filling – SamaGamer

“We cannot send the world the image of hotels with empty pools.” Jordi Clos, president of the Barcelona Hotels Guild, has returned to the fore to criticize the prohibition on hotels being able to open their swimming pools (unless it is with seawater) because the majority of hotels are not technically prepared for it.

He has demanded “the administration also look for solutions” and they have put one on the table: go buy water from France.

With the foot changed. In the middle of one of the most intense droughts in recent decades, Catalonia declared the drought emergency phase for more than 200 municipalities and 6 million people in the provinces of Barcelona and Girona. This phase has many measures: from forcing sports facilities to close showers to reducing river flows to a minimum.

The controversy of the moment focuses on the pools because the Hotel Guild is aware that the majority of establishments have not made the necessary changes to fill the pools with salt water and fears the impact on tourism that the image of the pools may have. empty. It is estimated that a family hotel with a relatively small pool would need to invest between 15,000 and 20,000 euros in installation, maintenance and replacement of salt water.

In search of lost water. Hence, as explained by La Vanguardia, the idea of buying water on the other side of the border and taking it to the hotels with vats and tanker trucks has been gaining weight. Rumors and speculation even speak of hotel complexes closing agreements for the coming months.

There’s just one small problem: it’s illegal.

Roads full of tanker trucks. In a recent interview on TV3, Samuel Reyes (president of the Catalan Water Agency) explained that it is not “a last minute measure.” The measure has been in the Special Drought Plan since November 2022 and the text is crystal clear. “It doesn’t matter if it comes from France, Bilbao or Japan, if it’s not sea water, you can’t fill the pool.”

According to Reyes, it is not only that “it would not make any sense for water not to be used for domestic activities, such as cooking or showering”; but that, if the purchase of water for these purposes was allowed, “we would have tanker trucks circulating throughout Catalonia and it would be a situation impossible to control.”

Meanwhile, the pressure continues to build. Because it is not only an international problem, it is also a regional problem. Although hoteliers on the Costa Dorada also fear the “reputational damage” that hotel problems in Barcelona may cause, the truth is that they do not have the same problems. Tarragona, depending on the Ebro basin, is not affected by the emergency and, if everything continues like this, its hotels will be able to open normally.

Will we see water smuggling on the border this summer? That is beginning to be the big question as the employers find themselves unable to get the Generalitat to finance the conversion of the swimming pools.

Facebook is still an immense social network, with many active users, although it is not what it was. Instagram cannibalized its territory and those who continue to enter Facebook with the same frequency are becoming fewer and fewer and belong to quite specific demographics.

They are witnesses and participants in what is happening on this social network: images created by AI, often directly stolen, They are being passed off as authentic by the classic accounts that only spread viral content to shoot your .

viral recreations

If you are one of those who still logs into Facebook, even from time to time, you may have seen a photo like the following: a man posing in a sawmill next to the wooden sculpture of a German shepherd. Although sometimes he is a bulldog, or sometimes the person posing is a woman. Sometimes the mutt has a hyper-realistic style, and other times it is more polygonal.

In reality they are variations of the original content of Michael Jones, a British sculptor who often shares his wood carving work. This man published a series of photographs and videos for a few months about the process of carving the figure of a German shepherd. Also dogs of other breeds.

From there, they have generated dozens, perhaps hundreds, of variations using AI by this type of pages designed to make content viral inspiring or tear-jerking. You place the carving next to a person who has nothing to do with Jones, posing with it, and you are ready to receive and praise. Sometimes the size also receives modifications.

“Your work is incredible”, “beautiful”, “Very well done!”, “Formidable work” and other similar phrases are the most common ones found in this type of images. There is one that accumulates more than a million likes. It was uploaded by a page called ‘Dogs 4 Life’, and its level of cunning is such that it has filled the comments box with its own comments, linking to websites where it has commercial interests, to derive visits and camouflage the real comments.

In some cases it is more evident than in others that it is an image created with AI, not a real photograph. Like in this one, both because of the man’s face and because of how extremely detailed a dog is that is supposed to be a wood carving. Not even Corradini could achieve those textures.

The comments usually look like this, completely positive and laudatory:

interviewed Michael Jones in this regard, who is naturally displeased with this phenomenon, as he believes that “they are missing out on legitimate credit exposure to their work” and that this sets unrealistic expectations for this type of art: the more people who are able If you do so, the less value it has.

The image with Jones’s original carving.

There are more examples, such as an image on a page called “Happy Day” that claims to have created a carved wood sculpture “with its own hands.” The more one looks at the base of the sculpture, the more one begins to see the seams.

And once you start looking, you discover that it is a pest. Apparently half the planet is woodcarving with their own hands at a level of legend. Counterfeiters have gone far beyond the German Shepherd.

Another obsession is in children or adolescents who paint their self-portraits. There are several notable models, but none as popular as that of a blonde teenager holding her own painting with grass and trees in the background.

Apparently this is the original image:

Another example that has transcended the model of a young blonde girl but is still nothing more than a crude recreation that passes itself off as authentic… successfully, according to its comments.

There’s a New Zealand woman named Catherine Hall who has taken it to the next level. detect these types of images: it tracks them and records them in a spreadsheet. He has several, they are public and in the dozens of rows he writes down the details about them to keep track. From the portraits of a teenager that have been reused ad nauseam with more or less subtle modifications. Not with one that brings an idea from the text to the image, but rather modifications from the image.

One of Hall’s spreadsheets.

Another of Hall’s spreadsheets.

And another one.

collects other examples that show how the creation and modification of images by AI, which increasingly achieves more photorealistic results, is being increasingly used by Facebook pages that seek interactions that they can then monetize.

Using inspirational or beautiful images to harvest and then exploit commercially is a relatively harmless use, beyond the annoyance it may cause to the actual artists who created what you see in the original image.

The problem may be greater if they begin to become popular on Facebook, or on another platform. false, photorealistic images, to try to discredit public figures, delegitimize politicians or use celebrities as a hook to sell fraudulent services.

The latter is already happening, also in Spain. If what we can see with viral images is achieving so much success, why wouldn’t a much more malicious and harmful use of this type of images be successful?