Featured Image Credit: SOPA Images / Contributor / Getty / Reddit
Humans are in danger of being pushed out from the internet, but if you believe the dead internet theory, bots have been ruling the roost since about 2016.
It's not hard to see the dead internet theory in full effect, especially when AI restaurants that don't even exist are being recommended as the best in town.
Artificial intelligence has a lot to answer for, and as the internet is flooded with machines instead of real people, it's sometimes hard to know what to trust.
AI imagery is a big point of contention for artists, photographers, and more.
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Even James Gunn recently shared a series of puke emojis when a fake trailer for his David Corenswet-led Superman duped a French television station into thinking it was legit.
— James Gunn (@JamesGunn) October 20, 2024
Even though there are some pretty obvious signs sometimes thanks to AI still struggling to get hands right, it's getting harder every day to figure out what's a a 'real' image and what's been churned out by something like Midjourney.
With AI imagery lurking behind around corner and spreading some worrying misinformation, it seems like Google's own search results have also been infiltrated by this pixel plague.
One Reddit thread has shown off how even a simple search for 'baby peacock' will largely return AI-generated results.
The search was shared on u/interestingasf**k subreddit, where tech fans were shocked to learn that out of the 15 images featured, 11 of them were made with AI. This isn't just a small problem, as if over two thirds of your results are returning with AI-created imagery, it's massively outweighing what's real on the internet.
As you can imagine, the dead internet theory crowd quickly flooded to the comments.
One concerned person wrote: "This will be so weird and disappointing for children growing up only with AI seeing their first real animal and it has no filters applied."
Someone else added, "AI should be filtered out and deleted. AI is not owned by anyone, even if you 'created it'
it is a bunch of real photos by real people that are being combined & used to make 'AI soup' aka plagiarism."
Another said, "Reddit is turning into the same, unfortunately," suggesting that the forum of ideas also has a bot problem. Well, we already knew that one.
Even if you search for 'non-AI baby peacock,' your results will be lost in a sea of AI images. The OP had some sage advice, telling those in the comments to add 'before 2020' to your search results. This should circumnavigate the recent boom in AI art.
The irony of it all is those who are calling for an option to filter AI out from Google's search results.
Unless you get a team of millions (if not billions) to trawl the internet 24/7, we'll need AI to tackle AI. Go figure. Either way, who expected baby peacocks to be one of the first real victims of the AI wars?
