[255/365] better hope you have spots

[cosmolinguist]

I am already disgusted by what we're calling "AI," what is actually scraping the language and art of human invention, ignoring copyright, and filtering that through the poorly-compensated labor of exploited people in a process so detrimental it causes similar long-term psychological impacts to that seen in content-moderators, consuming huge quantities of energy in the process...

As if I didn't have enough reasons to dislike it as implemented, here's another one, from someone talking about trying to depict his visibly disabled body via image generators:

Tech is not neutral. It can't be. It is always the sum total of human decisions, priorities, and tradeoffs, deployed to meet certain ends and desires, and particularly capitalistic interests. AI is far from being an exception to the rule. And in this case, any desire for image generation models to be able to represent me is going to butt heads with another incentive: the desire to avoid shocking users with body horror.

Successive model retrainings have made rendering humans much more accurate, and tighter restrictions on prompts have made it much harder to generate body horror, even intentionally. As a consequence, non-normative bodies are also incredibly difficult to generate, even when the engine is fed hyperspecific prompts.

It's not just that the training sets simply don't have examples of people who look like me. It's that the system is now explicitly engineered to resist imagining me.

…Hey, is now a good a time to mention that in an effort to "create a welcoming and inclusive community for all users," the Midjourney Community Guidelines consider "deformed bodies" a form of gore, and thus forbidden?

Comments

[crystalpyramid]

Ooh, this is good. AI really is the antithesis of the diverse children's books movement and all the work everyone's been trying to do to normalize differences for the next generation.

[otter]

I'm disgusted and upset along with you.

Boom!

[jesse_the_k]

Thanks for boosting this excellent insight.

[cosmicjellyfish]

This is fantastic (and infuriating). Thank you for linking it.

[silveradept]

An excellent crafted essay, and it slots in very nicely with the continued societal insistence that bodies that are visibly different than others and that can't be "corrected" to the societal ideal have to be pushed out of the light and sanded out of existence. As is noted there, tech follows society, and society has long since wanted to get rid of things they consider inconvenient.

[momentsmusicaux]

Yup, AI (at least the current generative stuff) is bullshit.
I'm aghast at how many people are totally buying into it. Article in the Graun the other week that was referring to the AI as it if had a personality, something to be reasoned with. Just total koolaid-swigging bullshit.

[cosmolinguist]

It is really disconcerting to see people treating it like it's a person. It's so disconcerting! And it has all these unintended consequences -- like a friend of mine who experiences hallucinations really dislikes how the word is being used to describe AI mistakes or weirdnesses. The language and similar aspects have moved straight from the weird little tech subcultures that developed these things into this explosion of mainstream exposure without much scrutiny or care for how it is talked about or is understood.