Scammers Sell Seeds for Exotic AI-Generated Flowers That Don't Exist

https://www.404media.co/scammers-sell-seeds-for-exotic-ai-generated-flowers-that-dont-exist/

by Brajeshwar • 22 days ago

51 36 22 days ago

dvh• 22 days ago

The monkey orchid was featured in one of the corridor digital video (in the context of ai scams), there are few similar species

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey_orchid

gdulli• 22 days ago

We talk too much about hallucination and too little about the more mundane elephant in the room that AI, whatever its effectiveness, will simply be used more for scam and deception than positive uses.

high_na_euv2• 22 days ago

I dont think a few scams here and there outweight positive usecases

siriusastrebe• 22 days ago

We're about to see our political campaigns flooded with fake videos, slander, fabrications, and misinformation. Used to be you could be relatively certain if something was a video it was too much effort to be photoshopped. Not true any more.

Planktonne• 22 days ago

It's not just a few scams though. It's a lot of scams, and a lot of propaganda, and a lot of CSAM, and even beyond the overtly negative, it's a tidal wave of slop in music, in publishing, in everything else.

Some technology has more negative use cases than positive; this appears to be one of them.

cwillu• 22 days ago

I don't think a few stock photo replacements here and there outweigh the negative use-cases.

slopinthebag2• 22 days ago

I find it fascinating that this is a popular anti-bitcoin argument, but (often) the same people making that argument actually find AI useful. So they experience a mild case of cognitive dissonance.

hansvm• 22 days ago

The Bitcoin argument is usually paired with "there are no non-scam use cases which aren't better served by other methods/tech."

oneshtein• 22 days ago

Just make scams illegal — problem solved.

Smoosh• 22 days ago

If only it were that easy! The economy would collapse if scams were stopped. There would be no progress. The president would be poor. We are already losing the scam war with china, this would just hand victory to them. Is that the world you want to live in? /s

But seriously, I wonder how much of the economy is scam activity?

namdnay• 22 days ago

those oversized "teddy bear" pictures are horrifying, looks like something from day of the triffids

jdw642• 22 days ago

When I work as a freelancer, I get a lot of requests lately to create fake AI manipulated images for scams. Especially requests to generate fake IDs using AI. Personally, I feel that there is a need for AI watermarks on image generation models, but at the same time, if watermarks become mandatory, it would effectively kill the business viability of those models. It feels like the same problem as guns and gun control.

armchairhacker• 22 days ago

AFAIK the big models have watermarks that are supposed to be hard to remove. But I don’t think it’s possible on local models: not just questionable because it would prevent full open-source, but if someone discovers a way to easily remove a local model’s watermark, it will work permanently.

It’s a bit analogous to New York and California regulating 3D printers (which I disapprove). But more invasive, because local models are software, and here the danger is not guns but photos.

jagaerglad• 22 days ago

may I ask the reason your clients don't just generate these things themselves?

jdw642• 22 days ago

Usually, this kind of work is difficult with large models. They either get rejected by policy or don't produce stable results. So you have to use local models, but local models have inconsistent quality and the setup is complicated.

That's why clients usually hear about keywords like LoRA somewhere and say, 'I heard you can generate it with this method.' But in reality, they don't know how to install a local model, serve it, run it, or stabilize the results. And that's where freelancers like me come in.

As a freelancer, it's hard to completely ignore this trend. Because freelancers like me aren't inside a company, we're usually a step behind on the latest news. So we end up searching through the information and keywords that clients share with us, organizing it, and following industry trends that we pick up when we visit companies for consulting.

In any case, most clients aren't completely clueless—they usually provide keywords like 'I heard you can do it this way' and make their reques

Ferret74462• 20 days ago

Much to the chagrin of the folks claiming "AI art is not art because it requires no skill" it does actually take skill and effort to get good results from LLMs.

aaronbrethorst• 22 days ago

All from well-known brand SheilaDegisn

gwerbin• 22 days ago

They don't want people with good instincts buying.

v-w-v-w• 22 days ago

Thank you for your purchase. Here is the seed to receive beautiful flowers: 735037659271543.

Use this with model Juggernaut XL v11 at 1280x720, DPM++ 2M Karras and hires fix set to 1.4. Unfortunately, we are unable to accept returns at this time.

codemog2• 22 days ago

This should inform entrepreneurs: people want unique and beautiful flowers. I don’t see why it’s not possible to do at least some modifications with gene editing methods.

kg• 22 days ago

What the world needs is more new and innovative invasive species that were cooked up in a lab to look cool :)

codemog2• 22 days ago

Care to explain why making a sunflower a different color is harmful? Why respond to things with the least charitable interpretation?

speak_plainly• 22 days ago

Medieval grifts are back. We urgently need a modern Jack and the Beanstalk movie.

esafak• 22 days ago

Image generators should embed their prompts, and eBay should run a slop detector.

Chu4eeno• 22 days ago

I believe grok embeds some modern standard provenance metadata (haven't checked what data it contains though), and Google uses their own invisible watermarking (that unfortunately only google can detect...).

sph• 22 days ago

And we should solve world hunger while we’re at it.

pixel_popping• 22 days ago

Pretty smart, pretty smart.

fer• 22 days ago

I've seen this for approximately forever, especially poppies (they got creative with that amount of petal surface). They were simply photoshopped back then.

DivingForGold• 22 days ago

I have been lied to multiple times, sellers claiming to sell me seeds for the relatively rare pink flowered version of "Pride of Barbados", most off Ebay, from foreign countries.

All of them germinated and grew to the common orange-yellow version.

I gave up trying.

Scammers Sell Seeds for Exotic AI-Generated Flowers That Don't Exist

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