AI is becoming super dangerous?
It's no secret that AI is increasingly taking over our lives and is advancing to surreal levels. For my part, I've hated it since it began generating art, as art made with AI was often more appreciated than digital or traditional art. This led me to resent it and avoid using it. Although AI sometimes makes life easier in certain technological aspects, I sometimes fear ending up living an episode of Black Mirror.
And yes, the image I used for the cover was created with AI. This time, I was tempted to use it with some photos of my face since the launch of Gemini's new feature called Nano Banana has gone viral. At first, I didn't think it was that interesting, but as the days went by, I realized that many people were using it to recreate photos of deceased relatives, and that's what made me fall prey to this curse. I never imagined that with just two images you could revive a loved one, and although it's a beautiful thing, in the wrong hands it can end badly.
Este es mi papá quien murio en el 2011, nunca conoció a su nieto ya que mi hijo nació en el 2017.
This is my dad who died in 2011, he never met his grandson since my son was born in 2017.
Y aquí una foto con su abuela paterna, la madre de mi esposo quien murio en el 2009. Mi suegro aun esta con vida, pero el quería que lo incluyera en esa foto ya que aún le duele el recuerdo de su amada esposa.
And here is a photo with her paternal grandmother, my husband's mother who died in 2009. My father-in-law is still alive, but he wanted me to include him in that photo since the memory of his beloved wife still hurts him.
It's incredible how well it recreates a person's face, but obviously you have to write a fairly detailed description of what you want to get good results. In this one, for example, I took a photo of myself when I was about 7 years old and one of my husband at the same age. I asked the AI to put us together, and the result was very adorable.
It even copied the clothes very well and made us hold hands. When my husband saw that photo, he was very happy. It's the cutest thing he's ever seen.
But also leaving aside the nostalgic side, I have tried taking photos with artists to have a laugh, Zac Efron (my teenage crush), The Rock (for the laughs) and Freddy Krueger (one of the characters that scared me the most as a child hahaha).
I've always dreamed of taking pictures with neon lights, and although I sometimes have LED lights that help me take photos, I never achieve the effect I'm looking for like in professional photographs: very detailed skin, lights that cover part of the face but don't illuminate it completely, a mix of colors, and a rainy atmosphere... I achieved it with a single photo and different phrases in Gemini.
I won't deny it, I've really enjoyed the experience of using Gemini, but I feel dirty. As if I'm breaking my principles and my ideal of hating AI. It's definitely something I have to get used to living with since there's no going back. But we always have to control ourselves and not let ourselves be too carried away by AI, or we could be living a complete lie. It also represents a danger to our privacy since any photo can be taken and used for not-so-good things.
Finally, I'm signing off with this photo inspired by Harry Potter, a movie I don't like but that I wanted to take just to see how I'd look with that aesthetic, haha. What do you think about all this madness?
Imagenes creadas en Gemini
Images created in Gemini
You will never be able to trust a digital file or image ever again. Every frontier for AI is basically done, when it comes for visual media.
You can take an image, and convert it to a video. You can take a script of text, and convert it to a reading of the text, by giving it a voice sample.
Then you can take the image, the sound file, and combine them into a new video, complete with lip-sync, expressions, and changing intonations.
It is wild how quickly the technology has progressed. It will progress even faster as more and more gets thrown at it. However, unlike writing (which is easier to spot when it is AI generated) - more and more people are fooled by AI images because they do not have visual literacy to the same standards.
It isn't yet perfect, all this tech - and it never will be, but manufactured reality is quickly taking over the feeds. We will all need to be stronger sceptics to navigate a future that is superficial and for the most part, fake.
Hola @alexa.art las fotos quedaron increíbles ☺️, yo también utilice la IA para hacerme unas con algunos artistas que me gustan y es verdad, te puede viciar lo bien que quedan y querer seguir haciendo más. También es cierto que las fotografías que usamos se quedan ahí y bueno es algo peligroso. Sin embargo, pienso que para el uso del arte está mal y no debería permitirse pero bueno jaja
You’ve captured the exact tension many of us feel: convenience and creativity on one side, authenticity and ethics on the other. I am still not sure on which side I belong more to, though.
Aunque puede ser útil para algunas cosas, da miedo en verdad, llegaremos a un punto en que nadie sabrá qué es real y qué es IA...