Can you even actually define what the actual fuck you would change in the imagery in this context of soliciting donations from largely white people?
Goddamn right it is about money! Money marshalls the resources which can help people. This is kindergarten level comprehension about what charity is and why they want money.
Don't talk to about human rights when you expand them so frivolously, and yet show a clear disregard for the effect on outcome of actual people in favor of scoring ideological correctness points. Only somebody incredibly privileged would have such skewed priorities.
On Facebook I have REGULARLY a lot of "soft porn" AI generated "reels" of very young women (think: Donold Trump favorite age) moving lascively, or AI slop videos of "fake outrage situation" meant to be viral and shared, to make people more and more angry
This is really a stupid use of CO2, of the attention of people, and that's despicable. I condemn people working in the industry allowing to do this
How can you possibly make due diligence when everyone around you is incentivized to lie? We do have a concept of fraud, but advertising seems to be able to move around its edges.
I do get the why. Money talks and whatnot, but we are getting to the point where trust is becoming a hot commodity and that is not good.
And all this before we get to the idea that it actually managed to desensitize people even further.
We only do have such a concept when it's about an individual lying to a company for profit.
When companies lie to individuals it's just business as usual, or worst-case scenario a "mistake" that the company pinky-promises will not happen again.
Hasn't failed me yet.
I posit that what we need is heavily enforced truth in advertising laws.
This is not easy. I help pay the school fees for a few students in East Africa. But, I have been to these students homes. I know their situation first hand. Now I am in a different country, and I can no longer verify if they still need help. All I can do is trust that their situation hasn't changed. And even if they are lying and they can actually afford the school fees, I know they are poor enough that helping them will still make a difference.
But anyone helping me to do this needs to take my word for it. Unless they travel here and get their own first hand impression.
I heard from one organization that was helping an orphanage, and then they found out that half the kids weren't even orphans. It was effectively a boarding school for some of the children. The people were at the location and saw the children in person, but they were fooled about the status of the children, or they didn't pay attention. Maybe it was a translation error, or some misunderstanding.
It doesn't actually matter. The important part is that these children needed help either way. So the money was not misused, just the true reality of these children was misrepresented.
The problem of course on the side of the givers is that you can't tell the difference between a genuine mistake and an intentional deception. You have to assess the risk, and, you have to decide for yourself how much you'll be hurt if it turn out to be a deception.
I don't give money to people I meet on the street, because I know enough people who also need help that I can't help everyone, so I limit my help to people I know well enough to trust them.
I learned this lesson in my early 20s. Nearly every entity that you interact with is trying to transact with you, in a way that benefits themselves. Whether that's a legitimate transaction (money exchanged for a product/service exactly as advertised), a misrepresented transaction (the product/service is not as advertised), taking your money for nothing, or simply taking away your time and attention (advertising).
Even before AI, if you were unable to get a good sense of legitimate transactions, you'd lose all your money on misrepresented transactions to scammy used car salesmen, door-to-door salesmen, and whole life insurance salesmen. These parasites and their ilk prey on people who are trusting by nature, and people who will say "yes" to avoid disappointing a stranger. It's unfortunate that the world has come to this, but you need to be untrusting of others' motivations by nature to not be taken advantage of financially.
I assume everyone is telling the truth until they've given me a reason not to assume that, and I'd say that hasn't failed me yet.
You can trust someone to drive properly and not hit you.
You can trust someone to not rob you as you walk by them.
You can simultaneously not trust them enough to give them money if they ask for it without sufficient proof. Or not trust them enough to invite them into your home.
"Trust" being something defined as both exclusively positive and a virtue in the person that gives it is just meant to soften up marks, and is probably instilled into us by marketing and advertising. It's certainly not taught by any religion, who concentrate on being worthy of trust, not trusting.
You trust people because you know them well, and you know what they will do when confronted by certain situations because you have seen them react to similar situations before. Before you know them well, you're just operating from stereotypes and comparisons with other people you've known who have similar mannerisms. Or you're projecting your own thought processes into their heads. A "level" of trust is just a confidence level in a prediction.
If you don't have a friend who has had to sacrifice something for you, you don't know if you have any friends at all. That's the real reason it's hard to make friends as an adult. But after you've been through stuff with people, you'd be a fool not to know they'll come through in this new, far-less grave circumstance.
