Otters on a plane using wifi.
Images: via
[ed. The last video (which I couldn't download) is amazing.]
Two years ago, I was on a plane with my teenage daughter, messing around with a new AI image generator while the wifi refused to work. Otters were her favorite animal, so naturally I typed: “otter on a plane using wifi” just as the connection was restored. The resulting thread went viral and “otter on a plane using wifi” has since become one of my go-to tests of progress AI image generation. (...)
The otter evolution reveals two crucial trends with some big implications. First, there clearly continues to be rapid improvement across a wide range of AI capabilities from image generation to video to LLM code generation. Second, open weights models, while not generally as good as proprietary models, are often only months behind the state-of-the-art.
If you put these trends together, it becomes clear that we are heading towards a place where not only are image and video generations likely to be good enough to fool most people, but that those capabilities will be widely available and, thanks to open models, very hard to regulate or control. I think we need to be prepared for a world where it is impossible to tell real from AI-generated images and video, with implications for a wide swath of society, from the entertainment we enjoy to our trust for online content. - Ethan Mollick
Two years ago, I was on a plane with my teenage daughter, messing around with a new AI image generator while the wifi refused to work. Otters were her favorite animal, so naturally I typed: “otter on a plane using wifi” just as the connection was restored. The resulting thread went viral and “otter on a plane using wifi” has since become one of my go-to tests of progress AI image generation. (...)
The otter evolution reveals two crucial trends with some big implications. First, there clearly continues to be rapid improvement across a wide range of AI capabilities from image generation to video to LLM code generation. Second, open weights models, while not generally as good as proprietary models, are often only months behind the state-of-the-art.
If you put these trends together, it becomes clear that we are heading towards a place where not only are image and video generations likely to be good enough to fool most people, but that those capabilities will be widely available and, thanks to open models, very hard to regulate or control. I think we need to be prepared for a world where it is impossible to tell real from AI-generated images and video, with implications for a wide swath of society, from the entertainment we enjoy to our trust for online content. - Ethan Mollick
