As a GenX who played with that filter yesterday, I don't understand why anyone's reaction would be to cry.
I for one and so very VERY happy I'm not growing up as a young person today. Life today is extremely hard for millenials and Gen Z. I would not trade any amount of time to be young again. I was lucky enough to get into the right career, I am very happy with the set of beliefs and morals I have, which I'm teaching my kids, and I have a house in the Bay Area. If my kids didn't have my wife and I to inherit from, I have no idea how they would ever be able to afford a house.
I met my wife during a time when you met face-to-face through friends, and we dated without each other having to be distracted by 24x7 work, phone, or online dating apps.
I look at my life and I'm satisfied. I know a lot of my friends are satisfied as well. A lot of millenials and Gen Z that I work with and are friends with had a different world they had to go through, are saddles with 6 figure student debt, no chance of a house, and are lonely. It's not fair and I wish this weren't the case, and I really hope that things like social media go out of fashion by the time my kids are teenagers.
I'm more inclined to think the crying because you saw yourself young is hyperbole to encourage downloads of TikTok for older consumers. Once they taste the feed, some of them will stay.
>are saddles with 6 figure student debt ... and are lonely.
While I sympathize with the plights of younger generations, student debt and (mis)use of communication tools are not one of them.
Unlike wider problems such as cost of living/housing and geopolitics, student debt and communications are two things completely within your domain of control. You choose to take on debt in the six digits, you choose to use communication tools the way you do.
If you don't want crippling debt, don't take out that loan; college isn't the end-all-be-all in life. If the likes of Facebook/Twitter and Discord are making you miserable, just don't use them or change how you use them; life doesn't revolve around social media.
Hell, even buying a house is still within the realm of sensiblity if you look beyond the metropolitan areas.
There's more to life than permanently connected city life stemming from a college degree.
Yes, and if you are worried about lead fuel in additives just live in the woods. No one said you have to live in a city…
Not to live in the manner that is normalized for you takes extraordinary strength and is not a reasonable expectation. It’s possible, but let’s not pretend it’s a free choice or dismiss the power of the dominant narratives.
My parents excommunicated me for not going down the path they laid out for me which included college. Whatever.
Instead I moved out at 17, ended up homeless, kept going, started a few companies, got a few tech jobs, started another company, and ended up more financially successful than anyone in my extended family without crippling college debt.
Let parents flip tables. Only go to college if employers in your ideal profession strictly requires college, and only if you have a scholarship or the means to pay for it without debt.
> Let parents flip tables. Only go to college if employers in your ideal profession strictly requires college, and only if you have a scholarship or the means to pay for it without debt.
I absolutely agree, with the caveat that somehow young people need to be prepped to have this attitude. Everything society stands for right now communicates the exact opposite values.
There's something really ironic here about the anti-college crusade, the lastest line-in-the-sand drawn by anti-education propagandists. If the complainers knew enough about the benefits of college, they wouldn't knock it.
This is just the usual emotional rant about "Shouldn't have done it if you didn't want X".
Not their fault colleges are charging top-dollar and hedging bets against students looking for a better future. Not their fault the government got into the business of student loans. Not their fault the interest rate doubled in 2013 from 3.4% to 6.8%.
>permanently connected city life stemming from a college degree.
>If you don't want crippling debt, don't take out that loan;
>If the likes of Facebook/Twitter and Discord are making you miserable, just don't use them or change how you use them;
Just projecting a narrow view. There was literally nothing constructive here, and it's identical to every person who didn't go to college's argument we hear ran.
But we get these unsolicited lectures from often-unqualified people who want to trash College hopes because of anecdotes of failure told to them by trustfund baby propagandists who went to ivy league schools.
> Bachelors degree holders have 3.5x lower poverty rate, and earn on average 22k more than the high school diploma would.
It’s fun how comparisons depend on what you compare. Now compare bachelors degree holders against people who have pursued specialized career training after high school: license electricians, nurses, etc
It’s not like skipping 4+ years of college and its associated debt doom someone to bussing tables. There are other paths that for a responsible individual can be much more lucrative and much more secure than slipping into four years of changing majors, gaining debt, and getting drunk.
