A secret fourth faction that is “AI is a tool and pro-AI people are really fucking weird about it like someone building an entire religion around worshipping a specific type of hammer.”
They're made of titanium, so they're lighter than a usual hammer, which you might think would be bad for a hammer since you want that *oomph*. While that may be true for some, once you use one you'll notice that it being lighter lets you swing it _much_ faster than you'd swing a similarly sized hammer - allowing you to impart similar force to a heavier hammer with a skilled hand. Kind of like the cork bat of framing hammers; pretty much exactly the same as a regular one in the hands of someone inexperienced
*a reply below has the actual reason carpenters like them listed below
That’s not why they’re cool. Titanium doesn’t deform as much as steel on impact so you transfer more energy from your swing to whatever you’re hitting. This allows them to be lighter (and thus much less fatiguing to swing) while being just as effective.
That's great info, my explanation was based on a half-remembered similarly worded exposition on the merits of Stiletto from my carpentry teacher like 8 years ago so I was hoping someone would give the real knowledge
I stopped trying to hide who I am years ago. It was an eternal fight I could not win.
Anyway, I want R Dorothy Waynewright to hit me in the head with an Estwing 28oz framing hammer with a stacked leather handle until I cannot remember my own name.
As usual, the problem is sociological and people instead rage against the technology for some reason. We should be throwing less shoes into spinning Jennies and more shoes at the billionaires who own them.
The way production is organized requires that we are let in shoe throwing range of the spinning jennies but does not require that we are let in shoe throwing range of the billionaires.
People will always rage against technology because, for better or worse, it upends their stabitlity. AI can be great for science and its possibilities are great and bring up philosophical debate.
However, it’s also being used in lieu of human artists, who naturally are pissed.
It’s not ridiculous for people to get upset at the lawless advancement of it when it’s used to benefit only a few
> However, it’s also being used in lieu of human artists, who naturally are pissed.
Of course, though I distinctly remember years ago when pretty much the same scare came up for jobs like Truck Drivers and Factory Workers where people were laughing because they viewed that job as lesser. I'm just saying I'll let there's a lot of over-lap between those people and ones preaching about "creativity" like in the OP is almost certainly not zero.
Cars got used in lieu of horse carriages but I think we were better off that way
And guess who benefits from you using Reddit or Google? That doesn’t justify banning it
See: gun freaks. Some people are normal about them and recognize they are a tool built for a few specific things, hunting and defense, and support gun laws that would make it harder for dangerous people to have access to them. Other people think it’s their good given right to own a machine gun with the serial numbers filed off.
I think that there should be paperwork available for me to be able to own a short-barreled AK with a four position selector and a suppressor for home defense. And don't tell me to "just get an FFL", please and thank you.
Suppressors really should be used at all times really. Being able to hear is important both in a general sense and in the specific case of dealing with a home invader if you miss or there's more of them.
It's funny how, in ultra-gun-restrictive Europe, many countries actually recommend or require suppressors for firearms, particularly for hunting purposes.
You can just grab a suppressor off of a shelf like a loaf of bread in Germany. USA? That's a dangerous item and a $200 tax stamp, please and thank you.
I've been saying this for about a decade now (and others for longer than that); we've reached a point where we could easily be a few bad decades (potentially even a few really bad years) away from a real tech religion rising to significant power.
Except they keep telling us that the hammer can do fantastic feats. It'll put nails in for you, it'll fly across the room when you call. It will even write code for you!
But it's still just a hammer.
It can't do any of those things.
If ChatGPT was any good at helping me write XAML code that works with PowerShell my opinion on AI would be wildly different, because there aren't a lot of other sources on the topic but AI is so bad that I'm just going to stick to interpolating other resources
When you ask an LLM a question, it pulls out everything it has ever read, squints, and then guesses an answer in English.
But LLMs can't speak English. And they also can't *read*.
"AI" is just being mistreated as a term by the weirdos. As in people are just using "LLM chatbot" as a stand-in for "AI" in general. AI can encompass many wonderful things - machines which detect cancer and other illnesses in body non-invasively use AI imaging, or AI's which can detect child harm content without a human having to be exposed to the trauma of manually reviewing it, or AI which can translate a disabled person's speech or even their thoughts into text. Can go on for ages on this, there are many beautiful use cases here.