I honestly think the problem is that we're trying to make people fungible in a weird secular market religion, and they're not. Trust is not a credit score.
Sounds like you have failed to find it, and are now just coping.
(assuming everyone's lying until proven otherwise sounds like a miserable existence)
High-trust societies are self-regulating scammers paradises. Filled with people citing Occam's Razor, and affinity fraud. Even worse, for minorities the procedures never get dropped, but they're still expected (pressured) to drop procedures to fit in, so they end up highly unequal societies.
It’s particularly striking when I visit my parents’ house. I’m a millennial and I don’t even know my neighbors names and my parents, who are boomers, routinely talk, text and visit their neighbors. Their neighborhood (at least among the old people) feels like a community. Mine does not.
High trust communities need a lot of time to develop and a lot of annoying gossip and reputation stuff that can feel nosy. My grandparents were always keenly aware of "but what are they going to say?!", what will they think of the mother if this or that (if the child uses swear words, if people peek through the window and see a messy room, if there is weed in the garden, if a guest is not stuffed full with food, if the curtains are still closed at 7 am, indicating that they are lazy and sleeping in etc). They were always worried about optics and reputation. They were in turn always evaluating how everyone else lived and behaved, who helped and who didn't, who lives neatly and orderly, or who doesn't cook for his (edit: her) husband properly, or which man is a drunkard or gambler, who shows up to church and who doesn't etc. This is suffocating but necessary for the kind of reputation that prevents antisocial behavior.
Of course that's the other extreme, but the point is, you need 10+ years of living together and interacting, helping out in renovations, knowing the families, regularly sharing dinner etc to get it going. People move too often nowadays for this to be viable. And of course having to stay put has disadvantages for efficiency and adaptability, there's a reason why people are moving around.
At least they were forward-looking on social issues.
Technically, we can read the banks' financial reports, the executives' background checks, the video recordings of their gold reserves... to decide which banks are less likely to run away with your money. But no one wants to live in such a place.
It's like the blockchain people trying to push blockchain for inventory management.
The root of the problem has something to do with the scammer.
I myself have almost fallen for a well crafted phishing attack, the only reason I never ended up putting in my card details was that I was technical enough to know that a generic URL with no query params can't possibly have my tracking code pre-filled on a page I've never been to before. Had the scammers just made me enter my own tracking code, or if I didn't know what a query param is, I 100% would've fallen for it.
My point is that no one is immune to a momentary lapse in judgement or just plain bad luck. You can be an expert, extremely intelligent, whatever, all it takes is 5 minutes of weakness to get you, whether that's because you slept bad, had something else on your mind, weren't being diligent enough (it's impossible to be diligent 24/7 after all) or any other myriad list of reasons.
It's easy to put the blame on the victims here, but with generative AI the line between reality and fabrication is getting thinner and thinner. I'm a massive AI skeptic (just check my comments here), but I'm 100% positive that sooner or later we'll hit a stage where it's quite literally impossible to discern an AI fabrication from a real event unless you witnessed it in person yourself. You won't be able to trust images, or audio or even videos of your loved ones unless you basically see them send it to you, and even then there's no guarantee the final footage isn't doctored by the phone in some way.
So sure, people need to smarten up a bit, but we also need to start thinking about these problematic issues with AI sooner rather than later, cause things are only going to get worse, and fast.
Exactly! In my example for myself, I really was expecting a package, and I was expecting to be paying some extra duties/fees, so the phishing site asking me to enter card details didn't strike me as odd. The website itself looked exactly like how the real one looks, there were no grammatical errors or anything else that would tip you off that you're not looking at a legitimate page. The URL, in hindsight was a bit sketchy, but honestly I've received official legitimate communiques from various large companies from very weird URLs before so even then I didn't question the URL too hard, as it wasn't typosquatting or using the Turkish l instead of the regular l or anything like that, just something like dhl-express.com (I can't remember exactly what the URL was). It even had a proper header navbar that they carefully copied from the real thing.
Literally the only thing that tipped me off that it was a scam was that it prefilled the tracking code for me, but the link I had received had no query param as I mentioned and I've never visited the page before (so the tracking code wouldn't be persisted in localStorage or a cookie). I can very, very easily imagine someone less technical falling for it, and hell depending on circumstances I probably would've fallen for it if I was tired after a long day of work or something like that.