University is important and should be universally available. But it shouldn’t be committed to by default.
> and earn on average 22k more than high school diploma would.
Let’s dig into that even a little and see what we get.
For starter they’re talking about on average. Just follow the reference in your article and you get to hear [0]. Look at how wide those range are for the college grads. 25% of college grads don’t earn more than the median (50% of) non-college grad.
If you happen to be one of those 25% college might not look like the slam sunk financial decision. And I’m willing to bet that what percentile you fall into isn’t random, but strongly correlated to major and college.
Obtaining a college degree has benefits, some occupations even require them (eg: medical, legal), but ultimately it's a balancing act against the cost of getting that degree and how much you even want that degree.
If you really, really want that college degree because your life goal requires it and you have reasonably reliable plans for paying the costs of tuition, by all means go for it.
What I'm saying is that it's a terrible idea to go to college simply because "that's the norm" or you were compelled. Going to college is expensive, the decision should be throughly thought out.
There is more to life than going to college.
As for communication tools, I reiterate: If certain forms of communication are making you miserable, either change how you use them or just don't use them. Life doesn't revolve around nor require social media, anyone who has had any degree of real life experience can teach you that.
You use tools to enrich your life, if a tool isn't enriching your life then you stop using that tool.
I think there was a study that showed that college paid off only to a very low percentage of highest achievers, if you consider earning years lost, tuition cost and loan interest.
And masters paid off to almost no one.
> If my kids didn't have my wife and I to inherit from, I have no idea how they would ever be able to afford a house.
I mean, this is a huge country and you're focused on the city with the most overinflated housing market. My guess is they would move almost anywhere else in the country and buy a house just fine.
> 6 figure student debt
Again, this is a choice (and a bad one at that). Most people aren't dumb enough to saddle themselves with that much debt.
The countryside filled with conservative yokels and low paying jobs? Cities are attractive for a reason.
My brother is a homosexual artsy type and he is now working his ass off to pay the mortgage but there is no way he wants to come back to his home-town.
That's a braindead take. Not only were there hundreds of other cities that didn't vote for Trump, but getting along with people who may have different viewpoints on things is what diversity is all about. What's wrong with diversity?
This is an odd question. Is every child of every wealthy family entitled to buy their own expensive house in the same neighborhood? How exactly would that work in real life?
OK. It still sounds like you're making an argument that people are entitled to own their own home in a specific place just because they have family there, so how would that work in real life?
Wow, the emotional reactions are really something to take in. You don't really notice your youth going, it happens so slowly. It's almost like seeing a long lost friend. I can totally empathize with the reactions here.
But is it really "AI"? Seems like little more than a fancy image processing method that:
- recognizes a face
- removes a few common wrinkles, e.g. nasolabial folds (-- these in particular are the most common marker of an "aged" face, and people who don't have them or who have broad nasiolabial folds are often said to "age gracefully")
- smooths out and brightens the rest.
It's not creating or generating anything, really. Just running a very adroit filter in real time. To what extent is it, then, AI? We should be wary of the way buzzwords are inserted everywhere, I think. (Remember when it was all "nano"?)
Actually it would be really interesting to see code that attempts to e.g. classify MNIST digits from first principles. No neural nets, no GBDTs, no clustering. And no cheating by trying to translate the above into if-then statements. Seems next to impossible.
I recall Andrej Karpathy saying that people originally tried to do that for image classification (such as cats/dogs problem) and weren't able to get anything close to high accuracy.
It's not really worth arguing about the definition of "AI". All the things you listed as "not AI" could just as easily be a list describing what "AI" can do.
Sure, there are more technical terms for these particular "filters" and how they actually achieved, but almost no one cares about making that distinction IRL.
"AI" is going to stick as a broad term, get used to it.
No, nothing is “really AI” except AGI, everything else is only called AI when its new and shiny. Once its established, it stops being AI.
E.g., rule-based expert systems are no longer described as AI by almost anyone, despite being one of the earliest kinds of “AI” systems. In a few years, LLMs and diffusion-based text-to-image and image-to-image systems won’t be “AI” either.
