Future Timeline

(Mother Jones)Today President Biden announced his reelection bid. In response, the GOP announced its further descent into the uncanny valley, with a big assist from artificial intelligence.

Presumably designed as a rebuke of Biden’s own relatively somber campaign video, the Republican offering—titled “Beat Biden”—foretells the dystopian future heralded by the incumbent’s imagined second win. It’s an all-but-unlivable hellscape of war, financial ruin, and crime. And it’s all, according to the YouTube description, rendered by artificial intelligence tools. Axios reports that “this is the first time the RNC has produced a video that is 100% AI, according to a spokesperson.”

The video itself offers a clarification baked into a watermark in the top left corner: “Built entirely with AI imagery.”

So not 100 percent. There’s music, bits of voice-over, and a ton of post-production effects (jitters and other “camera” movements, vignetting, animation, color-grading, sound effects, light flares, and more) happening in this video. But nonetheless, the production does appear to rely only on startlingly good AI imagery—replacing what would normally be general stock “b-roll,” the footage typically licensed from vast libraries to fill videos (and ads, and even works of our own MoJo journalism). One such AI image generator, Midjourney, rolled out its new model (version 5) in March, and it is capable of producing astonishingly realistic images, with a few stubborn “tells”: Despite some serious improvements, human hands are still a bit weird; extra limbs appear where they shouldn’t; and most prominently, words are rendered unreadable gobbledegook. You’ll recall the rash of stories about the fake Trump arrest photographs.

The producers behind the GOP video have done a good job concealing the AI-ness of the images, by digitally degrading the pictures to make them look more like video. When Taipei is bombed 10 seconds in, lens effects have been added to make it look like the image has been ripped from a witness’ social media account. But mysteriously, the city’s famous Taipei 101 tower sticks up at a dangerously titled angle compared to the rest of the skyline. Is it meant to be an impossibly wide-angle lens? Unclear.

caltrek wrote: ↑Thu Apr 27, 2023 1:40 pm

weatheriscool wrote: ↑Fri Apr 28, 2023 5:17 pm

caltrek wrote: ↑Thu Apr 27, 2023 1:40 pm The GOP’s AI-Generated Biden Attack Ad Really Is a Warning About the Future

erowind wrote: ↑Sun Apr 30, 2023 9:27 am

caltrek wrote: ↑Thu Apr 27, 2023 1:40 pm The GOP’s AI-Generated Biden Attack Ad Really Is a Warning About the Future

I really dread that this forum was right on this one, especially Yuli many years ago. (A somber salute to him on that one.) ...

Chatbots pretending to be journalists have been discovered running almost 50 AI-generated “content farms” so far, according to an investigation by the anti-misinformation outfit NewsGuard.

The websites churn out content relating to politics, health, environment, finance and technology at a “high volume”, the researchers found, to provide rapid turnover of material to saturate with adverts for profit.

“Some publish hundreds of articles a day,” Newsguard’s McKenzie Sadeghi and Lorenzo Arvanitis said. “Some of the content advances false narratives. Nearly all of the content features bland language and repetitive phrases, hallmarks of artificial intelligence.”

In total, 49 sites in seven languages – English, Chinese, Czech, French, Portuguese, Tagalog and Thai – were identified as being “entirely or mostly” generated by AI language models. Almost half the sites had no obvious record of ownership or control, and only four were able to be contacted.. .