They once where protected by the state- but the state, as policeman- has been continuously reduced in its protector role, by those, who found hackable political interfaces, the ticks on the state wave through the fleas on the people. The pent-up backlash to all this results in a militant vote for anti-parasitic and exposure limiting institutions.
Fascism promises to remove those attackers, by fire-walling away the exterior and prosecuting perceived attackers on the inside of the nation.
Every successful scam, every allowed exploit, is a advertising for the totalitarians who promise to restore order.
You can't and the correct response is a total lack of trust by default because that's the easiest way to protect yourself.
They really are out to get you(r money).
This has slowly eaten away at the idea that we used to live in a high trust society that has now completely transformed into a society where you cannot trust anything, ever, in any capacity.
I felt like I had kind gained back some control from not clicking on any links in emails and using my phone sparingly. But with this new crop of AI tools, you're right, it makes it a lot easier to separate you from your money and the criminals are becoming way more sophisticated and persistent in their attacks.
Now that long distance calls are free, the Internet connects you to everyone else on it, and paperwork is digitalized across entire populations, the reach - and therefore statistical likelihood of encountering- scammers is much higher.
Rather off-topic, but it's funny how this principle applies in the exact same way when it comes to traffic for instance. It is unfortunate it has to be like that, but not trusting any other traffic and assuming they can at any point do the thing you'd least expect them to do is just safer. Especially when e.g. cycling this saved my from injuries or worse more than just a couple of times. And that's even in a country with relatively high numbers of cyclists.
This is why driving schools teach defensive driving. You can't control anyone else but yourself.
Sure, you still need to look after yourself in the moment - but there are incentives in place to discourage drivers from misbehaving and those incentives do help reduce the likelihood that you will be a victim of an accident. They’re not great! Bad drivers get away with a lot, and cyclists are not adequately considered in many mechanisms, but they are better than nothing.
Yet ‘nothing’ is what we have with respect to online fraud, where the situation is more akin to one where driving laws don’t exist or aren’t enforced, nobody drives cars with license plates, you can’t get insurance, and if you are run off the road the police’s reaction is to tell you that roads are inherently dangerous places. Bad drivers will never be caught, and if they drive over you they get to steal your bike and sell it. Entire businesses are set up around forcing cyclists into streets where they can be mowed down with steamrollers, and the police claim to be powerless to stop them.
There are numerous mechanisms that exist that make it possible for us to share roads without inherent trust. And even those are inadequate. Fraudulent behavior online has none of the societal mechanisms that we have created to constrain driving.
I am a firm believer that commuters and pedestrians Urban Asia are suffering from PTSD just by going from point A to point B.
I failed my driving test in the US twice because I kept stopping at green lights. Back home, if you don't do that, you'll die or kill someone.
This mind set means that anyone on the roads or on the sea should never assume or trust any other participants, and thus to the best of a person ability communicate intend, verify that everyone is behaving correctly, and apply a defensive posture in order to create margins against unwanted outcomes.
Living this way is that it’s really exhausting, saps quite a lot of joy out of life and makes people more lonely. It’s far from optimal and a more sustainable option would be to work our way back to the community trust we used to enjoy just ~30 years ago.
I live in a small enough town that if I screw somebody, my name will be hosed until the day of my funeral.
End result is I've left $10s of K of easily pawnable construction materials out for years (sorry any thieves reading, it is gone now) and no one touched it. There are several houses around me that have been abandoned for years, no one has ever touched them, except as a free service to help maintain their road.
If I go into 'town' it's a good bet almost everywhere I go, my wife or I will see someone we know. If you do not hold a door for someone, they will remember. If you cut them off in traffic, they will remember. If we lie to others, it will be known by everyone in short order, and we will never have any halfway decent job here again, unless the money can somehow be made in a trustless service.
Perhaps we want privacy-but-not-anonymity. Or perhaps society doesn't scale easily.
This may mean you get scammed. (I mean, be more careful with larger amounts...) But when you get scammed, remain open anyway. Yeah, you can lose some money that way. But the alternative is "really exhausting, saps quite a lot of joy out of life and makes people more lonely", so even losing some money could be a net win overall.
The ability to move into new circles every few years incentivizes defection and low trust interactions.
