Thursday, June 27, 2024

Artificial Ingelligence -- a Veneer of Truth and Made-Up Crap

 

This kind of thing is popping up on social media all over the place now, and it's infuriating in both its incompetence and its laziness.

And, of course, artificial intelligence is involved.

It's easy enough to look at the photo and see it's been AI-generated. The two boys appear to have only one leg between them, unless you count the nub by the one visible leg as toes of a second leg, so maybe 1 1/10th of a leg, if we're generous.

Then there's the handlebars, done in the style of Pee-Wee Herman, so the evil Francis, when reaching out for the bar, ends up with an extend-o-bar that falls off the bike.

Then there's the bike itself -- a mishmash of what looks to be bare pistons with an actual bicycle, not a motorcycle, even an early one.

The real Abernathy boys here, and their motorcycle -- per Wikipedia:

And, in case you were wondering, here's the real Abernathy story.

The text accompanying this AI-generated photo is a mishmash of fact and typical AI-made-up garbage. The text tossses in "equestrian feat," not really mentioning that the boys did do some of their voyages by horse. But the way the rest of the text is written, it can lead one to assume all of the voyages were done by motorcycle.

It's easy enough to find the truth -- all of this took me less than three minutes to determine -- but clearly by using AI the creators hope to avoid any accusations of plagiarism, though the photos are likely in the public domain now, and any actual research, since AI can scrape enough off the internet to cobble together a story, inaccurate as it is.

Why bother with AI? Is it really just for clicks? Do these people get money if people interact with their posts? None of it makes sense. Of course, I'm looking for the Internet to make sense; maybe that's my biggest problem.

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