Recently, I saw a post on Lemmy of an article that piqued my interest, at least enough to try to validate the information in it. When I followed the link, I was greeted with a clearly AI generated image (it showed trump with an extra finger).
I immediately lost trust in the article and made a comment regarding that. (Link)
But the reaction to this was surprising to me. I got a response stating that the author has a background of being an established writer and reporter, as well as received a lot of downvotes. However, no one responded to my points on the use of AI.
My thoughts are that if you are making money on something, then you need to avoid AI when possible and reasonable.
What’s going on here? Am I wrong and this is somehow an acceptable use of AI?
[Edit] side note of something that that just occurred to me: don’t go to that thread to manipulate the votes or start ““brigading”” against it for the AI. I just wanted to discuss it here. Thanks.
Eventually we might not be able to discern between “natural” and “generated” images. Also there are plenty of instances where it’s probably ok to use generated images (eg. wikihow). Etc.
So I think it depends entirely on context and honesty. If someone is using a generated image in a dishonest way for some political purpose, then that’s probably bad. If someone uses a generated image to make a cartoon about cooking pancakes, then that seems ok.
(Routine disclaimer: Image generation is not “AI” but just statistics applied to big data.)