However tight knit, reputation based groups will tend towards risk aversion and conformity and tall poppy syndrome and nepotism. Low trust enables outlier performance.
Business moves at the speed of trust. Outlier performance can only exist in a high trust environment. Low trust society is highly correlated with low economic activity.
High trust environments are usually high trust inwards and low trust outwards toward outsiders who show up. They may show great hospitality but won't trust you with their affairs. Outlier entrepreneurial risk taking behavior only works in places that have medium-trust for everyone, by using contracts and other formal things.
High trust is incompatible with high mobility and "fresh starts". High trust is built when there's a way to retaliate and there is a way for reputation to spread. High trust among strangers only works if you can assume that the strangers are embedded in high trust networks that are in some way connected, even if you don't directly know each other.
If you can pack up and go anytime, trust will be lower. But for economic efficiency, being mobile is positive.
There are tradeoffs here. People didn't just become low trust randomly.
"They all only want your best... Your money"
It's still possible to function, it's just that you have to go out and seek information, and usually seek information through channels where the organization is not delivering it to you. Every non-profit files a Form 990 with the IRS, and every public company files a form 10-Q/K with the SEC. There's a wealth of information there for figuring out what the company is doing, but they usually like to obfuscate it in some extremely boring text and financial figures, because they want you to buy into the narrative they deliver to the press and not the facts they deliver to the government. They usually will not outright lie on these, though, because doing so is a crime that can put the CEO, CFO, and Board of Directors in jail.
Same for consumer stuff. Ruthlessly seek out back-channel information about products, whether it's word-of-mouth from friends, online reviews (though these are increasingly easily gamed these days), product tests from independent organizations (though again, many companies provide free products to review in exchange for favorable reviews), etc. I've found that keeping an online subscription to Consumer Reports has been well worth it because they're one of the few review sites where you pay them to review, the company doesn't pay them to get reviewed. Advertisements are worthless; treat them as such. Same goes for random cold calls; it's probably a scam, unless you can corroborate it otherwise.
I would like you to think through this statement and then carefully apply it what today's publicly facing technology can do. If TikTok proved anything, it is that masses of people can be influenced to do feel, think and act in accordance with desired goals.
One could argue that if it is already this bad, maybe it should e reined in a tiny wee bit?
<< They're all artificial, and generated for the benefit of the person running the campaign, not you.
Oh no man. The feelings are real. They are generated under false pretenses, but the feelings are real. Honestly, I am not sure if people running those campaigns realize that all those feelings may eventually be turned against them.
<< it's just that you have to
How come it is not fraudster that 'has to'?
I’m always fascinated by victim blaming culture, which has been pervasive long before generative AI.
You see it most frequently in cases where the victim is thought to be a safe target: Someone wealthier, an office rival, a corporation. On HN it appears in every thread about someone being scammed, but it was most obvious in the recent threads where JPMorgan was defrauded by a startup they acquired. Seemingly 1/3 of the comments were from people commenting that JPMorgan was actually at fault for allowing themselves to be scammed. Some even declaring that the fraudster shouldn’t be prosecuted because JPMorgan was entirely to blame for allowing themselves to be scammed.
I don’t know what drives it. The victim blaming people always seem to believe they would not fall prey to similar scams. They also seem to see the world as full of faceless scams everywhere and that allowing yourself to fall victim to them is a moral failing. Many of them just like to be contrarian, snide, and judgmental, so heaping scorn on the victim they know checks more of those boxes than going along with the obvious consensus that the party who committed the crime is the one to blame.
This happens with every new generation of scams. The victim blamers read the news and think it would never happen to them because they’re too smart, therefore any victims deserve blame.
"If the victim somehow did something to deserve it, then it won't happen to me" (just world fallacy)
That must be a representation of your own social circle because I can assure you that poor people are commonly blamed for all the bad things that happen to them.
Like that RMS meme where the world is finally getting the pointy end of the proprietary software trap and cries for help and he just whispers "Gno".
More powerful people, the ones profiting from economic crimes, are fighting to keep scams legal. And they are the ones that create confusing laws that blame victims for falling for scams in the disguise of "personal responsibility". When lawmakers are the scammers, scams become legal and the victims will not see justice.
1. In an ideal, fair world, which parties should have to change to make the outcome not happen? Scammers shouldn't scam, murderers shouldn't murder, etc.
