On social media, a number of creators are generating nostalgic photographs of China with the help of AI. Even though these pictures are wrong in some details, they are realistic enough to deceive and impress many of their followers.
Images look sophisticated in terms of definition, sharpness, saturation and color tone. Their realism is in part due to a recent major update to the AI image-making program Midjourney that was released in mid-March, which is better not only at generating human hands, but also at simulating various styles of photography.
It’s still relatively easy, even to untrained eyes, to tell that the photos are AI-generated. But for some creators, their experiments are more about trying to recall a specific era in time than trying to fool their audience. Read the full story.
—Zeyi Yang
Zeyi’s story is taken from China Report, its weekly newsletter that gives you information on technology in China. Register to receive it in your inbox every Tuesday.
Learn more about our AI-generated imagery stories:
+ These new tools allow you to see for yourself how biased AI image models are. Bias and stereotyping are still huge problems for systems like DALL-E 2 and Stable Diffusion, despite attempts by companies to address them. Read the full story.
