Lately, online, I’ve been seeing what seems like an increasing acceptance of AI-generated imagery from people who know that the frame was made up by a machine. Now, I’m not talking about unrealistic, cartoony, computer-generated (CGI)-style imagery. It’s not real!
No, I’m talking about a seemingly increasing acceptance of that hyper-refined AI imagery we’ve all come to recognize, along with computer-generated scenes whose creators have tried to pass them off as real life but who didn’t quite manage to pull the veil over our eyes. It’s not real!
Comments like “who cares if it’s AI” seem to cross my radar more and more now, and the more I read them, the more absurd I think the whole idea of AI-generated imagery is. It’s not real!
How on Earth can you ever allow yourself to trust an image of something that supposedly exists but which you know never did? It’s like reading Alice in Wonderland or The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, perhaps the most absurdly brilliant stories ever – but they’re not real!
I’ve been seeing it increasingly in e-commerce, especially. Comments like “as long as it looks like the real product, then I don’t mind” are among the silliest I’ve read. How could you ever buy from a company using a made-up image to advertise a real, physical product? The image isn't real!
The very notion of trust goes completely out the window when a computer-generated image depicts a seemingly real-life event. The details could be lifelike; hell, there could even be a hyper-realistic video of a model demonstrating the product, but neither the model nor the product are real!
If these “gen-slop acceptors,” as I like to call them, actually said the words “it’s not real” out loud every time they looked at one of these "real" images, perhaps then they’d realize just how absurd it is to be okay with being deceived. It’s not real.
It’s not real! It’s not real! It’s not real!
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