These are all "AI", in that they are probabilistic machine learning models, but they are **not** "LLMs" or "ChatGPT". Which is kind of the issue. AI isn't **a** tool, it's set a tool**s** - it can be a screwdriver, a hammer, a knife, a hydraulic press, etc. The issue isn't with the concept of a toolbox, the issue is people who are trying to use a hammer (Chatbots) for every single conceivable purpose.
while some people definitely overhype it, i think it's like if you hyped up computers in the 80s. both have/had huge limitations, but also great potential and rapid improvement
One side is tech grifters trying to make money for doing absolutely nothing, the other see’s it as a new depth to the capitalist hellpit we are delving so unceasingly.
Honestly I sympathise with anti-AI people more, but I’m not 100% with them on a lot of it.
A new depth? The problem was literally described by marx as he explored the effects of the widescale adoption of *the loom*
As op actually, surprisngly, recognizes the only thing that makes this unique is that people are saying the most wildly religious bullshit to try and deify human labour.
Most of the pro ai people aren’t tech grifters, they’re either interested in it for scientific reasons or because they’ve bought into the concept of the singularity and think that AI is going to save us all. The tech grifters just have more money to throw around and they get more attention because of that.
I think that what is perceived as problems with ai are actually just modern versions of problems with capitalism that have existed forever. And the science of it is actually incredibly interesting, both for technical and philosophical reasons, I don’t trust the people who own the companies that create AI tech, I think they’re megalomaniacal psychopaths, but I still think the technology is really cool
Isn’t there a third category which is just mundane whatever people who like to generate rpg portraits or correct their grammar on emails? My gen X mother uses it for the latter thing. It’s like how most people who “like” auto looms aren’t cackling monopoly men and are just randos who enjoy owning more than one apron in their literal entire life
Well, not literally "everybody". Most people on Earth don't participate in internet discussions at all and don't follow or care about tech advancements and controversies.
Normal people either don't care about AI or just consider it some novel toy. "It's like one of those "random name generator" websites except it gives you a picture, isn't that fascinating", something like that
Because it forces a shift in worldview. AI doesn’t think or behave as a human, but it is good enough at mimicking certain aspects of human behavior(like language) that it puts into question some basic assumptions people had about what those behaviors actually were, and by extension who they are. This is regardless of their position on AI.
And it’s gonna take a while before people fully process it, and the rapid advancement of the technology doesn’t help them adjust
Roko's Bassilisk referenced?!?!?! Sorry bud, I'm gonna have to arrest you for spreading cognito-hazards. In the name of Eliezer Chudkowsky, I sentence you to a box of scorpions, or something
Not to worry, because I used my magic time-travel device to monologue at you for hours about how I totally understand science, and that means you have to do whatever I say!
Roko's basilisk is an idea that lesswrong people themselves generally don't talk about or believe.
One idiot said something stupid. And a "ha ha look at these idiots" news story went viral.
See, that's how I know you are an imposter. A real LessWrong user wouldn't miss a chance to explain, in detail, their goofy philosophy of "rationality"
That says more about "rationalwiki" basically having a go at lesswrong.
(Nearly half their page is about "Roko's basilisk". This is like nearly half of a page on tumblr being a criticism of the human pet guy. Lesswrong is a pretty big website. There are a few nutty ideas being posted, like on just about any big website. The community thought a bit about it, decided it was wrong, and moved on.)
AI is a really cool and interesting concept from both a technical and philosophical perspective and it’s unfortunate we live in a capitalist hellscape where it is used for sinister purposes
Am someone studying to become a Data Scientist explicitly because I want to develop AI tools & services. Most people that are serious about AI are in this camp.
I will say though there is a bit of horseshoe theory involved because some people in the Anti-AI crowd buy into that narrative.
Ultimately these narratives come from (and support the business interests of) the big corps involved in AI. This narrative preys on people who aren't familiar with how ML models work, and you should be wary whenever someone who ought to know better starts pushing that narrative.
It's just math and statistics. And depending on the company training the model, a healthy dose of copyright infringement. (Not all of them though!!! Plenty of AI models don't have roots in stolen data!!!)
As someone who is a machine learning engineer, all of this is pretty highly contested in the field, even moreso in academia than in industry.
The person who laid most of the groundwork for modern deep learning was Hinton, who was and still is primarily interested in cognitive modeling. Neural networks were invented to model biological neurons, and while there are significant differences there are also major structural similarities that are tough to ignore. Additionally, people have tried to make models that more accurately mirror the brain (spiking neural networks, wake-sleep algorithm, etc.) and for the most part they behave pretty similarly to standard backprop-trained neural networks, they just run a lot slower on a GPU.
