ChatGPT

nsaspook

Joined Aug 27, 2009
16,321
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/may/02/amnesty-international-ai-generated-images-criticism
Amnesty International criticised for using AI-generated images
But photojournalists and media scholars warned that the use of AI-generated images could undermine Amnesty’s own work and feed conspiracy theories.

“We are living in a highly polarised era full of fake news, which makes people question the credibility of the media. And as we know, artificial intelligence lies. What sort of credibility do you have when you start publishing images created by artificial intelligence?” said Juancho Torres, a photojournalist based in Bogotá.
Torres said Amnesty’s use of AI images was an insult to the photojournalists who cover protests from the frontline.

“The power for a journalist is to recreate reality and what they see – something which during the national strike, many reporters, photographers and cameramen risked their lives to do. I have a friend who lost an eye. Using AI images not only loses that reality, it loses the connection between journalists and people.”
 
Last edited by a moderator:

Ya’akov

Joined Jan 27, 2019
10,235
No wonder that question has gone unanswered for almost 2,000 years now ... "what is truth?"
I can tell you what truth is.

“Truth” is the same as “agreement”.

When we say “that’s true”, “I agree” can be substituted with no change to the meaning of the sentence.

We imagine that “Truth” is somehow different from “truth” but for humans, objectivity is always subjective since we have to perceive and think about anything that we attempt to verify and our perception is permanently behind a subjective wall.
 

cmartinez

Joined Jan 17, 2007
8,760
I can tell you what truth is.

“Truth” is the same as “agreement”.

When we say “that’s true”, “I agree” can be substituted with no change to the meaning of the sentence.

We imagine that “Truth” is somehow different from “truth” but for humans, objectivity is always subjective since we have to perceive and think about anything that we attempt to verify and our perception is permanently behind a subjective wall.
I agree with your second point... but (unless I misunderstand you) not with the first one.

My personal belief is that truth has an objective, human observer-independent existence. And that we, flawed humans with limited intellectual and sensitive capabilities, can get very close to the truth but only to a point... Kurt Gödel's incompleteness theorem comes to mind.
 

Ya’akov

Joined Jan 27, 2019
10,235
I agree with your second point... but (unless I misunderstand you) not with the first one.

My personal belief is that truth has an objective, human observer-independent existence. And that we, flawed humans with limited intellectual and sensitive capabilities, can get very close to the truth but only to a point... Kurt Gödel's incompleteness theorem comes to mind.
This is nice, but you can’t know it is “true”. You are simply taking it on faith. It is an axiom, and there is no logical argument to show it is true. I understand you find it self-evident, but what evidence we do have is that even if there is “the thing in and of itself” we can never know.

The only argument for this is the agreement we have about the existence of things. That I can‘t just walk through a table that you can see makes you believe it must have an “objective” existence. And, no doubt, this is very compelling.

But, it is not proof! There could be another mechanism at play and we can never know because there is a hard epistemic limit. Substituting another explanation—like Idealism–in please of the Materialism we all grew up assuming, results in an indistinguishable reality. We can’t see that is happening there.

Materialism itself calls out the noumenal and the phenomenal. We have access only to the latter, and of the former it says ”we can never actually know anything about it”. To assume the Materialist universe is “true”, when there is no test for its truth, is very unscientific.

It could be true but asserting it is in fact so is a leap of faith. What we do know is that everything we can know is subjective. Things we can’t know might be objective but that’s speculative because… we can’t know it.
 

cmartinez

Joined Jan 17, 2007
8,760
It could be true but asserting it is in fact so is a leap of faith.
The acceptance of our very existence is in itself a leap of faith, albeit a very easy one to make. Of course we have to axiomatically accept as "real" things that cannot ever be "proved" as such because otherwise we'd freeze like lamp lit rabbits and our time and lives would be wasted on a fool's errand... you have a very interesting point of view, it reminds me somehow of David Hume.
 

cmartinez

Joined Jan 17, 2007
8,760
I wonder if this guy's going to be come the next Mark Zuckerberg



OpenAI hasn’t come up with an open-source model since 2019, and although the news is exciting, it might not be as sophisticated or in direct competition with its proprietary model GPT. The report further said that OpenAI’s $27 billion private valuation depends on a future in which the most sophisticated AI for commercial purposes isn’t open source.
 

Ya’akov

Joined Jan 27, 2019
10,235
The acceptance of our very existence is in itself a leap of faith, albeit a very easy one to make. Of course we have to axiomatically accept as "real" things that cannot ever be "proved" as such because otherwise we'd freeze like lamp lit rabbits and our time and lives would be wasted on a fool's errand... you have a very interesting point of view, it reminds me somehow of David Hume.
Your argument that if accepting existence as being true is axiomatic then accepting materialism is somehow accepting ”real things” but that‘s a question begging (circular) argument. There is nothing in the first part that makes the second part true, you are simply defining “real” as things-in-and-of-themselves, but with no more evidence on account of your first assertion.

Yes, we all have things we consider self-evident, and ironically it is those things which we consider most true while they have the least evidence since they can’t be proven. The key is to question the axiomatic things and decide why we consider them axiomatic.

For example, “do not murder” is an axiomatic moral principle for me. There may be practical reasons (to avoid punishment or revenge) but those are not my reasons. There are religious injunctions against murder, but neither are those my reasons. My reason for accepting it is that I have concluded (also axiomatically) that fundamentally, we are all the same and my right to infringe on your autonomy—except for self-preservation—doesn’t exist.

So, I my rationale is clear (to me) for accepting these axioms but once I considered the idea that a Materialist work view is not mandatory in any way, I found that I had to simply leave the question alone. But please don’t confuse “Materialsim” with ”Physicalism”. I am quite convinced that everything we can ever know or experience arises from physical world.

From the simplest foundational rules of physics in the form of physical laws to the incredibly complex structures that are formed by iterative application of them, there is only the laws of physics—you could say “nature”.
 

cmartinez

Joined Jan 17, 2007
8,760
From the simplest foundational rules of physics in the form of physical laws to the incredibly complex structures that are formed by iterative application of them, there is only the laws of physics—you could say “nature”.
But you would agree that not all of the laws of physics have been discovered yet, yes? ... and that such "laws" are nothing more than our interpretation (a model of sorts) of the reality that we inhabit?
 

djsfantasi

Joined Apr 11, 2010
9,237
Truth is a locality in the space of our existence. Certain assumptions about the environment limit this locality.

But since human perception (where perception in this case exists beyond the reports of our typical human “senses”) is subjective, an observer may conclude that there are many “truths” and hence follow that there is no one “Truth”,

However, for practical purposes, I consider “truth” to fall within some finite space and is a probabilistic point of the sum of all truths.
 

Ya’akov

Joined Jan 27, 2019
10,235
But you would agree that not all of the laws of physics have been discovered yet, yes? ... and that such "laws" are nothing more than our interpretation (a model of sorts) of the reality that we inhabit?
That is immaterial (no pun intended) to my position. I accept that there are a set of very simple foundational laws that govern the physical world. I don’t have to know what they are, particularly, to adopt my stance.

The laws themselves are, in fact, descriptions—but that’s appropriate. The main point is, anything that happens in the universe has to be traceable back to those fundamental laws. To put a fine point on it, there is only natural and whatever is “supernatural“ is either not actually so, still following those laws in some way we don’t yet understand, or simply doesn’t exist.

I can’t know that reality is as the Materialist imagines just because I believe things are always and only physical. Those are two different things. It can be hard to separate the two since the conflation of them is so embedded, but they are orthogonal.
 
Top