2. With a reasonable understanding of the world, which parties could have predicted the outcome and changed their behavior to mitigate the problem? JPMorgan not doing due diligence on a deal of that magnitude is pretty negligent. I don't carry open bags full of cash walking around the city either, and I don't comment negatively about our new glorious leader and all of his kingly power. Yes, if I had my savings stolen or were murdered on my next boat trip to the Caribbean that'd be somebody else's "fault" via definition (1), but as a practical matter my life is a hell of a lot better on average if I avoid those activities regardless.
The courts sometimes agree with point (2) to an extent as well. If JPMorgan's negligence caused harm to others, the criminals involved would still have full responsibility to JPMorgan, but the harmed parties might have a civil claim against JPMorgan. By way of analogy, what happens if your local bank's safe is found out to be an unmonitored cardboard box? The fact that somebody would eventually break in is predictable, and the bank would be liable to its customers.
I find that awful. JPMorgan should be held accountable, like many similar firms, for all the money that they themselves have stolen. But one crime does not justify the other. The people that scammed JPMorgan will not use the money to pay off JPMorgan's victims.
What it seems that in the USA nobody believes in justice anymore, as even the Supreme Court is just another partisan agency helping the rich. Americans may justify getting money thru crime because it is so normalized. Blaming victims helps to feel good about it.
The real answer is to have stronger institutions that see everybody equally under the law, and to have better laws that punish all type of criminals including economic crimes.
I suspect that we’ll be seeing AI-generated images of everything (including product shots), soon.
I’ll bet the biggest driver, will be that there won’t be any issues with provenance. I occasionally get attempts at “extortion,” with my sites, where they try to claim an image in my postings is pirated (I always make sure of provenance —I used to work for a photography company). If everyone uses AI-generated, that’s going to be a tougher task for the scammers.
Not sure if “AI-enhanced” will become more common for this kind of thing, though.
I’m old enough to remember when South Park took the piss out of Sally Struthers.
I have no idea who Sally Struthers is and I’ve never seen any of the adverts.
Famous for her “whining” ads: https://youtu.be/bGTEKWRLJuQ
In some of them, she would be walking around in a destitute village, looking disgusted. Terrible ads.
This is already a thing. There are high-quality tools specifically for it. I saw a video from a photographer who works in that industry and his opinion is that their jobs are over and they need to prepare to do something else.
Don't blindly throw money to feel good when people who you this kind of ads, check what they actually do.
This is an odd way of saying "people aren't aware of poverty amongst white people".
https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/sn07...
Yes, this would require government regulation. That’s a good thing here, and is what regulation should be used for: requiring the things that the market won’t adjust for.
Thus those regulations and solutions you are calling for are simply impossible and it won't matter how much money and prayers you send to the government. It won't change reality.
Isn't it obvious the government isn't an all seeing god?
All regulations are imperfectly written and imperfectly enforced but many seem to have impact.
I'm not sure if regulating this is feasible or not but it's not immediately obvious it's impossible to some extent.
In this case, it's calling for government regulations to make sure that people do not lie. Good luck with that, I say. Those are regulations which will be guaranteed to be imperfectly written and imperfectly enforced, and smart people - like the commenter I replied to - should understand that.
Unless you are of the faith that "the government" is an almighty and all-seeing god, which to be fair is what many people think and why government worship is the largest religion on the planet right now. Both in devotion of the believers, in tithes paid, and in willingness to kill for and die for the faith.
What will happen in reality if the government regulates picture veracity like suggested is this:
- Any pictures (real or manipulated or generated) which are in line with government policies and ideology will be marked as 100% true, real and verified.
- All pictures (real or manipulated or generated) which go against government policies and ideology will be marked as 100% fake and lies.
I think that’s the real problem - it’s not really any better if a charity uses a paid actor on a set, or finds the absolute poorest person in the worst street in the country and uses their photos as if they’re representative of an entire country for the purpose of soliciting donations. If the AI pictures were actually representative of the situation then I wouldn’t think it’s all that bad.
So it's like there is a certain genre of photograph that is what people have come to associate with poverty in developing countries that may not be realistic in the first place, and then as an additional level of detachment from reality, ai is then reproducing the conventions of that genre without even involving real people or places.