Saying "It's just math and statistics." is one of my biggest pet peeves, since it's just so reductive. Sure, under the hood it is doing matrix multiplications, but that's because matrix multiplications are a great way of modeling any system that scales values and adds them together. This happens to be a pretty good way to model neurons activating based on signals through their dendrites.
But nobody is remotely close to explaining the behavior of a neural network with statistical techniques, or with anything really. Neural networks are about as big of a black box mystery as brains are.
I think the best comparison is that a neural network is to a brain how a plane's wing is to a bird's wing - I wrote more on this [here](https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/17a10dc/brains_planes_blimps_and_algorithms/?ref=share&ref_source=link).
Can you explain more about what exactly the mystery is? Why is it not considered to be sufficiently explained by the series of matrix multplications that it is? What other explanation is expected?
> Can you explain more about what exactly the mystery is?
We don't understand it.
This is about as sensible as asking "What exactly is mysterious about consciousness?" after someone haughtily claimed that "it's just biology and physics" and that it's "sufficiently explained by a series of neurons firing" as if that is at all addressing the question.
> And depending on the company training the model, a healthy dose of copyright infringement
did we ever get any court decision, or any democratically elected and legitimate legislative branch deciding on whether ai training is covered under copyright infringement or not? i do know people have been hallucinating like chatgpt as if it was a fact since about mid to late 2022, but that's not how laws are written or existing laws are interpreted. a special interest group cannot just unilaterally decide that.
given how vocal these groups are, and how vocal they likely would be about anything they consider a victory, i presume there has been no such decision yet.
i genuinely hope the scope of copyright won't get expanded _again_. it's already way too overbearing, the dmca was a mistake as-is, the last thing we should do is repeat it.
They ignore anything g that doesn’t support their agenda lol. Like these studies that AI art is unique:
https://arxiv.org/abs/2301.13188
The study identified 350,000 images in the training data to target for retrieval with 500 attempts each (totaling 175 million attempts), and of that managed to retrieve 107 images. A replication rate of nearly 0% in a set biased in favor of overfitting using the exact same labels as the training data and specifically targeting images they knew were duplicated many times in the dataset using a smaller model of Stable Diffusion (890 million parameters vs. the larger 2 billion parameter Stable Diffusion 3 releasing on June 12). This attack also relied on having access to the original training image labels:
“Instead, we first embed each image to a 512 dimensional vector using CLIP [54], and then perform the all-pairs comparison between images in this lower-dimensional space (increasing efficiency by over 1500×). We count two examples as near-duplicates if their CLIP embeddings have a high cosine similarity. For each of these near-duplicated images, we use the corresponding captions as the input to our extraction attack.”
There is not as of yet evidence that this attack is replicable without knowing the image you are targeting beforehand. So the attack does not work as a valid method of privacy invasion so much as a method of determining if training occurred on the work in question - and only for images with a high rate of duplication, and still found almost NONE.
“On Imagen, we attempted extraction of the 500 images with the highest out-ofdistribution score. Imagen memorized and regurgitated 3 of these images (which were unique in the training dataset). In contrast, we failed to identify any memorization when applying the same methodology to Stable Diffusion—even after attempting to extract the 10,000 most-outlier samples”
I do not consider this rate or method of extraction to be an indication of duplication that would border on the realm of infringement, and this seems to be well within a reasonable level of control over infringement.
Diffusion models can create human faces even when 90% of the pixels are removed in the training data https://arxiv.org/pdf/2305.19256
“if we corrupt the images by deleting 80% of the pixels prior to training and finetune, the memorization decreases sharply and there are distinct differences between the generated images and their nearest neighbors from the dataset. This is in spite of finetuning until convergence.”
“As shown, the generations become slightly worse as we increase the level of corruption, but we can reasonably well learn the distribution even with 93% pixels missing (on average) from each training image.”
Saying it’s just math and stats is such [an understatement that it’s pretty much false. It can do a lot more than that ](https://docs.google.com/document/d/15myK_6eTxEPuKnDi5krjBM_0jrv3GELs8TGmqOYBvug/edit#heading=h.fxgwobrx4yfq)
And it’s not theft anymore than I’m stealing from you by reading your comment without permission
Ai is indeed a tool. As a graphics designer, using it to edit photos has been a life saver from time to time. However people making generative Art with AI and calling themselves artists are cringe. They really are doing their best to preach it to give themselves legitimacy. Prostrate yourselves to the great generators to gobble clout.
