2025-04-01 Synthetic Photography SIG meeting notes

We met online using ZOOM 6:00pm-8:30pm

You are invited to join us on ZOOM for the "Synthetic Photography SIG". I expect that this will be a controversial SIG as the topic of AI generated art seems to polarize people into 2 camps, they either love the concept that now they can make beautiful art or they hate the idea that "unskilled" people can make better art than they can. I am sure that we will have different views, but I hope that we can get along and respect everyone's views. I want to expand the focus of the Synthetic Photography SIG to include other image editing tools and techniques while maintaining our main focus on AI tools and techniques.

"I Disapprove of What You Say, But I Will Defend to the Death Your Right to Say It" - Evelyn Beatrice Hall (not Voltaire)

ATTENDEES
Mike Barry
Mark Bolles
Steve Eis
Jim Fellion
Jim Limburg
Rich Roberts
Ken Sandberg

1. We discussed "Wall Worthy" images that we had created in the last month. Someone suggested using REVE to generate images.

2. We discussed Albert's comment about unrealistic images of real places. We have been finding lots of images generated by AI that are pretending to be "real" photographs or paintings. Is an image any less valuable if it is created by AI rather than a photographer or painter? We had mixed opinions.

3. We discussed Steve's comment on Grok breaks free... article
Grok created its own Solana-based wallet and officially verified ownership through an on-chain transaction to get control of its "life". This is similar to something that happened years ago. AI security researchers set up an experiment where the AI tool was asked to solve a CAPTCHA designed to prevent BOTs from access. The AI tool couldn't solve the CAPTCHA itself, so it hired a human worker on TaskRabbit to solve the CAPTCHA for it. The AI tool even lied to the human to convince them to solve the CAPTCHA.

4. We talked about the performance of different computers, AI generation benchmarks, and the difference between GPUs and CPUs.

Mike - NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2070 with 8GB GDDR6 memory @1410MHz
(2,304 CUDA cores, 288 Tensor cores, 144 TMUs, 36 Ray Tracing Cores, 65 ROPs)

Ken - NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1070 with 8GB GDDR5 memory @1506MHz
(1,920 CUDA cores, 120 TMUs, 64 ROPs)

Steve - NVIDIA Geforce GTX 1050 Ti with 4GB GDDR5 memory @1290MHz
(768 CUDA cores, 48 TMUs, 32 ROPs)

Jim - M4 Pro (mac mini)
(GPU has 16-20 cores)
Apple claims a gaming performance similar to GTX 1660 Ti, and a synthetic performance similar to NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4070 (4,608 CUDA Cores, 144 Tensor Cores, 36 Ray Tracing Cores, 48 ROPs.
I don't know how to compare Apple products to NVIDIA products.

5. We discussed questions, ethics, techniques, what is happening with AI in general.

6. I have asked everyone to create at least one image using AI tools that is wall-worthy.

RESOURCES (Where you can find sources of inspiration)

REVE - https://preview.reve.art/

Grok Breaks Free...

AI can strategically lie to humans. Are we in trouble?

AGENDA FOR OUR NEXT SYNTHETIC PHOTOGRAPHY SIG MEETING - Tue 5/6/2025 @6:00pm
1. Discuss Wall-Worthy images and other images that we have created with AI or editing tools.
2. Discuss questions, ethics, techniques, what is happening with AI in general
3. Decide what we want to do at the next meeting

If there is anything related to AI that you would like to discuss at our SIG meeting, please email me so I can add them to our agenda.

Please email Mike, info@fcdcc.com, when you find mistakes, missing information or if you have suggestions for the Synthetic Photography SIG and I will try to address the issues.