It probably is some sort of convolutional filter chain to do that recognizing and blurring, so you'd deploy it as a TFlite with TensorFlow Lite, which kinda makes it AI :p
I don't know. Back in the 80s the goal posts for AI was always a machine that understands. We've not even come close to building that.
Instead, for-profit companies seem to have let their marketing departments move the goal-posts to the 40-yard line. "We can't build real machine intelligence, so we'll call this AI."
For me, I always thought R2D2 or R. Daneel Olivaw were what AI was supposed to be. Not "playing Go is hard, so a computer program that can do that is AI." It's the AI label that has been misapplied.
I know, this is where I get the lecture about words meaning different things over time. It's why the technical term for the stuff we've been talking about is Machine Learning systems, not "AI." The "AI" phrase is marketing fluff.
> I don't know. Back in the 80s the goal posts for AI was always a machine that understands. We've not even come close to building that.
For any reasonable definition of understanding, we have. If you wanted to test my understanding of an article after reading it, what would you ask me? Now submit the same articles to ChatGPT and ask the same questions. I'm not sure who would score better.
No. We haven't. Any reasonable definition of understanding includes knowing what's real and what isn't. We've created software that does a great job of simulating responses. The software is unable to "know" anything, let alone that it's assertion that the current year is 2022 is false. It would be possible to coerce ChatGPT into generating the assertion that 2 + 2 = 5 and it would follow the simulation of the argument that this was so, generating text along the way that seems to brim with confidence.
The ability to generate text from statistical models of text is not understanding. That we can fool vision systems with decals is because those vision systems cannot bring a model of the world to bear on the interpretation of the statistical matches coming in through the detectors.
We've built Chinese rooms able to supply gibberish and excellent translation with equal aplomb.
> You don't really notice your youth going, it happens so slowly.
Unless you're unlucky and start losing your hair in your 20s. That really teaches you a lot of life lessons about self-image, aging, the way beauty is marketed and about confidence in general.
I think accepting hair loss and aging made me a better person. These AI youth filters actually annoy me because they are so blatantly manipulative and prey on insecurities often instilled/reinforced by advertising and social media in the first place.
> Wow, the emotional reactions are really something to take in.
I suppose you aren't a frequent user of Tiktok, which is a good thing. I think I'll also be addressing the general HN reader with this comment.
Exaggerated and performed responses are a staple of content on the Tiktok platform, which isn't to say that the filter itself isn't something you can use to reflect on. But give it a browse, and browse enough and you'll see that the content there is mostly acted out and inauthentic, and you'll get a better sense of just how manufactured it is. Savvy teens, children and young adults who frequent the platform know how inauthentic it is. Which is not to say that it isn't entertaining; like how wrestling and drama serials are fictional yet entertaining.
Some of these people were really good actors then? There were definitely some videos with exaggerated responses but there were several that I have a hard time believing weren’t authentic.
I think the vast majority of them are acting. I tried the filter, sure it makes you look younger but it doesn’t make you look like you were when you were a teenager. It has some unique distortions that just don’t look like your younger self
Related "Social Media is a Major Cause of the Mental Illness Epidemic in Teen Girls. Here’s the Evidence." [1]
Does anyone else find these videos extremely emotionally manipulative and creepy? Now users have to contend with not just everyone else being unrealistically beautiful and young due to makeup and lighting but also AI.
"now people have to contend with fake things existing"
maybe its time people get a grip and realize photoshopped stuff is not real, movies are not real, cartoons are not real. Get a grip and do not attempt to run into the huge boulder just because a cartoon showed the roadrunner being able to.
> “Results showed that exposure to manipulated Instagram photos directly led to lower body image.” Engeln, Loach, Imundo, & Zola (2020)
Children with vulnerable developing brains being targeted by algorithms designed by teams of engineers and PhDs to exploit human psychology don't stand a chance. You may as well be telling heroin addicts to "just don't get addicted bro".
You can show kids /r/Instagramreality/ [1]. I doubt it will help.