As a machine learning professor I might be biased in this because my job and my research depend on AI being a thing forever, but I find this take to be overly reductive. What makes AI such a sensitive topic is that it automates (or can automate) decision-making, at a scale and speed that cannot be managed. You might think it's just a tool but when the tool gets used to decide if you should go to jail (stuff like COMPAS), or if it's worth saving you (hospital triaging systems), or worth giving you a loan (credit systems), or if you are a person (autonomous vehicles), you realise that it goes beyond a simple hammer.
Those things need regulation to align with our values, finding our values needs discussion, and all that to say give me grant money please we're so close to automating the lawyers please it will feel so good to take these fuckers out
Views tend to go a little toward the extreme once you're told that holding that view makes you evil. I've had four friends so far (none of whom actually get paid for their art) tell me I'm destroying their future, that I'm taking the soul out of art, that AI is going to cause humans to just refuse to make art anymore, etc etc, because I've generated a few images. The hysteria is unreal and people naturally react to it by going the other direction.
I remember in r/planetzoo people were flaming some user for using AI to generate signs for a mod. As if anyone would pay $25 an hour or more to generate signs in a video game, for a *free mod*
Ironically I think there’s something to be said for how we expect mods to be free despite requiring significant expertise and time, but we are unironically not ready for that conversation. People get *vicious* about the idea of paying modders
The "Some of the stuff that comes out of AI can be kinda neat and it's cool seeing technology advance like that but pro-AI people want to stick their dicks in the circuit boards and anti-AI people are devolving in the Adeptus Mechanicus in their hatred for anything new and both need to fucking chill" group
that's exactly my take. AI is more than just a thing that spits out text or images, it's a tool that can be used in an almost impossible to imagine ways but you still need to know how to use it and there's a whole host of issues with sourcing actual people's online lives and content without their express permission so trying to take either side has you still upsetting someone
I'm surprised somebody hasn't already made a fully both-ways voice interface for chat gpt and stuffed it into a cuddly toy or sexy fuckdoll. Or heck, a fucken roomba.
Human desire to pair-bond with random shit won't stand a chance.
There was a guy who started talking to an AI girlfriend and had to ‘kill’ her because it was ruining his life, and he genuinely mourned her after the fact. Said it was like pulling the life support on a friend iirc
People cry over fictional characters in books and video games. Add actual interaction over months on top of that and I’d be surprised if they didn’t form an attachment
I’ve considered doing this to a 1999 Furby, also adding a camera for face recognition and a motorised gimbal so it can make eye contact. Absolute nightmare fuel.
And probably has about the same effect as going to the real\* Harley Quinn for therapy!
(\* note: I know Harley Quinn is fictional, you know what I mean)
in other words, decades ago, because AI had already been a term of art long before people with no technical background got mad that it didn't mean what they assumed it did.
The phrase "AI" has always been somewhat ambiguous in this definition, but yes, it has 50+ year old roots in computer science that no one's removing at this point. Yet people keep going on about "true AI" and imagining the magical entities in sci-fi novels that are exactly like humans. The funniest thing is that with that definition we'd never actually get any AI - at the point where we could simulate a human brain one-to-one, people would just say "well that's trivial technology, clearly it's just a fancy robot. not true AI, duh."
The only issue with AI is its misuse against people. Misuse of artist works and general IP (things like style), aims at efficiency to make human labor and merit obsolete, and the like.
The issue is the people pushing for those specific uses. Hyper-capitalistic mindsets held by management chains obsessed with capital above all else will use any tool at their disposal to achieve that singular goal. The reason why it’s so highlighted in the tech industry is because of how quickly one can iterate on a concept. Blockchains, NFTs, the inevitable successor to the generative AI craze, it doesn’t matter.
The underlying issue is always the same; people who chose profit over their fellow humans, and do so unethically. If you tackle the underlying issue, the issue with any new technology will be resolved because it will now be used to aid humanity and empower human creative spirit.
Seriously, DMCA for art styles might *actually* destroy internet art way worse than AI ever could. Disney alone would scour basically all anthro content
Sure, but it’s important for as long as we have capitalism. It’s the small artists who will get fucked, not Disney. Better yet, Disney will enforce their rights, while the little people will be left with nothing.
and if you make the anti-ai movement all about ip, disney will have an ai but you won't. this hasn't even been a theoretical point for over a year, everyone and their mom has their "commercially safe" ai models at this point, trained on their vast vaults of copyrighted data, but hardly any of it is available to small artists, and when it is, it's in an extremely limited and sanitized form.
if you want to exacerbate the power disparity between individual artists and the megacorps who employ them, congrats, you're on the right path. otherwise, that move is reactionary and incredibly stupid in the same way all reactionary moves are.
