I have an account on a photo sharing platform called "Flickr."
Lately I've noticed a disturbing (at least to me) trend:
In the past people posted their own photos and other people would
perhaps click the "heart" icon or even add a comment. The point is
that most of the photos were their own and were a reflection of their
mind, imagination, creativity, life or whatever. Maybe just a cute cat or, in my
case, lots of sunrises. But nowadays I see people posting AI generated photos
on their photo blogs instead of their own work and I thought about why
this might be. Is it laziness? Lack of creativity? Just enter a few words and sit
back and let the AI algorithm scour the internet pile of photos of other people
and see what bubbles up. Of course I can (and do) just ignore those people with the "block user" option. But what is the point of posting AI generated
images? Is it to say, "Hey, look what I did!" But there is no "I" doing anything.
Now I can imagine a world where the AI generated images outnumber the
user created images. Then that huge sea of images out there will be mostly
AI generated so that now AI images will be generated from other AI
generated images. Perhaps this is a good thing. It might make the whole
of AI to implode. In the limit any image that AI generates will then be just the
same image over and over again. Who know what it will be. Maybe just an
image of Alfred E. Newman saying "What, me worry?"