Some people refuse to acknowledge the fact that a lot of what drives emotion is subliminal and can't be logic'd away. It doesn't matter if you know it's fake, if you see nothing but perfect 10's all day, then look in the mirror, you're gonna feel ugly. If you see nothing but people in G-wagons all day, your shitbox Honda is gonna make you feel like a failure.
That's not even considering that fact that the sheer volume of fake that gets dumped on people completely skews the logic aspect too. Even if you wanted to be rational about you successes and failures, how are you even supposed to know where you really stand?
I am reminded of the study that found that placebos "worked" (had positive effects) even when the patient knew it was a placebo[1]. Unrealistic standards of beauty perpetuated by digitally manipulated images in advertising and social media can mess you up the same way, even when you know what is at play. You can be manipulated by an ad even when you know it is an ad trying to sell you something you likely don't need.
Of course don't get addicted. Everyone knows that, even people who end up addicted.
If "just don't do X" worked, no one would be fat, corrupt, addicted, or injured in workplace accidents.
But people don't work that way, and "don't do X" is hopelessly reductive -- it leaves out all of the (often very strong) factors that drive people to actually do 'X', such as non-stop marketing on TV, movies, radio, and internet apps pushing them to look, think, act, and buy the same things.
That’s probably lost the time they go to school where social pressure is stronger than any form of parenting — that’s why DARE and banning social media doesn’t work, what a good parent is supposed to do is give them enough information with which their kids can handle the situation. They will try out weed and will have a secret tiktok whether you like it or not, and I much rather they tell me about these so that I can help when they feel lost.
I'm upvoting, because the crux of this comes down to proper parenting.
It's the job of the parents to teach kids how the world works, including what are fictional constructs that should not be used for any kind of measurement.
There's no need to single out children. There's plenty more adults -- Gen X, Boomers, and probably Silent generation folks, too -- who seem to have completely lost their minds after finding their way onto the internet in the last decade.
its developing into mental illness because everyone is just 100% encouraging and indulging the insanity. Do you honestly think this great new world of never calling people out on their BS, for fear of hurting their fee-fees is helping anyone?
I honestly just don't believe that attitude is helpful for people, teen girls especially. It's a societal issue that can't be addressed just by admonishing someone
Do you mean that anything projected onto a display isn't palpable, so it isn't real? That seems odd: what about my bank statement, or the comment you just left?
Or are you saying that people shouldn't care if they are misled by things on the internet? I get that people shouldn't believe Hollywood movies are real, but what about a video that someone makes which purports to be their real life?
I am trying to interpret your statement, but having trouble parsing it.
well of course the image is real in so far as it exists, but it is not the persons real face. ANYONE can be photoshopped to look like anything, industrial strength makeup can perform mostly realworld photoshops. It is quite obvious that those who engage in such does not look like that without the makeup.
I am saying that people must exercise some thoughts about what is natural. I could pay someone to put my face in a tom cruise movie, and be just like him. Also, I dont believe that people make videos that "purports to be their real life" as such, I mean sure, they produce a video, but do they explicitly say "this is my real face with no makeup, and this is the entirety of my life, ONLY these glamerous things you see" ? and EVEN if they do, people must simply understand what medium they are watching. Find the latest John Wick movie, and it will claim hard to be real life, claim shit is real, but its not. If someone on instagram or tiktok makes claims, judge them for what they are.
Now sometimes it might be hard, but the obvious cases are EASY. its extremely easy to see when someone has industrial strength makeup, uses smoothening filters that takes away ALL details etc
I think at this point in time any image on a screen should be at least suspected of not being real. It’s just too easy now but our sense of credulity has not kept up.
I have a coworker who is 26. If anyone at all brings up being older (and most are), she bursts into tears about her "lost" years. She is a TikTok addict. This will not go well.
The irony is that people who are looking at their lost years are not realizing that they are probably making the same mistake with their present. In 10 years they will look back and think those were lost as well.
without knowing the specifics, im gonna make a generic guess: she probably begins to realize that what she focused on during those years are not what she now realizes matters more. And she figures its probably not possible to perform a course correction at this point. I will no doubt be downvoted to oblivion for saying it, but this is becoming an increasingly big thing, in the next 10-20 years it will be an order of magnitude worse than now.