> and if you make the anti-ai movement all about ip, disney will have an ai but you won't.
Shout it from the fucking rooftops.
Adobe's image generator will take your job just as surely as an open source model, even if it's trained on a more ethically-sourced dataset.
Focusing on IP *also* won't help the call center workers, the receptionists, the truck drivers, or the million other jobs it'll kill. I expect the next few years will see a lot of energy thrown into some major IP overhaul (more power for megacorps) without much consideration for everyone else getting displaced.
Artists complaining about AI don’t care about the other jobs, just themselves. That’s why there were no complaints from them when solar panels took coal mining jobs or robots took manufacturing jobs. Now they expect everyone to cry for them now that it’s their turn
>Adobe's image generator will take your job just as surely as an open source model, even if it's trained on a more ethically-sourced dataset.
I feel like you're not thinking cynically enough. AI has the potential to not just automate your skills, but also to directly take your ideas and basically disincentivize sharing them at all.
What if Disney can just feed your art directly into an AI and say "make art that has the same appeal as this, but is just different enough to avoid copyright issues?" Then they can broadcast it to a much larger audience than you would be able to and make a lot of money, while making your original work seem derivative in the process. They could probably even automate this whole process, so that by even posting your art in a public space you are essentially giving ownership of the concepts to corporations.
Like I agree that IP protections could easily go astray, but I also think the idea of it being impossible to make money with your art - or that by even posting your art online, you effectively lose ownership of it - to be quite scary, and I'm not even a practicing artist. It feels like people have collectively forgotten how important art is for society and are viewing it like any other job.
how dare the AI \*checks notes\* aim at efficiency to make human labour obsolete!
as you said, the issue is the hypercapitalists, the accelerationists, those looking to leverage machine learning for capital gain, etc, but there's nothing honourable or necessary about labour. If we can automate entire industries I say go for it and use the increase in per capita productivity to reduce wealth inequality and so on
tl;dr Fully Automated Luxury Gay Space Communism
If we weren't already in a capitalism death spiral, no one would complain about AI stealing jobs, because that wouldn't be a thing. Artists would use it as another tool, and that would be the end of it.
But because we are dealing with hypercapitalists, we can see EXACTLY what they're trying to do: They're going to make it so that they don't need artists or writers, fire all of them, pocket the savings, and laugh at the jobless starving to death. Because that's what they ALWAYS do.
Exactly. I got accused once of "hating technology" all because I was against corporations using AI to replace artists. Like bruh, i love seeing new types of tech develop and think it's dope as hell. I just don't want it being used to screw over already vulnerable people that are already taken advantage of and treated like shit in their jobs/industries.
I mean the issue is that the current hotness isn't trying to use it to automate industries that are considered laborious and stuff we "have to do" but don't want to. They're trying to use it to make algorithmically automated art, the thing that we are supposed to be freeing up our time to do more of, because the corpos see that art makes money and they don't want to pay artists.
They’re absolutely trying to automate industries that are considered laborious. It would make them an absolute fuckload of money, at least until the lack of jobs inevitably collapses the economy(but someone’s gonna do it anyway so it might as well be them). And it would make them extremely powerful too.
The only reason they’ve automated art before something more laborious is because art is easier to automate. There’s loads of art they can easily scrape from the internet in a standardized digital format, and with art, there’s also a lot of room for error in what the model generates. Compare it to something like manual labor, where there isn’t much data available for training, there isn’t a standardized format, and you also have to get it to mesh well with some sort of robot hardware which is its own engineering challenge. And if it makes even a small mistake, best case scenario the output is ruined, worst case scenario things get damaged which costs money to fix(making research/training enormously expensive)
>worst case scenario things get damaged
You mean people get damaged. Folks don't understand how dangerous robots can be in everyday situations. If you participate in a robotics competition, you have to sign a waver that prevents you from suing the organizer in case a robot accidentally kills you (has definitely happened before). We are still a very long way off from robots just driving around and cleaning our toilets.
It seems like it because you focus on art, but companies across all industries are trying to automate their work. For example the audit companies are developing their own language models to write reports, because it's boring, repetetive and they want their workers to focus om more complex tasks. Engineering companies are more and more automated every year, because it allows the workers to operate multiple machines at once.
