Technology @beehaw.org Lee Duna @lemmy.nz 1 yr. ago

First Google Search Result for Tiananmen Square “Tank Man” Is AI Generated Selfie

www.404media.co First Google Search Result for Tiananmen Square “Tank Man” Is AI Generated Selfie

"Tank man" has become something of a litmus test for shitty technology.

51 comments

Upping the original as a matter of course.

Sauce: https://the.me/making-the-iconic-1989-tank-man-photo/
- Watch out mate, you're going to bring out the deniers
  
  Look, all I’m saying is that I have yet to see any definitive proof that China really exists. A flag with 5 stars and 2 colors? Who do they expect to fool with that?
- Wow. I had never seen the full image. thanks!
  
  Permanently Deleted
  
  Permanently Deleted
- Did you upload the image? I don't see anything
  
  I did, can you see the link? The picture was originally from there.
When will people realise that google has tailored algorithms and we are not all experiencing the same search results?

The first thing you’ll see if you search Google for “tank man” right now will not be the iconic picture of the unidentified Chinese man who stood in protest in front of a column of tanks leaving Tiananmen Square, but an entirely fake, AI-generated selfie of that historical event.

No, this is the first thing the author saw. Probably because they are a journalist writing about AI.

When I google tank man I don't even get the AI image on the first page. The top result is from history.com. If I go to google image search it is the 7th result on the page. The top result is from wikipedia.
- When will people realise that google has tailored algorithms and we are not all experiencing the same search results?
  
  You're right. This is the real problem with search engines like Google and one reason I use SearXNG instances and Mojeek instead. Where I live, the algorithm is more likely to net content that is biased toward right-wing conspiracy theories and problematic agencies because of that algorithm. Any search engine that does this is not a valid search engine, in my opinion.
  
  Yes I had a family member in a right wing conspiracy area. It was infuriating because his friends would tell him their nonsense and he would be skeptical and google it, only for google to seemingly support what they were saying.
  
  I couldn't replicate his results at all and it would take a lot of searching to even find what he was talking about so I could debunk it for him.
  
  I suppose it's invalid in the context of showing you what you exactly searched for. But it's pretty valid in the context of showing you what you're looking for. For example, someone with a disdain for science when searching for the terms "big bang" or "evolution" is probably not looking for scientific articles detailing the rigor of the prevalent theories. If the point of a search engine is to find what you're looking for, it's pretty effective by that measure. It just so happens that what you're looking is biased in its own ways.
- Yep!! First result was correct for me both logged in [no personal search -- disabled that shit years ago] and logged out. Also the first result on DDG.
  
  I had it but really had to scroll to the bottom. It was also not Reddit but articles saying it was the first result. Which is kind of ironic.
- How do I get google to stop.showing me reddit pages?
  
  Try adding -reddit in your search query.
Google's becoming pretty terrible anyway, it only seems to return pages that are selling things. I've switched to Kagi at this point and it seems to work better, it's subscription only, but you know you're the one paying for it and that means that you're the end customer.
- Why not duck?
  
  Because last time I checked they just used Bing anwyay, while Kagi runs their own indexer.
  
  Duck duck go is practically broken. I switched to startpage which worked alright until I got a VPN, then I just started using bing with better results. So it is somehow worse than bing even. Duck ignores my quotes and minuses and such things.
- I recently switched to kagi, too. Couldn't be happier.
  
  New Kagi user here too, been very happy so far. Though it turns out I do a lot of searching and blew through the 300 searches in the $5 plan in like 2 weeks...
  
  I wonder if the verb Google will stay with us when its origin is lost in history
we aren't far away from easily-made interactive images / video where people will be able to create realistic selfies / video clips of their own self - in famous situations. Like Forest Gump being inserted into meeting historic President. The appeal is too strong and it will likely create tons of highly upvoted/shared social media images distorting the original.

People tend to treat detecting photoshop images as a game of one-upmanship, not as an importance of preserving a documented concept or situation for others to learn and understand.
Maybe google images needs a toggle for AI generated content. It won't be perfect, but it should filter out a chunk of it just by excluding pages that have it
- Accurately detecting an AI generated image may be more computationally expensive than generating it in the first place.
Another "success" of CCP technology

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