Technology
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
That makes sense. The goal always seemed to be as fake as possible.
Oh no, fake people are stealing fake jobs from fake people!
Anyways..
I prefer to think of it as leveling the playing field. You don’t have to be a 20 year old woman with the right face and body ratios to be an instagram model anymore. Anyone can! Seems like true equality to me.
And thus social media has reached its apex.
After a decade plus of bombarding people with a mix of whatever they desire most and whatever causes them to become emotionally invested to the point of exhaustion, we see the pinnacle innovation of social media:
A literally completely fake person selling overpriced fashion I guarantee was made in a sweatshop, that nearly no one viewing 'her' can afford or look good in, who receives many thirsty comments praising her as if 'she' will be their friend or something, who in the process of doing all this also puts out of business actual human models who are simply fake in every sense of the word that is not literal.
It is basically the most perfectly capitalist thing I can imagine. Everyone loses except the capital owners.
I mean sure, maybe it will get some people whose entire personality is "I am pretty, worship me!" to think about doing something actually useful or learning and developing a real personality.
But... we are fairly far into the predicted cyberpunk dystopia now. No its not exactly as predicted, but shockingly close in many ways.
The average consumer of content cannot tell a bot or a fake person such as Aitana here from a real one, and there will just be another after news of Aitana in particular gets around.
At this point I would say that most humans have basically failed a reverse Turing Test.
Wasn't there a social media website that did a massive bot purge a while ago and most influencers found out that like 90+% of their audiences were actually bots anyway? sounds like this is just a logical conclusion and the rest of us can get on with our lives while bots entertain bots.
Let's define "stealing" and "business" here.
-
Influencers don't produce anything, nor do they add intrinsic value to products they promote. Not much business to that if you ask me.
-
They do already compete fiercely for brands' atention so every successful influencer by definition has "stolen" potential income from others.
If you want to split hairs, influencers' work is creating an idealised image that they project to peddle products. If AI can outmatch them in that regard, I see no problem with that.
The only problem I have with that is the notion that a company gets to consolidate funds that were previously going to an actual real person. Now, if we could rely on big business to pass on those savings to their customers and employees, that would be one thing. But we can't.
Ok, I'm all for worrying about the impact of AI in jobs but... Living advertisements are easy to replace, what a suprise.
People who make actual interesting and/or funny videos, those that require personal work and are a direct result of the creator's skills or interests, are not really at risk of this.
Wow, a bunch of assholes just getting paid for showing you free stuff they got, pretending to be relatable and your friend while evading their taxes in Dubai, may be out of business. And think of those parents who won't be able to exploit their kids by getting them free toys and exposing them to the whole world!
I don't think I will lose any sleep over this.
If your job is easy, then it'll probably get replaced with AI eventually. What's easier than being an influencer?
If you only do the easy part, then yes that’s infinitely replaceable. Being a pretty face is exactly that, and AI can do that all day long.
Being actually entertaining and engaging, though, is a different story, and AI is struggling to pick that up. And of course teams of corporate marketers continually fail at this.
But yes, the “job” of “being attractive on the internet” can now be outsourced to machines.
AI is improving by leaps and bounds. I've fiddled with Stable Diffusion for over a year and I've seen it go from mostly random, highly deformed, blurry Polaroid quality images to high def, lifelike, in almost any pose imaginable images. And the same improvement goes for non-photo quality images too. Highly-skilled illustrators with degrees are mostly fucked. This whole "but I'm so much more efficient" argument doesn't hold water in our economy. Producing 3X more doesn't mean people consume 3X more, it means you're 3X overstaffed.
Now for streamers and influencers I'll admit some of them have cardboard personalities and are easily replaced. Someone like JSE (I don't watch much so sorry if my references are dated) is a little more animated than average so that's gonna be harder to replicate, but does it need to be replicated in order to steal views? Jack is one man and he can't stream 24x7 and many would prefer an "always on" streamer to someone with better content but available intermittently.
