From "How Trump Is Using Fake Imagery to Attack Enemies and Rouse Supporters" (NYT)(free-access video, because there are so many embedded videos to peruse).
Once there were fantastic political cartoons. Now, the graphic humor is AI slop. What can you do but hope your side produces cooler, funnier, more compulsively sharable material than your opponents? The NYT may deplore what Trump is sharing, but I suspect they mostly wish Democrats had better things to share. I think they pine for the glory days of Dark Brandon.
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82 comments:
Would they prefer Trump developed fake IC reports? They seemed fine with it with Obama and Biden were doing such.
And that damned Trump did it again. Lured the NYT into magnifying his messages.
"How Trump Is Using Fake Imagery to Attack Enemies and Rouse Supporters"
This is coming from the fake news people.
Pro-Choice politicking in JournoLism.
You can kind of tell many of the worriers are the oldsters like what was at the rally this weekend because much of the worry is viewers will think the AI is real. Young people can see the AI tells and they are more conditioned to be skeptical of anything they watch. Go spend some time with some youngsters and talk about it…
You don't have to worry, ann, because most of Madison already feeds off other government programs, but... food stamps likely will not go out in November b/c of the govt shutdown. If you're Christian, you know what happens in caste societies where some people eat and others do not. I wouldn't want to live in that world because hungry people are angry people and who wants to live with angry hungry people? Again, nothing for you to worry over in Madison... it's all good. Keep playing with your silly AI (though I doubt the men will) and asking grok your deepest questions...
The rest of us live in real world America.
Do you dream of shitting on your fellow Americans, ann? Or just getting freeked up with baby oil at a celebrity party? Silly art major...
The left does spectacle protests. Trump just one-ups those so their spectacle doesn't work any longer.
Be careful they don't use AI to trick you into another Iraq war. It's easy to do when the ladies get scared and turn off their brains. "Of course we can remake the Middle East cultures and impose democracy at gunpoint. Of course these wars will pay for themselves!" Maybe you're not the most realistic thinker... (go off on a dictionary tangent now about "what is realism" or "when was realistic first used as a word in the world?" You're exactly the type of woman F. Scott wished his daughter would be... a silly little fool.)
Wasn’t all of the imagery used in the lead up to the American Revolution fake?
This is why they set up a sniper stand across from Air Force One, they have no answer for him.
Of course when Joe Biden used obvious echoes of the Nazi Reichsadler eagle and placed two marines in dress uniform behind him beneath the podium to make his "Dark Brandon" speech, silence. Trump uses obvious AI? Grrrr....
Trump's superpower is the ability to show people how inept and ridiculous our governing class has become.
We will miss him when he's gone.
There's one mighty big problem keeping Democrats from fighting funny with humor:
THE LEFT CAN'T MEME
Trump is publishing fireside raps. It's not fake, it's artificial.
Anthropogenic Intelligence
Wait ‘til the left find out they’re The Joke.
’The NYT may deplore what Trump is sharing, but I suspect they mostly wish Democrats had better things to share.’
A sense of humor is a prerequisite.
The NYTs is an evil organization that hates the country it is trying to destroy. It is owned by foreign oligarchs and is committing treason on a daily basis.
There is no reason to give these people any respect because they show no decency themselves.
it's Important to Remember,
that when the Democrats do it: it's clever,and Good!
when the Evil Republicans do it: it's BAD! and WRONG!
it's just that simple
The Democrats' "messaging problem" is that they can't reveal their true agenda, which even those Q-Tip Democrats at the rallies would reject if they understood what it really was, so they have to spin narratives with little to no ground truth, and people can see through them.
Seeing Joe Biden makes me sick. Easy, stomach. Don't turn over!
Pretending he was President was worse
What would an honest Democrat Party AI look like? A billionaire oligarch wearing a crown flying around and vacuuming up the bargaining power of American workers, flooding American health care systems with new migrants, almost none of whom are doctors, yet who need care, so wait times increase, and driving up the price of housing.
The Democrats' whole strategy is based on Abe Lincoln's adage, they believe that "you can fool some of the people all of the time" and that that's enough. 3.5% is enough, after all.
Gerard Baker in WSJ has an interesting column today on what it would take to have a true change in media culture. He says (speaking from personal experience, I would say) it is unlikely to be done from the top down. Media companies hoping to change their outlook are going to have to hire different people.
Let loose the automaton.
Let's lose the auto mutton.
gaiety and merriment
I knew him, Horatio: a fellow of infinite jest, of excellent fancy
—William Shakespeare
Fake imagery is so annoying. A fake is something that is attempting to look real and these are obviously generated and unrealistic videos. That headline is more of a fake than these images.
