I have been served the following ad on YouTube multiple times:
This isn’t the exact one I’ve seen, but you get the idea. Artificial puppies now exist.
I wonder what this implies for real puppies. Will they somehow replace actual puppies, since they last forever? More dogs would be taken to the pound, contributing to already insurmountably low storage capacity given the needs of the animals, leading to more dogs being put down. I feel like these puppies won’t become mainstream though, so maybe this is just a non-issue. Maybe.
Also, the fact that these AI creatures are puppies rather than dogs showcases how humans are attached to young age, even on other creatures.
While trying to find an ad to embed into this blog, I found the following video, as well as many others who say the same:
So, um….it’s all a scam.
Now I feel like an idiot – as soon as I saw this ad, the first thing I thought was: “Oh wow! What a great blog topic!”
The more I think about it, the more stupid I feel. The videos are obviously AI-generated and the premise, especially considering how absolutely unrobotic the puppies look, is just unrealistic.
But this is still intriguing. AI-generated videos adverting false AI products. AI being used to empower a scam, which has all it’s own ethical complications.
5 Comments
This is so crazy! I honestly thought the puppies were real at first too. It’s wild how convincing AI can be, even when it’s totally fake. It makes you wonder what other scams are out there using AI. It’s kinda scary to think about how easy it is to get tricked online these days. I guess we’ve got to be extra careful with everything we see now.
this reminds me of AI dogfish. (I can’t hyperlink on comments so here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r7LiHGLAEdA&t=29s). I think it says something about humans that the first thing we do with generative AI is just make “cute” animals. It is interesting that it’s a scam though. I wonder what you would get sent if you actually tried to buy one?
There are lots of jokes from the pre-app, 2000s internet about the purpose of the internet being for cute animal pictures (and especially for CAT pictures)
https://www.rutgersuniversitypress.org/the-internet-is-for-cats/9781978827912/
Proof that the academy will study almost anything!
The attachment to young age thing feels somehow more significant than I’ve fully grasped when thinking about LLMs and AI training. I can’t quite explain it, but to me it feels linked to the exaggerated facial features and *very* unproportional bodies of women in earlier AI images, as well as the tendency for chatbots to be overly polite and ask you questions after their answers. There’s something like a “black hole of general appeal” in the way these models are trained, and I can’t help but see that as inherently removed from artistic innovation.
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Karya Bintang Abadi