most AI generated content that tries to look real ends up quite uncanny

I think that a lot of people who say this have looked at a combination of material produced by early models and operated by humans who haven’t spent time adapting to any limitations that can’t be addressed on the software side. And, yeah, they had limitations (“generative AI can’t do fingers!”) but those have rapidly been getting ironed out.

I remember posting one of the first images I generated with Flux to a community here, a jaguar lying next to a white cat. This was me just playing around. I wouldn’t have been able to tell you that it wasn’t a photograph. And that was some time back, and I’m not a full-time user, professionally-aimed at trying to make use of the stuff.

kagis

Yeah, here we are.

https://sh.itjust.works/post/27441182

“Cats”

https://lemmy.today/pictrs/image/b97e6455-2c37-4343-bdc4-5907e26b1b5d.png

I could not distinguish between that and a photograph. It doesn’t have the kind of artifacts that I could identify. At the time, I was shocked, because I hadn’t realized that the Flux people had been doing the kind of computer vision processing on their images as part of the training process required to do that kind of lighting work at generation time. That’s using a model that’s over a year old — forever, at the rate things are changing — from a non-expert on just local hardware, and was just a first-pass, not a “generate 100 and pick the best”, or something that had any tweaking involved.

Flux was not especially amenable, as diffusion models go, to the generation of pornography last I looked, but I am quite certain that there will be photography-oriented and real-video oriented models that will be very much aimed at pornography.

And that was done with the limited resources available in the past. There is now a lot of capital going towards advancing the field, and a lot of scale coming.