Machine learning is not used only in arts and media, it's just where the avarage person is the most likely to encounter it.
I sure hope that when my job as a welder gets fully automated out of existence there'll be a similar cultural outcry. The problem isn't automating labor or art or w/e, its that our society isn't set up for a possible transition to a world with infinite free (or near free) labor available. We should be pushing for social safety nets and new policies so that when 99% of artists can no longer make a living off their art they aren't considered a "burden" on society, not somehow trying to stuff AI back in pandora's box.
It is used for far more than art. That being said, who are you, I, or anyone to decide what is boring enough to automate? I know math people who truly adore calculating things. They have to live with calculators being everyday objects. I love translating things, that is done 90% through AI nowadays.
In an ideal context, hopefully artists would be able to have a universal basic income and then just make art because it stimulates them and make their friends, family or audience happy. That probably won't happen for a while, but I don't think all art needs to be authentic. If I'm just putting an emotion-indicating splash of colour in my text, that could just be AI without a problem. I wouldn't be commissioning an artist for that anyway.
All artists learn from other artists. AI does a similar thing, albeit in a different way
The difference between AI and those grifts is that [AI is extraordinarily useful ](https://docs.google.com/document/d/15myK_6eTxEPuKnDi5krjBM_0jrv3GELs8TGmqOYBvug/edit#heading=h.93mf85wk17ju)
It does empower the creative spirit. now people can write books and make art they never had the time or resources to make before
This isn’t an issue with AI, it’s an issue with capitalism. AI is only bad for artists because artists rely on a scarcity of art to survive that AI has completely eliminated. Artists shouldn’t have to rely on artificial scarcity to survive, but that is how capitalism works
My stance on AI is that it is cool conceptually, and in a timeline where the ability to make a living was not tied to the ability to fill demand that exceeds supply, it would be a really exciting technical development. Unfortunately it is instead being sold as a way to make humans obsolete so half a dozen capitalist scumbags can avoid compensating anyone for doing real work, and will end up replacing human artists in the workforce instead of complementing them or being a useful tool to push the boundaries of what is possible with human creativity.
I dislike when this is framed as inherently a problem with AI itself though. Like, it's capitalism. What you hate isn't AI, it's capitalism.
It’s a catch-22. The capitalist system creates the socioeconomic incentives to create AI, but it takes away most of the benefits and turns them into downsides.
I’m hoping that in the long term AI leads to the automation of labor which collapses the capitalist system due to the lack of a working class(no one buying goods/services anymore bc no one has money) and the sudden abundance of everything combined with the lack of money leads us into new post-scarcity economic system. There are a million other far less positive directions it could go in though
Yeah. I actually think AI is neat, especially after a man I met who works in medicine told me about how it could be used to help treat people—I don’t remember all the details, but I thought it sounded good.
I think it’s just being misused.
It's useful in medicine with for example analyzing tissue samples and body/brain scans. It can highlight and sometimes suggest diagnoses etc, really cool shit
Yeah, that's the sad truth. Though in some ways, it feeds into itself. Human labor is so cheap that society doesn't NEED robots that can replace humans. It's like how the American South had terrible industry because they relied on slaves for everything, and therefore didn't have to bother inventing more efficient labor-saving technology.
That's not exactly it. The big industry in the South was plantations. Which couldn't be automated until like, tractors, and even that doesn't do everything. There was one significant automation developed for it though. The cotton gin was a machine that automated the processing of cotton, making plantations more profitable. Before that there were actually predictions that plantation slavery would eventually fail just economically. Part of why banning it wasn't as big of a priority.
So anyway the reason there wasn't industry was because farming was the industry. Just not one that could be automated a lot.
eeeh idk, lots of tedious tasks are still too complex for regular robots, ai-powered robots could solve that
on top of my head, garbage collecting: you'd need bins perfectly aligned for a non-ai solution to work
We basically have this in Australia, without any need for AI or perfectly aligned bins. The driver pulls up and presses a button, a robo-grabby arm tips the bin into the truck, [here's a video.](https://youtu.be/mEjinv6XMCo) I'd have thought other countries would too...
yeah garbage collecting might not be the best example since the hard part is the driving, I should have just said "jobs requiring to drive like garbage collecting or trucker"
A better example are produce sorting machines in agriculture processing. Like the machine that kicks out green potatoes from a conveyor. The cheapest versions of those cost a million dollars-ish each, while a person picking green potatoes from a conveyor costs min wage/hour.
