But… why would you not replace workers with robots when you can? Serious question.

The alternative is paying people to do an unneeded job, and that’s not sustainable. How do we intend to pay a person who contributes nothing to society?

I feel there are going to be a shitload of questions like this in the coming decade. We’ve navigated such upheavals before, such as during the Industrial Revolution and the beginning of the Information Age. But now? Seems quite different.

Had this talk with a more conservative acquaintance about minimum wage:

“We gotta pay these people a living wage. What about all the dumbasses out there that can’t handle more than a convenience store job?”

“Not my problem.”

“But those people are OUR problem. Want to give them more welfare? Want them to be homeless with all the problems that brings?”

Anyway, some fool will come along shortly and scream, “UBI!”. If you get a simple answer to a complex question, the answering party is simple.

Capitalism created influencers in the first place. No, we don’t need ordinary people living imaginary lives to create consumers who are being sold a lie.

Good riddance to bad rubbish.

Why use any human-like image then? A lot of people on instagram use mannequins or busts. The models are serving a purpose. Removing them means someone loses a job.

If we look at this from top-down you’re right because the company is saving a cost. But from the bottom-up, you’ve just become more expendable. This leads into the arguments others have been making, what happens when eventually people can’t work? And why should we use technology to serve the few and not the many?

I experimented a little bit with this, but it was fairly limited and required a bunch of reference pictures of the character. And I totally lost all coherency once I tried to train the same model with a second character.

That was a couple of months ago, though; maybe I need to look at it again.

Thanks! I’d read it already. Good one too. Though I wasn’t consciously referencing it in my mind, it no doubt planted the seed for my thought.

The basis of my thought was my own reflection on whenever I’ve seen AI images that are intended to be beautiful and attractive. While they are often somewhat uncanny and even unnatural, in my experience they are definitely hitting the right “buttons”, like an artificial sweetener. But, IME, unlike artificial sweeteners, can effectively go for being more “sweet” than anything natural ever could.

I don’t think I like it, but the capacity is definitely there and I can’t see why people won’t eventually get used to being aroused by some ridiculously proportioned and shiny but undeniably “sexy” AI character/imagery and find increasingly little of interest in our dull, flabby, hairy and flat selves.

For the porn and modeling industries, maybe there’ll be a liberating effect of freeing women from the industry. Maybe sexual relationships will feel free to emphasise the physical and psychological intimacy rather than the visual attractiveness.

In the end though, beauty standards will probably just become more problematic. Weird sci-fi shot is probably in store.

All true. But I’ve seen way more ridiculous stuff in ai imagery than I have before. There seems to be a maximising effect so unreal but still attractive that previous manipulations did not dare approach.

Probably referring to this one: youtu.be/iYhCn0jf46U

Inb4 piped bot!

Other modeling companies could use the same AI model, and no one could sue because you can’t copyright it!

And you do realise that those that own the places where people currently make a living will never give up their wealth? Unless the government makes the companies pay taxes at the highest bracket (I’m guessing that an AI will be the most experienced employee from day 0) for each instance and each position that the ai is taking over, businesses will fire everyone not essential (read: the guy that plugs in the server).

Someone tried that 60 years ago

Because broken as they are, people still come first before AI. Or they should, anyway.

There is no reason AIs can’t generate diverse kinds of people.

It’s not like ads use real people anymore. Everything in advertisement has been highly Photoshoped for ages. I don’t understand your point about representation though. It will be easier to create diverse models in all shapes and sizes.

I could see point #2 going either way… it could actually be a good thing. If no one trusts images, then why would anyone assume they are their BMI?

Based on the information the ad services know about individual viewers, they could customize the ads using invented models that perfectly match the viewers’ ethnicity/demographics.

IMO hyper-individualized ads that are personalized would increase diversity. It’d also be a new frontier in advertising manipulation.

Thats more of a problem with the older image generation models, the current models have largely resolved the hand problem

For pictures that problem was fixed barely one month after the hype began. With good prompts and a second round of editing through the AI, that’s a complete non-issue.