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Last week Bing launched their AI image creation engine, powered by Dall-E 3, and it was a big hit. Hilarity, followed by panic, followed by even more hilarity, ensued.
For those of you with healthy and productive lives you almost certainly missed this as it happened on TwitterX. Here’s the synopsis:
Dall-E 3 is a generative AI that creates art (but not Art 
) in multiple styles based on your prompts. If you want a digital art picture of a capybara trick-or-treating in an American suburb it’ll make it for you. See:
Neat, right? There’s just one tiny, minor, hardly-worth-mentioning problem…
The people at Bing have no idea how the internet works.
Almost immediately people started having some fun with this new toy and Twitter was flooded with pictures that were meant to both entertain and offend. SpongeBob apparently did 9/11. Kirby (a Nintendo character) also was responsible for 9/11, according to photographic evidence I saw. This particular trend started who knows where, but a small time tech journo heard about it and that’s when things really took off. This hectoring scold was so incensed by people having fun that he decided to start prompting Bing to make offensive images, then he wrote about it. He then went so far as contacting Nintendo to ask them how they felt about these sorts of images. For those of you keeping score at home here was the progression:
Hears people are making these offensive images
—> Goes and makes his own offensive images
—> Gets offended
If you think political journalism has been captured by activist hacks you should see the state of tech journalism.
Anyway, Bing engineers worked to shut down the potential trigger words in the prompts so Kirby could no longer do 9/11.
But of course the internet was undeterred by such modest barriers. What followed was exactly what any sentient observer would have expected.
Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce wearing stereotypical Native American headdresses. Taylor Swift in an SS uniform (many of these), Taylor Swift as a Roman centurion at the crucifixion, OJ Simpson jumping out of the woods at Taylor Swift…while she’s in an SS uniform. You’re getting the idea, right?
Swift is nothing if not careful about her NIL, and she probably doesn’t love the idea of having pictures of her as a Nazi circulating the internet. So who precisely does she talk to about getting this sort of thing pulled down? Who’s responsible when this all goes from harmless trolling to something a lot darker? Because remember, you can choose the style of your pictures and photorealistic is one of those choices.
That lovely young lady is not real. She’s the result of the prompt ‘young Latina woman working in a physics lab, photorealistic’. We should pause for a moment and reflect on how unbelievable it is that this technology exists and at how rapidly it went from glitchy and weird to simply working well. It’s quite something.
But see this is where it gets very messy very fast. All those trollish pictures I mentioned above were done in the style of digital art, basically a Cartoon. I suspect the people making them knew better than to ask for photorealistic images of actual, recognizable public figures. But not everyone will be so restrained.
Three days before an election a local newspaper runs a picture of the incumbent Congressman and his young female staffer looking a little too close. He loses the tight race and his reputation is ruined. A week later it comes out that the image was AI generated and had been leaked to the paper through various opposition groups. Where does he go to get his job back? How does he rebuild his reputation and his standing in the public eye?
The answer, according to Bing and every other company involved in this work is basically the shoulder shrug emoji because nobody has bothered to actually game this all out.
In the rush to get a product to market nobody thought about what happens when said product is in widespread, uncontrolled use. [Insert Ian Malcolm quote here] What are the laws governing this stuff? If I ask AI to make me a photorealistic picture of some celebrity doing something wrong-but-believable, who does he/she sue? For sure not me, because I didn’t make the image. In fact I can’t use the image for commercial purposes because it is by definition not mine. So does the celebrity sue Microsoft? What about the half dozen other companies that are doing this work? If Bing locks down prompts maybe I find a loophole on Stable Diffusion XL or Midjourney. This is chaos being unleashed on the public and all because the leaders of government and tech couldn’t be troubled to think five minutes into the future. Sound familiar?
Bonus points for anyone who gets this 
The Greek Goddess Niobe weeping over the loss of her children to social media/smart phones/AI?
It’s all Deep Fakes from here.
Epimetheus’s wife. It seems so obvious in hindsight!
In the vicinity, but don’t look backwards but rather forwards (and be haunted by it).
Priam’s beautiful daughter that cheats Apollo?
Eve mother of Cain, Abel, and Seth. Weeping over what her descendants are up to.
If not, Pandora looking for Hope in the box that unleashed evils upon the world.
“But the woman took off the great lid of the jar with her hands and scattered, all these and her thought caused sorrow and mischief to men. Only Hope remained there in an unbreakable home within under the rim of the great jar, and did not fly out at the door; for ere that, the lid of the jar stopped her, by the will of Aegis-holding Zeus who gathers the clouds.”
Hesiod Op. et Di. Lines 94-100
Pandora does not act of her free will. She is Zeus’s punishment to confuse mankind. Ancient satire. It is perhaps interesting how recent narrative changes from the original.
Ping Pong. Foosball. Fly fishing. Hunting. Back packing. Skiing of all sorts. Hiking. Rollerblading. Trail running. Mountain biking. Travel. Bird watching. Etc. etc……
Dang, and to think I’m missing out on all this wonderful digital imagery by wasting my time on other pursuits.
Like media and politicians, perhaps don’t give them more oxygen than they deserve
Your response is precisely why I included the last image, as I anticipated at least one person would find this whole thing to be a time-wasting triviality.
It can be fun if it takes no time though, like @010101 might have been able to do. Top of mind for me by contrast:
The dude top left is wondering about his strangely hypertrophic deltoid, whilst the lacriminally abundant nymphette appears unaware of her pending wardrobe malfunction,
The audience goes wild