I have been warning about this from the beginning.
It is an example of my explosive, nearly instantaneous epiphanies on that fateful day and moment in December 2022 that changed my life’s focus and motivated me to produce AIgitated.com and this site.
The work on the other site has been deep and tremendously draining of my time, energy, and drive to continue. Then something like this comes up, and I remember how and why I decided to take it on and the need to continue.
Up until only the last few months, I rarely encountered something that was simultaneously LOL funny, disturbing, depressing, horrific, and anger-inducing, all at once. But today, I did. Unfortunately, these episodes are becoming much more frequent.
So, I am taking a break from working on the next post for the core suite in AIgitated to present this harbinger of things feared for in the past, happening in the here and now, with much more to come. I know that sounds very Dickensian, but it’s true. It was something I clearly foresaw at the beginning of this adventure coming to fruition.
It was a post on the platform that has become a virtual septic tank, on par with the usual social media suspects regarding the level of dreck produced and spewed.
The subject was how amazing praying mantises are, especially their egg cases. The post included several images credited to the author.
The scientific name for the egg cases is ootheca. The author did not use it.
Notice I said “images,” not “photographs.”
The images were not photographs. None of them. They were all AI-generated “art.” In a post to celebrate their reality.
They were all disgracefully terrible: astoundingly cartoonish and astoundingly inaccurate. Inaccurate is too kind. They were pure anti-reality, pure fiction. It made me wonder what kind of images had “trained” the particular AI model that produced them.
Probably none. Yes, they were that bad.
Why did the author use them? Did he accept them blindly as true representations? I shook my head, exited the post and the platform, and went on with my work. But the episode bothered me. I am seeing more and more of this.
A few hours later, I received a rare message on Skype. Once I had read it and returned to the homepage, I saw that my contact page included the Microsoft Copilot AI app as a “contact.” (Skype is a division of Microsoft).
As I said, I rarely use Skype, so I don’t think about Copilot (or any AI assistant). But that post was still working a nerve.
I wondered why the author used the images he did. Where did he get them?
I plugged the search phrase >find images of praying mantis ootheca< into the app, the author probably had used the phrase “egg case” as he looked for quick information to contentualize™ his post.
The images returned were very similar to what had been seen in the offending post:
And I opened each thumbnail:
Since I am showing a screenshot, the links are not active, but two of the three links in the return provided photos of ootheca.
Notice I used the word ‘images’ in the query.
I tried a more precise search:
>find photographs of praying mantis ootheca or eggcases<
This time, “sources of photographs” were returned. But so were sci-fi generative images.
Q: Why the addition of the sci-fi generative images? They were not images of mantis ootheca. They have nothing in common with actual ootheca. Nothing.
And why are they being called photographs?
They are there because DALL-E is a creative product of Open-AI, which has a partnership with Microsoft, which utilizes DALL-E in the Bing Image Creator integrated in the Copilot feature of the Bing search engine. Got all that?
All of this must be monetized to generate a return on the massive capital expenditures involved in producing these toys.
These AI-assisted search engines typically provide a very limited number of returns of limited and (often) questionable validity and value.
This is the future of search and “content production.” This kind of search, the return content and quality, and the content produced from it is disconcerting and agitating me.
As I have said elsewhere, we need to vet the tech, the returns, and the motives for producing and using both.
Always.
If you have access to Copilot, please run the prompts I used and see what returns you get. Or try them on whatever assisted apps you may be using. Let us know your results.
Feel free to visit one of my real praying mantis stories marzipansnatchers.