Anyway, who will want to continue to fork out money over fraudulent images of victims? How can I know that this or that agency represents actual people in need?
In Zurich, an Oktoberfest-related festival (Zuri-Wiesn) held inside a large tent-like structure put up within the main train station's main hall has recently concluded. On the outside, on both sides, the tent was adorned with large-format prints of vaguely Germanic rural folk in celebratory garments holding up their pint. All generated! Blurry facial features, malformed metal buttons. I'd argue that already damaged the joviality and earnestness of the event. And that's just beer...
This is a problem and always has been with AI, people have been saying this for at least a decade at this point. Type in "photorealistic picture of child in refugee camp" in any AI that lets you.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benefits_Street
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Jeremy_Kyle_Show
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt5455122
I remember thinking at the time that these were quite exploitative.
So now they use AI imagining stuff...
For drunk driving in particular, the pictures typically come from the police and aren’t exposed or composed with an artistic purpose. The opposite is true for a bunch of the famous pictures of poverty; these are composed for their (often powerful) emotional effect. Whether it’s a good thing or not, I can imagine that being able to add a little of the art direction after the fact to drunk driving photos might be tempting, i.e., having some control over angle & exposure, and maybe avoid gore in the shot…
Fantastic.
It’s pretty fucked up to, say, inject tragedy into narratives by showing victims as emancipated when they’re not. Or altering racial profiles to fit a narrative.
It may not pop out as particularly noteworthy in a new age of fake imagery though.
With aid agencies and donations you're often entirely reliant on their word as to whether your donation has actually made it to the cause they claim to support. If they're going to be using deceptive imagery, what else could they be deceptive about?
I assume kids are starving there, but I have to wonder why the photographer picked a distortion and not a representative pic
I've run photos I've taken through AI so I could post pictures of myself without opening myself to being doxxed.
let me do one nit picky correction
"does so in a a way even more efficient at manipulating our brains"
because a lot of media, especially social media, already do so. Just currently by using unrelated stock photos, photos from different "incididents" etc.
e.g. even on supposedly reputable news channels it's not rare to find the background images of completely unrelated incidents when they don't have any fitting "correct" images, and then maybe some small *note in some corner. Or not because didn't even notice.
There might be some like that, but not all. You can't paint with such an all-or-nothing brush. Be specific about the organizations you think are a "scam" and are only after "your money."
> Because they can’t provide photo documentation of they work on the site where apparently the aid happened. So sad. And many people fall for this scam.
You're putting too much faith in "photo documentation." A lot of stuff can't, or can't practically be documented with photos. I'd say the benefits of aid are one of those things. A picture of people distributing food from a truck? Could be a staged photo-op. And there's the issue of "poverty porn," where you take photos of someone's miserable situation so some better off people can gawk and judge.
When running a charity you need to spend money on things that aren't strictly the mission (such as fundraising) so that you can continue to operate, but every dollar that goes towards those activities is in a sense wasted. Knowing where investing is necessary and where to skimp is the essence of good charity management. I can't really see the argument that promotional photography wouldn't be the latter.
For instance in the charity I run, we have about a thousand pictures of real operations taken by amateurs. For our posters we still prefer staged professional photos, since they look 100x better and communicate our message much more effectively. And yes, it does annoy me that this is the case, but again, the goal of my charity isn't to pursue truth in advertising, it's to achieve an actual goal (which is the goal people have already entrusted us with their real money, so one does have a healthy fear of wasting it).
On a deeper level it's sort of like why paintings sometimes feel more true than photographs in the sense that they can communicate how we perceive a place and what it means to us in a way that a photo often cannot.
Personally, I'd prefer donating to an organization that isn't trying to use "sad" images to gut-punch me in the first place. There's a reason the "Arms Of An Angel" ASCPA ads are a laughingstock.
It is a tricky question and for me there is no clear answer.
Perhaps if the image came with a disclaimer that explained the rationale for using AI.
It’s one thing to create an image but creating a whole fake testimony is even worse.
Notice they just felt that the tool was evolving “too fast” and it didn’t feel real enough. Once the tool is better, they’ll have no issues with fake testimonies.
That's a hot take. Any group's credibility is shot if they're fabricating testimonials, never mind that the subject matter is absolutely brutal, manipulative, and exploitive. The whole point of such a thing is to show create human connection to a real problem in the interest of motivating change. What utter bullshit.