I mean that’s just growing up. I’d love to be a teen again with the life experience I have now. But that’s just a fantasy of course, nobody gets to do that.
Alternatively, now everybody has the technology to make themselves look younger in their pictures if they feel the desire to. No need to be a photoshop / aftereffects expert.
Get. Off. Tiktok. Get. Off. Social media. I feel like an old man screaming at kids to get off the lawn. But am I the only one? What's the draw on Tiktok really? I never got it. Then again I never got Twitter either. In my day, we had Usenet for social media and BBSes. And when we cried, it's because we were flamed hard. I have much respect for AI researchers who are some of the most talented in the world, and yet it's cognitive dissonance for me to see them working for social media and advertising companies.
This isn’t really a TikTok invention, filters like this were popularized on Snapchat years ago. TikTok is primarily a YouTube alternative, and there’s perfectly good content to be found (sometimes in spite of the algorithm).
Agree in general, though. Social media is a business for some and for everyone else it’s just mind-games.
> And when we cried, it's because we were flamed hard
Wow, it sounds SO great.
> What's the draw on Tiktok really?
TikTok is an amazing "curiosity catalyst". Most videos last 30 seconds. You can learn and discover a lot in not that much time. The short format makes it enough to become interested in tons of subjects and be able to search more later. I honestly feel like TikTok brought me my creativity back.
It's also way more "feel good" than other social networks for some reason. That's the perfect place for people to share their stories because they don't "get flamed hard". But maybe that's just because Gen Z is more respectful of difference and TikTok will become increasingly worse as boomers get on board, I don't know.
The person says that seeing herself as a teenager basically instantly cured her anxieties from being bullied for being "ugly" as a child. It's not unlike psychedelic users reporting drastic changes in their outlook after a trip. Would be interesting to study this.
Kind of frightening! I tried it out, and it doesn't look like me, but there is a resemblance to a younger me. Having my "current" me in the other video panel makes it even more shocking. I really understand why people are taken away by this. Imagine this a few years out, where you could feed such a filter pictures of actual younger you. A filter like this could become close to perfect. Now imagine a MMO which takes in all of that ... don't tell Zuck about this idea.
yea, training it on some actual photos would really take this up a notch, a huge notch. The reactions would be 1000% more heavy, and they are already pretty heavy
You could train it on different age ranges too and then use a sliding scale to lock yourself into a particular age. For an MMO this would be pretty cool, reminds me of something black mirror could come up with.
Apple, Google, Facebook+Instagram, and Amazon already have every photo of most people since 2010. They can do that today if they decide. For my kids, they have every photo and video since the day they were born. For the newer portrait photos and cinematic videos, they even have depth data.
I messed around with it. First, it didn't look one bit like myself as a younger me. It was like an artificially blemish-free version and it even tries, haphazardly, to fill in a receding hair line. To be honest, it was funny.
I'm sure people's reaction to get teary-eyed have less to do with the literal-ness of the filter and more of a surfacing catharsis deep-down that people have about the passage of time, lost opportunities, distant pain or hurt, disappointment, and also perhaps a nostalgia for once was growing up. It's a pretty human thing.
Supposedly that effect continues, the first third of life feels longer than the last two subjectively (at least I've heard that claimed). Wouldn't surprise me if it's a mixture of processing speed slowing down making things feel like they're moving faster and just the fact that each year is a small percentage of your life. Maybe also less variety day to day as an adult, fewer big changes.
You can test the clock speed thing and there's some evidence for it (ask different aged people to estimate when a minute has passed, stuff like that).
The watched kettle never boils. Kids are impatiently waiting to grow up, to get through their teens so they can drive cars, earn money, live freely. The average school day is a long day at the office. I recall sitting in class day-dreaming about not sitting in class.
Yeah, I’d guess prison time also feels pretty long. Children in modern culture serve a pretty long sentence (depending on how good your parents are I suppose).