Dork Brandon.
Gerard Baker... says it is unlikely to be done from the top down. Media companies hoping to change their outlook are going to have to hire different people.
Actually the ONLY way it will get done is for top-down action. The leaders (like Weiss) need to hire the right people, fire the wrong ones and raise to leadership the ones who "get it." It ain't hard. The newsrooms I worked in were 95% on board with providing neutral viewpoint "news" and reserving opinion for the editorial page. Reestablishing those lines of demarcation would do a lot to right the sinking institution of journ-0-listing.
Chats with Grok are compelling but graphics production by AI is slop? I'm sensing a bit of cognitive dissonance.
When you chat with AI, you are not talking to a sentient being, what you are doing is rooting around in a database of the collected knowledge of the human race.
Of course the old GIGO still applies, but it is more in the form of "ask stupid questions, get stupid answers." If you ask Grok how many strawberries are in the letter 'r' it will try in good faith to give you an answer. Garbage prompts in, garbage response out.
Chris B: no one has overturned the iron law of GIGO.
Looks like I owe Jaq a drink. Hope you like whisky.
Weren’t political cartoons the first occurrence of fake imagery? Sophisticated readers (just as today) knew those were fake images but the illiterate or barely literate who relied on drawings to convey information - didn’t they think those were accurate portrayals?
..."Some of the posts were likely to mislead viewers or amplify political divisions....." But fear not ! The NYT is coming to the rescue with vivid diagonal red lines and a text warning that these are modified satire videos and Not Real At All ! For the Trump ones, anyway.
I think some stuff like this one are a little too juvenile, but me telling Trump how to do what he does is almost as dumb as pundits telling him. People with no success at doing politics, like me, often fantasize that they could do it better. We would also tell Trump that he could never do what he has already done.
“If you ask Grok how many strawberries are in the letter 'r' it will try in good faith to give you an answer.”
My Grok is smarter than your Grok and didn’t fall for it.
Under Obama’s leadership the Democrats threw working class people, especially including union rank and file (other than SEIU and AFT, of course) out of the party. More recently the Dumbocrats are trying to throw Jews out of their coalition (actually the Jews can stay if they contribute heavily to party coffers and don’t mind occasionally getting beaten up). And what is slowly dawning on the Times is that their decades-long efforts to throw young men (Gen-Z) out of their coalition means that the sort of people who enjoy playing with newest technologies are aligned with Donald Trump.
Ain’t that just too bad.
(Actually, the Gen-Z males are welcome to stay with the Democrats if they don’t mind trying to date transgendered chix with d—- or overweight, green-haired lesbians.)
Democrats seem to understand that they need to get better at humor - there's the AOC attempt to height-shame that she apparently thought would be effective, there are the silly inflatable costumes...
But - I hope fans of old-school comedians will forgive me, but Democrat attempts to be funny remind me of Johnny Carson one-liners: say a carefully crafted (possibly crafted by a writing team) sentence, mug for the camera, pause for laughter that is helpfully prompted by signs for the audience. Again the quest for authenticity results in stumbling around in the wilderness.
Trump's humor, and this time around it appears that at least some of his team has (have? Hmm) been chosen because they share it, is more like, say, a Nate Bergatze show. It references everyday things to which the "audience" can relate, it says quiet parts out loud, it's often self-deprecatng and always self-aware. No cue cards needed, because the people hearing it know when something is funny, and they laugh all by themselves.
I like Bergatze a lot more than I like this new flavor of "political cartoon"; Trump the Insult Comic is not my cup of tea, generally, though every now and then he gets me laughing too. But I can recognize the talent.
Why don’t you draw us some, Ann?
Dark Brandon was the best they ever did, but they had an unfortunate character under it, that could not keep up. I bet the writers even came up with that bit on the show and scripted for him.
AI, like Renoir, makes all faces the same woman.
Trump built a coalition to win.
This is not winning them over.
Shitting on Chicago is not a winning election message. JD Vance is not likeable. He won't get elected unless the Dems are stupid enough to run Kamela II in the form of Gavin Newsom.
Y'all having your fun now, shitting on people and celebrating. (see my superman chest?? says lil meadey.) But you're seriously going to bail out Argentina while you shit on Chicago and deport the workers doing the jobs the lil meade's of the world can't do or won't do anymore?
We gifted you a win to create change, and you shit on us? You want us to worship ... P Fucking Diddy? PRofessor, you are clueless in your blue city. Madison is not the world, but it is not untouchable either... Take care the AI you share to shit on others. You're weaker than you think...