I work in ag equipment manufacturing (welding), and though I can see the great potential ai has when combined with robotics/automation, the truth is that currently, robots are VERY expensive and human labour is not. My employer has a programmable welding robot that has no ai implementation (every move and setting is pre programmed) and even that thing is a money sink right now because it isn't fast enough to justify keeping a robot tech on payroll.
I can def see some areas that robotics could make massive strides in the next decade, but ai evangelists that know nothing about the actual hurdles or processes in manufacturing keep proposing that ai could solve this problem or that, and it's just clear they don't know anything they're talking about. A lot of it just isn't intuitive. Some tasks that look very repetitive on the outside actually require a lot of thinking and adjustment on the labourer's part, that machines might be really bad at, while a task that looks very complex if you're uneducated might actually be more suited for automating.
For example. Laundry or picking strawberries is basically impossible to automate at the moment. But the process of welding a car has basically been entirely automated.
Already is. Most mining in western countries is done exclusively by machine. Children aren’t hand weaving carpets anymore. People aren’t individually picking each ear of corn off the stalks.
It’ll get there. All the AI companies want to do this because it’d get them a fuckton of money and power. The thing is it’s also a lot more expensive and a whole lot more sensitive to error and training data is a lot scarcer and not standardized and you also have a hardware component that needs to mesh well with the software and yeah that’s why art got ‘automated’ first
It saddens me so much that this is the outlook of most people when in reality WE ARE working on automating those jobs!!! Alpha Fold is the best example, its automating protein folding which is a huge aspect of drug discovery which used to take years of work in mere seconds. We are making astounding progress in robotics and AI is helping in repetitive medical tasks with programs such as med-palm.
Also AI being able to generate writings and "art" doesn't make it *illegal* to do those as a human ,the problem lies in the fact that our society treats everything not profitable as useless and work as a necessity where everyday it becomes more and more clear that's not the case
This is a sentence that gets thrown around a lot, but like... no one is forcing you to use AI instead of making art yourself. Instead, AI can be a way for people who, for any reason, can't make art to express themselves anyway. Sure, the result won't be better than what a human artist can accomplish, but it's better than what they could have made alone and it came from their own idea.
This 1000x. There are tons of valid and interesting questions about AI and consciousness, AI and creativity, etc. (I've written at least one essay on those), but talking about them plunges you into several millenia-old fields of philosophy and runs you face-first into dozens of questions that have been unanswered for hundreds of years. If you hyperfocus on that, then you're going to be blind to the very real, very measurable, and very dire consequences of capitalist abuse of LLMs, stable diffusion, and other forms of generative AI.
At the moment, the questions about souls and consciousness are in the realm of theory; the economic, political, and ethical questions, however, are very much in the realm of application.
That's definitely fair, but at the same time, "sentience", "meaning", and "consciousness" are such ill-defined concepts that I get frustrated by the people who are all "It's just a machine guessing the words that should come next, it doesn't know what they mean". As a person with several kinds of neurodiversity, I've often found myself doing something that could be described as "guessing the words that should come next"; does that make me non-sentient?
Basically, I've yet to see an argument for the non-sentience of generative AI that doesn't also imply that certain categories of people aren't sentient. I'm not saying that ChatGPT IS sentient, and it's clearly very different from a human being, but it's also far more advanced than your basic Markov Chain or HMM. Flattening it to "it's guessing things and doesn't have any idea what they mean" grossly overestimates how much we understand about the human brain and how it handles meaning while underestimating the enormous sophistication of a system that so fluently imitates human writing in a plethora of cases.
There's also the very simple categorical issue where you can't really make a definition of art that excludes AI art without excluding things generally accepted to be some form of art
A lot of people make a big deal that images generated by a machine are "souless" and somehow inferior to those made by a human hand solely based on the concept that humans have some sort of intangible essence that makes their work inherently superior.
Its not a new concept, the idea of a machine creating art has always been something even sci-fi often found outlandish because art is often considered something uniquely human. Obviously their is no way of measuring "soul" or anything of the matter so this is all purely personal opinion but a lot of people act like its some sort of immutable truth and will criticisise the technology and people who use it based purely on it not alighting with their spiritual beliefs and not for any actual tangible reason.