I dunno if that test would really get to it. Presumably people have an updating idea of what a minute feel like, unless they stopped interacting with clocks in their teenage years.
nope. That filter already happened years ago on snapchat. It doesn't have the same effect at all. Teens can see themselves as old all day long and it is impossible for them to really react to it in the same way because it hasn't happened and there are no memories or experiences of being that person. Going the other way tho...
Ah yes... I remember FaceApp and in20years.com or whatever they were called. Back then, it was a novelty. "Cool, that's what I'll look like when I'm a big grown-up!" we all thought. How things change...
I like how it tries to fill in male hairlines and gives bald men a generic crewcut. It's the only thing "additive" I saw, the rest just looked like smoothing and brightening filters.
What I love about TikTok filters is how good they are at getting people to show their face. If TikTok is collecting biometrics, they are sure doing a great job at it.
The filter is quite simple - brightening and smoothing the skin; apart from that - getting rid of that goddamn "tent" between nose and lips i.e. nasolabial folds. And the wrinkle between your eyebrows.
As I'm 30 and people tell me I look younger than I really am, guess this is my sign to take skincare more seriously while I can. I am already halfway there by not smoking and rarely drinking alcohol.
Am I the only one that finds this frightening? Adults pretending to be teens is going to open up a whole new can of worms the implications are crazy. Keep in mind this is an app with millions of teens hooked on to it.
What’s more terrifying is what happens to explicit material where consenting adults use filters like this? Is the law keeping up with tech like this?
There is a fundamental difference between text and live video. If someone texted you that they they are Obama and they want to be friends, very few people would believe it, some may still fall for it no doubt. But now someone video calls you and you see Obama on the other end, and you’re able to have a conversation with them, then a lot more people would believe them.
There's not much the law needs to do. People just need to learn that when they open up apps like that they're going into a world full of fake shit. Nothing is real.
There are already older models who facetune to look like teens. I've heard of at least two cases that were made public, I'm sure there are more that stay under the radar. It's definitely strange and not healthy for society.
All this AI-enhanced imagery has a certain creepy, unsettling unnaturalness to it that I can easily recognise at a glance, but it seems a lot of people unfortunately can't.
Should probably RTFA, friend. There's a whole twitter thread full of people taking full-on psychic damage from this filter. It's definitely hitting a significant percentage of people pretty hard.
Maybe this hits harder if you're sick or in actual danger of dying young (ish), but... man. I'm not going within a million miles of this filter.
I would not want to be young now and participate in the bullshit they feel pressured to participate in, but if you put me back in my body at twenty again, without the blown-out heart and the ruined spine and the trashed rotator cuffs and the bad knees - well, I already had those, thanks to the bumper of a Geo Metro, but still - I think I could find a way to not give a fuck about social media or social expectations or any of that shit. I'd treat that body like somebody just handed me the keys to a Lambo - no more smoking and drinking and doing hard drugs and eating shitty food sitting in front of a computer for decades. I'd go wander the earth like dude in Kung Fu, eating like a hippie and not wasting my time on aspirational capitalist bullshit.
Nobody I know wants to be a young person now. But most of us would love to be a middle-aged person in a young person's body.
It's not right to call this an AI filter. It's amazing how lazy we've been getting with our terminology lately. Every impressive algorithm has the AI label slapped on it.
I for one and so very VERY happy I'm not growing up as a young person today. Life today is extremely hard for millenials and Gen Z. I would not trade any amount of time to be young again. I was lucky enough to get into the right career, I am very happy with the set of beliefs and morals I have, which I'm teaching my kids, and I have a house in the Bay Area. If my kids didn't have my wife and I to inherit from, I have no idea how they would ever be able to afford a house.
I met my wife during a time when you met face-to-face through friends, and we dated without each other having to be distracted by 24x7 work, phone, or online dating apps.
I look at my life and I'm satisfied. I know a lot of my friends are satisfied as well. A lot of millenials and Gen Z that I work with and are friends with had a different world they had to go through, are saddles with 6 figure student debt, no chance of a house, and are lonely. It's not fair and I wish this weren't the case, and I really hope that things like social media go out of fashion by the time my kids are teenagers.