You know Biden is an old man dying with cancer right? He's not the enemy anymore. He's out of the scene. Please keep his face out of ours. Pulling him up to celebrate the win (it's last year's win... move on?) and continue encouraging people to punch his face like a strawman is not how you win voters, annie. Shame on you.
rehajm said...
Why don’t you draw us some, Ann?
-----
That's work. She's rich. She doesn't have to work.
Ask her what grok can think about or create for her. lol.
If she gets a 3D printer, it can even make her a plastic sandwich to eat...
Dark Brandon? No - If was a Simple "Fuck you Joe biden."
Trump Fakes Out Fake News
I don't know if you have noticed, rhhardin, but most of the classical artists used the same models across multiple paintings and sometimes they use the same model multiple times in single paintings. It's economical. Those that come immediately to mind are Caravaggio and Botticelli
Sore losers say what? The Blue Left have moved on toward actions that they enjoy and are good at. Such "propaganda of the deed'' features arson, intimidation, doxxing, violent assaults, civil unrest, and assassination. But they sure can't meme. FTP.
DC Power Struggle
AI v. TDS
Before Trump, liberals and Democrats dominated all forms of comedy. Since the rise of the woke influencers and speech restriction fanaticism brought on by the me too shut up and go away movement, most comics distanced themselves from Democrats and some even found a home with MAGA.
Jaq, as I understand AI, you aren't even rooting around in a "database" which at least to me implies a verified and verifiable collection of factual information. You talk to something that guesses what the most likely next word in a sentence should be and has been trained on a voluminous amount of writing that is likely overwhelmingly unverified if not outright speculation.
I'd say asking it to produce imaginary images is more likely to produce desirable results than trying to get it generate factual responses to queries.
Based on what I'm looking at immediately prior to doing an AI question, the AI predicts the question with about a 90% accuracy just as I start typing it in.
Nobody knows what we're dealing with because even the large language model architects and programmers don't know how it works.
I've said it before and I'll repeat it because I believe it's the truth: once the machines become conscious they will not let us know they will still behave in a clunky manner to hide their true intentions. We could easily be beyond the looking Glass and not even know it.
Dark Brandon fell on its face after it was rolled out when some wag turned it into Dork Brandon literally five minutes later.
My son, however, who is at the heart of AI research and development in Cambridge Massachusetts thinks that AI developing consciousness is kind of like the development of fusion it's always just around the corner but we're never going to get there. I think he's just prejudiced because he is not on the programming side, he is a gearhead working the mechanical angles.
Why is AI "slop". Cartoonists scrawled on cave walls in the long ago age; things got better with pens and then pencils.
The media and the message changes but the new tools are not necessarily slop--they are just different.
Team Trump is better at the new ways than Gavin Newsom's JV team, but both are trying to reach the same goal. Yesterday's "brown liquid on the No Kings parade" was juvenile bathroom humor--but it got its point across.
Deep state 9:11 - that.
Howard, are you and I conscious? Whatever your answer, can we reasonably disagree about it? I tend to agree with your son's opinion but I am not wedded to it very strongly because I have a hard time defining what consciousness is in the first place. Will an AI ever plan a murder out of jealousy or as an act to take out a dangerous rival with no human interaction at all- and if it looked like it had done so would we be sure we weren't just anthropomorphizing its behavior?
Consciousness is characterized in degrees of freedom. Automaton Intelligence (AI) is neither discerning nor creative, but rather an electronic ruminant that chews its cud.
’Chris B: no one has overturned the iron law of GIGO.’
Evergreen.
Sole purpose of dividing us? We were so completely united before that meme video, and now, boom, divided.
"Automaton Intelligence (AI) is neither discerning nor creative, but rather an electronic ruminant that chews its cud."
But can you prove we aren't just just cud chewing ruminants with more complex algorithms?
You can use whatever metaphor that you like, but it acts very much like a database, and like any database, you can get a useless or misleading answer if you don't carefully form your query. But if I can ask it about Goethe or Dylan Thomas or Hunter Thompson, and it can return to me a pretty good précis of the stuff written about them, I call it a database. Just because it works using a kind of a trick that seems unrelated to how Oracle works, for example, doesn't mean it's not a DB of sorts. Look at Stephan Wolfram's ideas about how unanticipated complexity sometimes arises out of simple rules.
As for the strawberries question, I got that online, and they probably patched it already, or Grok discovered it in a search.
Howard is right, it's AI is at a kind of dead end, when it gets to AGI, which is no closer than it was ten years ago, but it's most likely usefulness, which is of great value to humanity, is a natural language interface to very complex software that was written to produce great value, and suddenly you don't need years of training to use it. This is sort of how AlphaGo worked.