Take AI out of this story and pretend that you have groups making up stuff to solicit donations. It's fraud. The AI part just means it was easy to commit.
I've never ever heard of this charity in India, but if you've been to Tokyo these guys have posters of like the worst stereotypes of India you can think of, in order to milk money.
Gutter scum. These NGO scam-artists are half the reason these countries remain poor - it's in their interests that this doesn't change, which is why they NEVER advocate structural change.
Eg. None of these people will talk about caste till the cows come home, but will not utter a single word against the systemic British era policies that exclude the majority of non-Anglophones out of education and ergo a way out of poverty. Almost like they want to ensure that colonial policies that suit them don't go against them.
Although I agree that using AI-generated poverty porn is repulsive on many levels, I think there is a valid consent and privacy issue if using actual photos of real people in these circumstances.
A picture of a real person, especially a child who is being victimized by poverty and/or abuse is now being victimized twice.
In this case, AI could be used judiciously to alter the persons face/body and other identifiers to protect their identity, in the same way that print journalism changes names and other identifiers in text. I think this would be ethical as long as properly marked as having been altered and why.
Of course this does not address the motives of the company behind the ad, but it would at least provide increased transparency and privacy protections.
Visualizing the Consequences of Climate Change Using [GANs]
I always found it very hypocritical, the idea that deepfakes are ok if they mock up something we support.
I generally don’t think it’s a big deal to make a synthetic image, just the double standard.
The second one is more insidious: If they solved the problem they address, they would no longer need to exist. They have no incentive to succeed. So they go around addressing individual problems, taking sad pictures, and avoid addressing systemic problems.
And if the systemic problems are insoluble? Then there is again an argument that the NGO should not exist. If the problem is truly insoluble, then likely the money could be better spent elsewhere.
But from another POV helping your local orphanage gives you a stronger bond to your local community and contributes to the well-being of the society you live in. By sending your help (aka, money) away you're essentially corroding the pillars holding the nice society you're living in.
As long as the images they end up with accurately reflect the situation on the ground and the use of AI is transparent it seems like a good idea to use AI for attention grabbing images and supplement with candid photos from aid workers who aren't professional photographers.
In such ads, you can see entirely fabricated “people” talking about their amazing experiences with the product.
Is that regulated at all? Should it be?
Jolly doo wiggly jingle dee. This is actually the blueprint for society that I believe most of us are following to fine details. It's been largely rehearsal hitherto, but I do fear the show has begun and any moment now we'll have the doors to the theater welded shut and quite regardless of Amendments, someone's gonna yell fire, too late. And it'll get warm and fuzzy.
My vigilance is unaffected by my absence of optimism and I hold tightly to my values with clean ears to listen to those of others; but here's a scary consideration:
Those that are optimistic that this imminent hellscape can be managed tend to be either not very, or too intelligent. The intelligent ones forget in the bliss of creativity and grit that they are an extreme minority. They may see solutions everywhere, but if they were brave enough to stop and express this to random strangers, things wouldn't go well for long. In theory it could, but in practice wouldn't, and one would find the middle spectrum has been forged with indifference, hostility and abundantly rewarded for self-imposed ignorance and therefore has no time or patience to even hear. Although some might listen while staring at their phone, actual considerations would be outliers.
This is getting worse, not better. The filter bubble has gone live.
Future mitigation will be by necessity in accordance with public obtuseness. What of this mitigation that can be mustered will not be passive, nor pleasant, if any at all beyond headless self preservation. I foresee an inextricable mess, compounded by the winds of time which inevitably must change to carry back all the problems that for so long we have discarded into it. Environmental, social, fiduciary, tectonic, cosmi-oceanic - you name it - it's a big harsh universe and we've been taunting and shitting at it for too long.
Fraud, my friend, is our new religion. Speak against it too loudly and you'll get one tall wooden leg with a nice perpendicular one to secure you high upon it.
Already in 1986, the band Chumbawamba published their debut album "Pictures of Starving Children Sell Records":
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chumbawamba
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pictures_of_Starving_Children_...
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gt_ztOo9Kak
> https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=OLAK5uy_ljBD_smlWxwYsg...
amelius•2h ago
Anyway, all advertising is fake nowadays, so it is hard to compete while being honest. Can't blame them.