a sea of ​​synthetic images, we may all be on the cusp of a collective hallucination.

“I was about to send you old news on this subreddit lol,” one Redditor commented on r/midjourney. “This looks so real it’s insane.”

Online communities tend to converge around a niche idea and build in-depth information about it, like a collaborative work of world-building (see: ‘Goncharov’). Naturally, the same thing happened with these fake historical events, as Reddit users began creating their own history of how the 2001 earthquake affected world politics.

Another user wrote in a made-up news article, “Despite the scale and devastation caused by the Great Concordia Earthquake of 2001, it appears that 10 years later, few people remember the event,” misnaming the earthquake that never happened. This is likely due to a combination of factors, including the Global War on Terror, the Iraq War, and the Great Recession.

The Redditor who originally posted the photos theorized about how a major disaster just before 9/11 might have affected the War on Terror, positing that the economic impact of the disaster could undermine support for the Iraq invasion.

As widely available AI image generators quickly become more sophisticated, their creations may outpace our ability to adapt to a flood of believable but utterly false images. For better or for worse, it is now possible to create our own “Goncharov” in an instant, turn any vague fantasy into something tangible and put it on the Internet.

While many of these creations are harmless, it is not hard to imagine how compositional images could manipulate public knowledge of current or historical events.

It turns out that “Balenciaga Pope” was the brainchild of a defecating 31-year-old who told BuzzFeed News he hadn’t thought about the consequences of AI images. “It will certainly become more serious if they do not start applying laws to regulate it,” he said.

In fact, lawmakers in the UK and some US states have enacted bans on fake, non-sense AI pornography and deepfakes. But memes like Great Cascadia Earthquake and Balenciaga Pope aren’t intrinsically harmful and won’t encounter regulatory firewalls anytime soon.

The images generated by artificial intelligence are still not perfect. Street signs look as if they were written in Simlish, and there are more hands with three fingers than you’d find in the normal world. Normally, if you look closely at an AI-generated image, you can find some strange aberration, a group of pixels that tell you something is wrong. But it’s hard to tell what’s real or imagined – and hard to imagine what comes next.

What Are The Main Benefits Of Comparing Car Insurance Quotes Online

LOS ANGELES, CA / ACCESSWIRE / June 24, 2020, / Compare-autoinsurance.Org has launched a new blog post that presents the main benefits of comparing multiple car insurance quotes. For more info and free online quotes, please visit https://compare-autoinsurance.Org/the-advantages-of-comparing-prices-with-car-insurance-quotes-online/ The modern society has numerous technological advantages. One important advantage is the speed at which information is sent and received. With the help of the internet, the shopping habits of many persons have drastically changed. The car insurance industry hasn't remained untouched by these changes. On the internet, drivers can compare insurance prices and find out which sellers have the best offers. View photos The advantages of comparing online car insurance quotes are the following: Online quotes can be obtained from anywhere and at any time. Unlike physical insurance agencies, websites don't have a specific schedule and they are available at any time. Drivers that have busy working schedules, can compare quotes from anywhere and at any time, even at midnight. Multiple choices. Almost all insurance providers, no matter if they are well-known brands or just local insurers, have an online presence. Online quotes will allow policyholders the chance to discover multiple insurance companies and check their prices. Drivers are no longer required to get quotes from just a few known insurance companies. Also, local and regional insurers can provide lower insurance rates for the same services. Accurate insurance estimates. Online quotes can only be accurate if the customers provide accurate and real info about their car models and driving history. Lying about past driving incidents can make the price estimates to be lower, but when dealing with an insurance company lying to them is useless. Usually, insurance companies will do research about a potential customer before granting him coverage. Online quotes can be sorted easily. Although drivers are recommended to not choose a policy just based on its price, drivers can easily sort quotes by insurance price. Using brokerage websites will allow drivers to get quotes from multiple insurers, thus making the comparison faster and easier. For additional info, money-saving tips, and free car insurance quotes, visit https://compare-autoinsurance.Org/ Compare-autoinsurance.Org is an online provider of life, home, health, and auto insurance quotes. This website is unique because it does not simply stick to one kind of insurance provider, but brings the clients the best deals from many different online insurance carriers. In this way, clients have access to offers from multiple carriers all in one place: this website. On this site, customers have access to quotes for insurance plans from various agencies, such as local or nationwide agencies, brand names insurance companies, etc. "Online quotes can easily help drivers obtain better car insurance deals. All they have to do is to complete an online form with accurate and real info, then compare prices", said Russell Rabichev, Marketing Director of Internet Marketing Company. CONTACT: Company Name: Internet Marketing CompanyPerson for contact Name: Gurgu CPhone Number: (818) 359-3898Email: [email protected]: https://compare-autoinsurance.Org/ SOURCE: Compare-autoinsurance.Org View source version on accesswire.Com:https://www.Accesswire.Com/595055/What-Are-The-Main-Benefits-Of-Comparing-Car-Insurance-Quotes-Online View photos