No one talks about the uncanny valley that much anymore — it’s that weird feeling you get when you look at a CGI image and it doesn’t quite look completely real. With AI image generation, there might be a new concept you could call the uncanny friend. Recently, Meta released a new standalone AI image generator. The tech is based on something called Emu image synthesis, and the way it all works might surprise you. Imagine with Meta AI is already built into the Meta apps like Messenger and Instagram, but it’s now available in a browser window and it’s quite impressive. The only catch is that we’re the ones supplying the source images. That’s right, Meta scrapes all of our social media feeds to the tune of about one billion images. The AI can fabricate groups of people that might look somewhat familiar, but only if you are suspicious like me. I have to say, one image the AI generated gave me pause. I asked the AI to create an image of a group of people smiling at the camera. Some of them looked strangely familiar. I wouldn’t say any of them looked like my actual friends, but I also don’t remember consenting to an AI experiment like this. Sure, it’s fun to use, and the results are often outstanding, but social media users are already a bunch of Guinea pigs. We hand over our data to help advertisers target us. We grudgingly provide private information which can be used for nefarious purposes. Now Meta is using our images to build an AI image generator, whether we want to be involved with that or not.
Full opinion : Meta Is Scraping Our Photos From Facebook And Instagram To Create AI Images.
