Omg, I love how the first examples just show how easy you can fake things. Fake being at a party with your friends. Didn't make your bed, no problem, just fake it.
The sad part is my mother would love "remixing" my old child photos of me.
Omg, I love how the first examples just show how easy you can fake things. Fake being at a party with your friends. Didn't make your bed, no problem, just fake it.
The sad part is my mother would love "remixing" my old child photos of me.
Seriously, are these really the best examples they could come up with?
What is the point of having a fake picture of your dog in a costume? What’s the point of having a fake picture about being at a party?
The only use case I can think of for this is for someone who likes to make up stories and lie about what they’ve done. Is that really the target market?
I can’t imagine “remixing” treasured childhood memories that had a context so you can see a totally implausible and fictitious event. Am I the stupid one for not getting it?
Trying to be as least cynical as possible, imagine if you were a party with 3 or more people, and you really wanted a nice pic like that to commemorate the night, but never got to take one all together because someone left early, and you were in the bathroom when they announced their departure.
Yes, it's a major first-world problem to not get a photo, but to the right person, it could mean a lot to them to "fix" the photo they took with A and B to add C to their 'rightful place.'
and then as you look back at that wonderful night you "remember" with all your friends, you will reinforce a false picture and reality strays further
What's the point of having a photo like that?
Is spending time with your friends not enough in 2026? Do we must provide photographic evidence of all the fun you have been having or it did not happen?
You’re mistaking your preferences for the majority’s preferences. Huge chunk of humanity now chooses to experience in-person events recording it through their phones.
Big difference between being at an event and recording it via your phone, and using ChatGPT to make an AI image of it. Images are not all the same.
In the first case presumably the person is focused on their phone/the photo instead of their friends, and in the 2nd it's the opposite (then making the photo after they're no longer with their friends). It could be said the latter is better?
No, because people talk to each other even when using their phones.
This is easily observable in literally any social situation.
Did you miss the last 15 years of social media?
So many people I just stopped spending time with altogether as instead of being present they’d be posing for their 90th instagram shot by 10am - and then of course they want you to pose, too.
So no. Spending time with your friends is not enough in 2026. I’m not even convinced people have friends now - just colleagues and mutual parasites.
I think it depends on who your friends are, and/or culture.
I was in France the other month and walking down to the river in Saumur, I noticed an area serving drinks (out of an old converted bus) with lights and suchlike (opposite the castle on the hill), with a small acoustic band. Nobody (and I mean nobody) had their phone out. The couple of hours I spent there, nobody was observable taking selfies. The age range was from young to old.
I was shocked. It was very different from the UK. Refreshingly so.
I was also recently in France, at a very similar affair - little fortnightly village fete, with a band and food and all that.
Most everyone over 40 or so, talking. Most everyone under 40, preening and posing. I saw so many people holding plates awkwardly in midair to get a picture of themselves, the food, the bunting etc. - to the extent that the organisers were having to ask people to move along so others could order.
Then again this was the Dordogne which may as well be Bognor at this point.
This is such a contrived imaginary situation that is pretty divorced from reality. No one wants a fake AI photo to commemorate a real event.
5 years ago, after a work retreat, I photoshopped the couple of team members who couldn't attend into a team photo we took so that we could use the photo to represent our team.
This is just that, but without the hour of tedious photo editing (I'm not very good).
But still what's the point? To look back on false memories that didn't happen?
With this logic, what is the point to read a book about false events that did not happen? Can we please stop attacking everyone's version of fun or what makes them happy just because it isn't exactly what we like?
In a world were there is a significant amount of people that do things just to take photos of themselves doing things rather than experiencing the thing, this may be the lesser evil.
At least they actually showed up
That was exactly my first reaction!
Mark where you at the party today? Yes of course look at these pictures I took (╥﹏╥)
> The only use case I can think of for this is for someone who likes to make up stories and lie about what they’ve done. Is that really the target market?
As far as I can tell, the biggest uses of these sort of models is to pump out lots of content on multimedia-based social media, so yeah, it's basically for the sort of person who doesn't shy away from exaggerating, omitting or outright lying in order to get more views.
I’m less concerned about faking being at a party with friends and more with the 2006 timestamp on said photo!
Can you imagine finding a stack of photos in the basement with timestamps of the Before AI times and wondering whether they are real or just got swapped with generated and printed fakes? Scary!
It’s cool, folks… nothing bad is going to happen. Right? Right?!
True, I didn't thought about that. Just imagine the scale of "historic" images that will be created over the next 100 years.
There won’t be a next 100 years.
Didn't make your bed, no problem, just fake it.
Except you need to have taken a photo of the unmade bed, uploaded it to ChatGPT, prompted for the 'fake made bed' version, and downloaded the image.
Surely it's less effort to just make the bed?
It would use far less energy to make the bed too, and help preserve Earth's future by avoiding needlessly expending energy.
You can take the photo, inside the chatgpt app and then talk to it without much effort. Perfect for a lazy teenager .
> Surely it's less effort to just make the bed?
It's not about the bed.
