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Comment by hunkins | Hacker News Reader

This release changes society forever. Free and open access to generate a hyper-realistic image via just a text prompt is more powerful than I think we can imagine currently.

Art, media, politics, conspiracy theories; all of it changes with this.

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Eh... if I was making conspiracy theories, it's not like Photoshop hasn't existed for decades already, with far more predictable results.

>it's not like Photoshop hasn't existed for decades already, with far more predictable results.

Agreed. For me those results are predictably shit. Every time.

You could take a photography class? They're fun.

Photoshop requires experience and some talent, this doesn't. If I was some small rebel group in Africa or the Middle East with basically no money or training, I'd use this tool every single day until I was in power, or I'd frame my opposition as using it against the People.

Everyone just got their own KGB art department.

Try and do that. Likely those people won't care too much about you, they lean towards authority figures in their community. It is way easier to find those guys and corrupt them. Rather than running some underground news agency changing minds of millions of people.

In fact quite often the former is the case + cheaper + less time to execute. "Western" societies will be more resilient to this scenario. So, mostly its gonna be a lot of "political" art we gonna see.

>"Western" societies will be more resilient to this scenario

I would think western societies, with our higher consumption of media, would be less resilient. 'Fake news' is already a large issue here.

And thus we become more resilient. I know a lot of people who trusted news, now they verify, research presented data.

Photoshop requires hours of work from a skilled professional to create results of decent quality. Now anyone can do it for free, virtually instantaneously.

Photoshop requires skill. This mostly doesn't.

This is like a gazillion photoshops being released in the wild. Things change with scale, and there is a threshold where, if enough people start doubting often enough, then all the people will doubt all the time

Longterm, multimodal generative models will be society-altering. But right now this is just a really cool toy.

What will change society forever is when the hardware required to run this software is available in the latest medium/high end phone and 100's million of people can download the app to say what they want.

Yes. This changes everything.

Until this point, you really cannot believe any image you see on the internet anymore.

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