DarthFreyr

@DarthFreyr@lemmy.world

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Useful things at the mall⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  I saw the watermark stuff, and I’m not contesting any of that, my specific interest is in the fine-detail artifacts. The apparent leaning of some of the bars, eg the 5th and 6th, can 100% be explained by something like a smudge between them; I’d know because I actually drew up some parallel bars in paint.net, rotated and zoomed them, lightened a splotch, and gave it blur to match. Human eyes and brain are pretty good at picking out valid details from degraded images, but you have to remember we’re talking about the level of shading of a handful of pixels, it does not take much disturbance at all to create an illusion of non-parallel lines. A hard object hitting the tag there would be enough to damage the barcode printing slightly to create such a lightening as would produce the leaning appearance.

  I’m not saying that an AI didn’t draw the barcode, and I’m not even saying that it doesn’t have an effect like that because of generative AI imperfections. I’m saying that nothing that I see, or that has been pointed out to me, about the appearance of the barcode provides any indication or suggestion that the image is AI-generated, instead of those being typical results of looking at an image that has been resized and compressed/converted as it travels across the internet. Or to say the quiet part out loud, that those who see “ai artifacts” in the barcode are chasing ghosts, regardless of the actual image creation or the presence of watermarks/fingerprinting.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Useful things at the mall⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Can you specifically describe what you are seeing then that stands out as an AI artifact? I am genuinely interested, not just try to challenge your statement. Here’s my observations and thoughts on it:

  What I see is the JPEG compression blocks around the lines and characters where the chunk changes from a smooth color to a much noisier square; what looks to have once been much blockier aliased pixels forming the barcode lines that got scaled up and blurred, so now there are distinct vertical segments a within each line, as well as a noticeable gridding on the small characters (some of which might also be my viewer); and then possibly some sort of moire effect from the slightly angled barcode lines interacting with the grid of the pixels and/or JPEG compression chunk boundaries. As with many images on the internet, it looks like it has changed size and format in the past, and it’s possible that someone composting an image from different sources would end up with different artifacting in different places.

  Given how small the details of the barcode are, I think they would have to come pretty much entirely from the VAE decoding itself, not from the typical generative AI denoising that we would typically associate with hallucinations, extra fingers, and all the other “classic” tells of older image generation models as well as the less-specific “wrongness” of some more recent ones. So it would AFAIK end up having to be a pretty specific artifact to the actual base model being used, and even then just doing a VAE encoding into the compressed, many-dimensional latent-space and immediately decoding would produce the same artifact, and that’s hardly an “AI” process on its own.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Useful things at the mall⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  That just looks like typical camera and compression artifacts on a fine detail pattern, not like a generative AI that doesn’t actually know what it’s drawing so it starts making inaccurate extrapolations? What about that makes you think it was done by AI?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Horrorposting⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Interesting article, and one I am sympathetic to, but the inclusion of “Western” (and democratic, to a lesser extent) alongside educated, industrialized, and rich when transitioning from talking about a “lack of sanitation” to “adequate sewage disposal” was kinda… jarring?

  Other cultures may not have the same type of porcelain thrones we use, but I think the EIR parts still have effective plumbing, even without being WD. Or do they just not have any of the same issues and pressures around public toilets?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Liminal Space⁩ ⁨⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Thought this was literally a video of a loading circle for a while, and figured “Well, I guess the OP technically hit the liminal nail on the head” when I got jumpscared by the blobbrain loading in.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The ancient Greeks or Chinese should have already had words for this.⁩ ⁨⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I assumed it was just the numbers on the image, not the level of ADHD. As in “a person with ADHD who matches with number 5 on the imagination scale in the OP”.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Is there or has there ever been information illegal to possess or have?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  Not seeing the relevance of need at all? It seems like a legit answer to the question, at least inasmuch as any specific content or documents can be, as opposed to forbidden knowledge/ideas like crypto key numbers or (in the past) the concept of a gun-type fission bomb.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Daddy needs to pay rent⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  Similar, but my real question is why you have an explainer for the North American Fiber-Seeking Backhoe but with a picture of a Northern Pipe-Cracking Excavator?