Hell, look at Amazon. It used to be filled with name brand products that you could rely upon because reputations were at stake. Now it's an endless sea of cloned and relabeled products that are between decent and total crap, but is that hurting Amazon's bottom line? Nope. The stuff is crap but it's cheap, readily available, and it arrives in 24 hours. Who needs quality???
TL;DR - AI doesn't need to be good, it needs to be good enough, and when it breaches that threshold you'll see quality content creators go into overdrive to keep up or pack it in because the effort is no longer worth the payout.
Damn, what a shame, those poor poor influencers
maybe they need to get an actual job now?
Forgive me for being entirely unsympathetic, but I would not call being an “influencer” a “job”.
One step closer to the Dead Internet Theory becoming reality
For people like me that hadn't heard bout the theory.
"The dead Internet theory is an online conspiracy theory that asserts that the Internet now consists mainly of bot activity and automatically generated content that is manipulated by algorithmic curation, marginalizing organic human activity"
Here's the summary for the wikipedia article you mentioned in your comment:
The dead Internet theory is an online conspiracy theory that asserts that the Internet now consists mainly of bot activity and automatically generated content that is manipulated by algorithmic curation, marginalizing organic human activity. Proponents of the theory believe these bots are created intentionally to help manipulate algorithms and boost search results in order to ultimately manipulate consumers. Furthermore, some proponents of the theory accuse government agencies of using bots to manipulate public perception, stating "The U.S. government is engaging in an artificial intelligence powered gaslighting of the entire world population". The date given for this "death" was generally around 2016 or 2017.The theory has gained traction because much of the observed phenomena is grounded in quantifiable phenomena like increased bot traffic. However, the idea that it is a coordinated psyop has been described by Kaitlin Tiffany, staff writer at The Atlantic, as a "paranoid fantasy," even if there are legitimate criticisms involving bot traffic and the integrity of the internet.
People's identities become fully commodified then a technology is invented to simulate it. Late stage capitalist dystopia things.
This is a problem for the whole internet. I've made a long version of my argument here, but tl;dr as companies clutter the internet with cheaper and cheaper mass produced content, the valuable places will also get ruined. There's an analogy to our physical world: Because we build cheap and ugly cities that roughly look the same, the few places that are beautiful and unique are also ruined, because they're just too valuable; everyone wants to go there. I think that we're already seeing beginning, with pre-existing companies like Reddit that have high quality human-generated content walling themselves off more and more as that content becomes more valuable.
I don't see the downside to this in particular.
If everyone would just stop looking at influencers, they would go away.
I'm not entirely unsympathetic here - we all do what we can to survive. For some of us, that does mean cashing in on nature's gifts.
There is a darker side here, as much as I like to joke, influencers are people and most people draw the line somewhere. There are some things no-one wants their face tied to. AI personas on the other hand...
They terk er jerbs
Wait, are we supposed to think of influencers as humans?
To me, this is just part of the progress. With the introduction of technology, they were the ones to take advantage of Photoshop, Instagram filters and all. Now the technology advanced enough to not only be an instrument to enhance their looks, but to fully replace them.
Progress to where? To complete alienation?
Lately the benefits of technological advancement seem to mostly serve to make some executives wealthier, rather than benefit the whole of society. Same goes here. Rather than somewhat affected by brand deals these figures can be entirely fabricated so that every word of them is optimized for sales.
Even as someone who used to be excited for AI personality developments, looking at this gives me an awful dystopian vibe.
Human influences have always given me dystopian vibes. And they were just making some executives and themselves rich, is not such a big loss..
Ohhh no...Logan Paul will need to learn a discernable skill of some sort.
I mean, someone like Hatsune Miku already existed before. It's just (slightly) more mainstream now. The only issue with "virtual influencers" is how straightforward the owners are in admitting that their product is AI.
Would you look at that, another story where I hate everybody involved.