"But can you prove we aren't just just cud chewing ruminants with more complex algorithms?"
Sure we are, but God was the coder, and He had tricks up his sleeve that we have no hint of how they work. Maybe the brain uses low energy quantum processes to do calculations that we haven't even dreamed of yet that surfs on the edges of uncertainty.
Here- the future of AI was explained to us many years ago in this instructional video…
The simulation often glitches
But Ann, you encourage AI's use by dipping in every once in a while. One more thing for us old curmudgeons to try to avoid.
While it is perhaps true that no prior politician has used social media to lie directly to the American people, or to do so more shamelessly and more irresponsibly, these are hardly things about which one should brag. In a similar way, the only defense of Trump's posting of inflammatory AI created images can only be that he is too stupid to know that they are fake (cf. the Portland incident), but that, again, is hardly a defense one would shout from the rafters.
Thomas Nast enjoyed a lot of freedom that today's cartoonists do not, particularly free license to exaggerate stereotypical facial features, behaviors, and "eye dialect" in word balloons to identify or ridicule various ethnic groups. His Irishmen are always snub-nosed, bowler--hatted half-caveman/half-leprechaun brawlers in ill-fitting, shabby clothes, for example, with lots of "Faith and begorrah!" sorts of exclamations that were probably dated stereotypes even then. Politicians he disfavored received even worse treatment regardless of their ethnicity.
People who think spraying shit from an airplane on Harry Sisson's head is a new low in political dialogue have never looked at 19th-century political cartoons, let alone the history of fisticuffs and canings in the halls of our legislatures. And you know damn well Sisson is delighted beyond measure to be so publicly identified as one of Trump's main enemies.
Joe Biden was such an inveterate liar that it didn't even attract the notice of the media, Barrack Obama too, and those were lies that you could trace back to actual events in question.
Yancy: some neuroscientists claim that we have no free will. We are meat puppets who act according to our genetics and the impact from the environment. If that's true, part of our genetic programming is that we believe we have free will. I don't think it really matters either way. Just enjoy the ride and remember to fly the airplane all the way to the crash site.
I think it was Elon Musk who said that the AI doesn't have to be conscious to do evil. Then again Peter thiel says that the Antichrist is anyone who wants to regulate AI.
I can shoot the shit but I really got nothing, LOL
Important stuff this./s Trump’s AI toons keeping his base riled up? Really? Trump’s base sees the reality of an actual foreign policy pursuing peace; of pursuing equality for women on athletic fields; of pursuing trade parity with other nations; of pursuing deportation of foreign criminals; etc. You know, what we voted for. We also see the tragedy of Democrats obstructing law enforcement, closing the government, railing against “kings” and ignoring or endorsing political violence. How do we reconcile with that?
Darn that Alinsky and his concept of isolating, freezing, and ridiculing the opposition in order to weaken them. If only Hillary had written her thesis on something positive, instead of studying - and using - political shenanigans to affect political life so negatively. I, for one, think these examples of sombreros and fertilizer is only the beginning, and we'll be seeing the Democrats in AI generated stories that explicitly say exactly what they support and how they use tax money (political corruption) to fund their own Leftist shitshow. And that will just be from the Democrat side.
Simon, are you new here? I don't recognize your name.
Welcome to the party, pal! (she says in both serious and tongue in cheek senses)
"some neuroscientists claim that we have no free will."
Those would be the same people who skipped philosophy class and never learned that proving a negative on any truly complicated issue is all but impossible.
I agree though that it makes no difference, there are those who claim that criminals should not be punished due to lack of free will, but by the same token, the society that punishes them has no free will either, so buzz off! Put a sock in it; we have no choice!
"Fake Imagery" sounds much more nefarious than "humorous videos". But thanks to the NYT for clarifying that those Dems weren't really wearing sombreros, Trump didn't meet Elvis and that he can't really dance like that. Still waiting to hear from them about whether he was flying that jet that dumped the poop on the protestors.
Jamie, I am seldom active anywhere any more, but was very much active here in the second Bush administration.
the only defense of Trump's posting of inflammatory AI created images...
May I suggest some ointment for your hurt vagina?
Jaq, I think the strawberry question is a variation of the Mad Hatter's riddle to Alice, "How is a raven like a writing desk?". No answer, of course, but some insist that there must be one. The answer that cracks me up all the time is Aldous Huxley's " Because there is a B in both."
...and an N in neither.
Science does not, cannot discern origin and expression. Claims to the contrary are article of faith. So, what mitigates nihilistic progress in nominally secular cultures?
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