People areaddicted to generating now.
Slopoholics the whole bunch of them.
Not in the past I guess?
Yeah, the "3 lonely selfies -> fake 2006 party photo" is the most 2020s thing I've ever seen in my life.
> Omg, I love how the first examples just show how easy you can fake things. Fake being at a party with your friends. Didn't make your bed, no problem, just fake it.
Well, that's like the entire point of social media anyway, isn't it? People there will _love_ this. Ugh ...
My secret hope is that this kills the influencer industry and gets things back to just ads. Just the ads happen to be fake people, instead of real people pretending to be ads.
And the fan favourite 'Imagine the apartment we're trying to sell doesn't look like a superfund site'
Is that 5 pillows on the original (messy) bed down to 4 pillows in the clean version?
Apple Intelligence received the same criticism when they launched Siri AI. Seems like the faking it, is a common product UC.
They famously have not launched Siri AI yet.
Ah yeah, well they integrated Chat afaik.
I meant to say when they launched their promo [1] for Siri AI. Can’t find a non IG link, sorry.
[1] https://www.instagram.com/reel/DBBgEWQP2b5/
This is an artificial modern world problem.
For thousands of years people have told embellished stories, and humanity has thrived upon it. Tall tales, fish stories. Heck, that's still the average person's experience unless they've really worked their critical thinking muscles.
Today's working adults are used to the short thirty-year "safe space" of smartphones and internet. We grew up in a temporary meta stability where "truth" was "recorded" and could be "relied upon", and now that the fundamentals are shifting, we're complaining that the physical world is amenable to storytelling and imagination once again.
Cry me a river. This is awesome and is a direct consequence of everything I ever wanted the future to be: magical creative superpowers. I wanted to graduate into the world that is emerging now rather than spend the first third of my career in incrementalism and slow progress.
2008 - 2020 sucked. What a total lull. AI is healing these things and putting us back on track for the jet pack future we grew up dreaming about. It's taking us back to a creative world without shitty platforms controlling what we say and do, and without a ceiling on what we can accomplish.
It feels like every day we're unwrapping a new present or several. Not small things, but reality-shattering things that fill me with inspiration to build and explore. It's so much fun.
Sounds like you fundamentally misunderstand the thing people have against using AI for these pursuits. If your imagination or capability needed LLMs in order to unlock their full potential (as in, if you waited until AI removed the barriers between a beginner and their future craft), maybe your potential wasn't that great to begin with. And all you're doing is producing things closer to the median, instead of somewhere toward one end of a bell curve.
To tell a story, to even exaggerate one is something completely different from providing "prove" it did really happen exactly the way it was told.
There are many many people that will take an image as an undeniable fact of the real world. While before you could fake(photoshop) things it took more time then 30 seconds.
I wouldnt regulate these aspects, because I believe pandoras box is already wide open. Regulating anything wouldn't change much.
Pandora's box is already wide open? The lid was blown off the hinges long before AI. There were people eating Tide Pods in the 2010s. People were drinking bleach and taking Ivermectin to kill a virus about five years ago.
AI, in some ways, might be our only saving grace at this point. It sure as Hell cannot cause people to do much worse.
AI makes it easier to fact check. It’s not perfect but it’s better than nothing.
This is the right perspective.
While {AI, the Internet, Smartphones} can cause harm, {AI, the Internet, Smartphones} are vastly more beneficial to society than not.
[Cry me a River]
No thank you
Good, because we need that river to make AI images!
>The sad part is my mother would love "remixing" my old child photos of me.
How is that sad? Why is your mothers joy sad?
Because she will pounder in old memories that never existed in the first place. Instead of cherrying the current times. Past moments of long gone time will be elongated beyond their actual existence.
Imagine a time where a small moment is actually a smaller amount experienced then the remixed one. At one point you will have more memories of fake events, and more emotional beats for said fake events than real ones.
AI videos showing you a second life if you just had chosen a different path.
People will be depressed from it.
There’s a wonderful Ted Chiang short story called “Anxiety is The Dizziness Of Freedom” that explores how people become enmeshed and addicted to alternate versions of how their life could have gone. It’s reminiscent of what you’re describing.
I made an AI video of a picture of me when I was about 2. Had a huge smile on my face in the photo so as a lark I made a 5 second video of me laughing. The look in my mom's eyes when I showed her and the way she grabbed the phone from me to look closer was such a good moment.
It's not an alternate reality. I was laughing at the time almost certainly. New ways of seeing old memories really needn't be depressing at all. It's so strange how so many people seem to only see the bad in a technology that can be used in countless different ways.
Because elderly people who never had a connection to tech or sci-fi will have no feel for, and therefore no resistance to the kind of trickery that seems fun but is ultimately corrosive. Cheerfully meddling with the artifacts of memory at that life stage is corrosive.
Why do you assume her joy is the sad part?
Because the mother's joy should hinge on the actual photo of the actual event of the actual person, not a fictional imaginary event or fake childhood of their child. The experience of being human should be tethered to reality.
Memory already declines with age. AI slop threatens to warp those memories further.