you should really be measuring active users - not device purchases.

Why? Device purchases is a measurement of how well the company sells while active users shows how reliable the product is. One is good for business, the other is believed to be less so, ar least by the current batch of CEOs

Is it a scam? How does it work?

Yeah, that’s fine, but at some point we need to start talking about alternative methods of monetization for websites. On the one hand, compiling a list of recipies on a website and maintaining that website is not easy or cheap and the owners should be able to make money out of it. On the other hand, the user should be able to pay for this comfortably and have a nice experience on the website.

This ad model doesn’t serve any of the two, business or consumer.

The statement about the deepfakes is just patently incorrect on your part. It is a trained model which takes an input, and outputs a manipulated output based on its training. That’s enough to meet the criteria. Before it was fairly difficult and almost immediately identifiable as AI manipulated. It’s now popular because it’s gotten good enough to not be immediately noticeable, done fairly easily, and is at the point where it can be mostly automated.

I never claimed that the current software didn’t use machine learning. I simply said that faking video/images has been happening long before machine learning was involved in it and I completely disagree that it is harder to identify fakes now than it used to be. Maybe it wasn’t a technology that was easily available, but image manipulation is something we have been seeing for a long time. If anything, the fact that it is know public knowledge that image, voice and movie clips can be faked will help people to stop trusting them when they shouldn’t

You should tattoo “I’m wrong but I don’t want to educate myself” on your forehead so people know not to waste their time.

If we’re spreading out to mean AI mor generally, we could talk about how facial recognition has now gotten good enough that it’s being used to identify and catalogue pretty much anyone that passes a FR-equipped security system.

I don’t think that this is “AI more generally” as the public (and the current article) understands it. You’re lumping together any slightly self corrective algorithm under the AI umbrella. This might be technically correct, but it’s just operations, it’s not indicative of the current hype.

We could also talk about “self driving” cars and the compeletely avoidable deaths they’ve caused.

The limiting factor for self driving cars is hardware, not software. There is no commercially viable video technology available to allow taking the self driving technology out of the lab and into the consumer space. Unless you’re talking about Tesla-like systems which, of course, are neither a “self-driving” system nor consumer ready.

We could also talk about how mimicry AI has now been used to create both endless revenge porn of unwilling victims, and also faked the voice of others to try to scam them or make them not vote

This is not AI. The technology behind the voice or image manipulation has existed for some time and has been used for fake porn and for fake voice calls for a long while. We’re only discussing about it now because they can generate traffic if they’re tied to a hype like AI. Very few people would read a story about a student sticking faces of his colleagues over naked bodies, but say the student used AI and suddenly everyone wants to find out what happened. It’s even worse: headlines are discussing the reaction of X celebrity to porn fakes in the context of AI even though porn sites have been having a fake porn section ever since the late 90s and they’re available to anyone with the mental capacity to click “I’m over 18”. Maybe you’re too young to remember, but google wasn’t always censoring search results. Before 2010-ish, fakes like these would routinely appear in google searches of a celebrity’s name. I’m not really sure why AI makes this any different

Most of the time, information that you’re doing something wrong should be enough to prompt you to dig deeper into the matter. It’s not the job of perfect strangers to educate you.

Hey, thanks for taking the time to reply to my hasty, poorly put together message. The point I was trying to make was that the original meaning has been lost when the word became popular. It is a somewhat obscure word with a loose definition based on an obscure reference and it describes something for which the language was more than ready to describe anyway. I think that instead of telling people to try and use the word correctly, one should tell then to not use it at all.

What does it mean? It’s a relatively new term and I’ve seen it used to describe everything from accidental logical fallacies to being short-changed at the liquor store

That would explain the targeted scams I’ve been subjected to which seem to have been coming from old colleagues

You made me check, the cheapest I can buy one here is 70k EUR for the EQA:

EQA is the name of the new entry-level model to the all-electric world of Mercedes-EQ vehicles.

What a bargain for an entry level model

Mercedes: the EV market is challenging at the moment.

Also mercedes: pay 100k for this car with limited autonomy and dubious software in early beta stages…

People who keep paying are assholes