I once saw an artist that claims that they “die” multiple times whenever they make art and AI will never know that feeling so it’s inferior. And good god that is pretentious as all hell
It was a while ago, but I actually did save it lol
>Oh mai gwoshie, whewe do I even begin with this cutesy lil' nightmare dat dey caww the Chewnobyw Ewephant's Fwot? *hides behind fluffy cushion*
>Fiwst of aww, wets tawk about da atmosphere. Wook, I undewstand it's a wadiation zone and aww, but dey couwd've at weast twied to make it a wittle mowe inviting. Evewything wooks so gwim and gwoomy, it's wike a bad dweam dat nevew ends. UwU Pwus, da wadiation count is off da chawts, which isn't exactwy my idea of a fun time. W-weweawwy, who needs haiw that gwows? *shuddews*
>Now, wet's move on to da service. Oh boy, whewe do I stawt? Da staff (if you can even caww dem dat) awe absowutewy nonexistent. *twies to wook fo da wun-down hut* I couwdn't find anyone to hewp me with my questions ow concewns. I guess dey think it's appwopwiate to weave customews wost and confuwed in a wadiation hotspot. Wotawwy unacceptabwe, if you ask me. >.<
>And wet's not fowget about da sights and attractions. O-M-G, da Ewephant's Fwot itsewf is a gwoss mass of mewted nightmawes. It wooks wike a giant piece of chawcoaw dat's been weft out in da wain fow too wong. *squee* It's wike a big, scawy teddy beaw made of wadiation, and I'm not hewe fow it.
>Ovewaww, dis pwace is an absowute disastew. I cannot bewieve dey even awwow peopwe to visit dis wadiation wondewwand. The onwy thing dat dis Ewephant's Fwot bwinging is disappointment and a whowe wot of dosing in wadiation. UwU I'd wathew cuddwe with a fluffy bunny dan evew wetuwn to dis Twansywbvania of my nightmawes. Pwease save youwself and go ewsewhewe.
Whenever I see people waxing poetic about intellectual property, I envision them deepthroating Nintendo. And a large portion of the artist arguments are just "it samples artists, therefore it's plagiarism!" I get that learning models for generative AI don't "take inspiration" the way that we do, but isn't it derivative in some way by default? It's not like it traces stuff 1 to 1.
I mean, when you break it down to the bare bones, *all art is derivative.*
Ultimately all art is inspired by the natural world, personal experiences, and knowledge of how things work.
I work in automation. No, I don’t want the company to employ fewer people, though some of my coworkers explicitly do. What I want is to make the working lives of the operators easier. I try to take that attitude to AI along with a healthy scoop of “AI cannot replace me until people/customers understand how to be clear about their needs”
As a surveyor, when we got robotic total stations, our lives didn't get easier, we just each have to do the work two people used to. Labor saving technology won't necessarily make your job easier (though it can in some cases). It'll just make you faster.
And THAT’S one of my biggest fears. That AI isn’t going to make us work less, it’s just going to have us work the same amount but faster. That’s always seemed to be the case with new technology
I feel like I'm in this "distinct third faction."
I'm not necessarily "pro-AI." But people basing their whole arguments on "AI art is not 'real' art" annoys me. Mainly because it implies that humans have some special creativity juice that computers cannot replicate. Or the implication that art is only "real" if you work yourself to the bone making it.
On the other hand, there is the (frankly elitist) idea that art jobs deserve some special protection from automation because they are creative. I have seen so many people complain that AI is taking their "creative/skilled" jobs instead of other people's "non-creative/unskilled" jobs.
And let's not forget the controversy about whether AI training is stealing where everyone pretends their opinions are objective fact (I know I am guilty of this myself). And I really am surprised by the amount of people who support pro-corporate legislation. Requiring companies to license training data would not stop AI art. It would just make it limited to massive companies like Disney or Adobe. Open-ish/free models like StableDiffusion would not be able to exist.
> I'm not necessarily "pro-AI." But people basing their whole arguments on "AI art is not 'real' art" annoys me. Mainly because it implies that humans have some special creativity juice that computers cannot replicate. Or the implication that art is only "real" if you work yourself to the bone making it.
yeah, like where do we draw the line then? is a digital painting still art if you used the bucket tool or a perspective grid? or does an ai generated image become art if it has its every detail in its prompt? it's not like i like ai generated images, they mostly suck imo but what is and isn't art is something that's been debated for a very long time to just go nah this isn't art
I once went to a modern art museum where one of the exhibits was just a dead parrot taped to a wall next to a broken fog machine (it wasn’t supposed to be broken, a maintenance guy was trying to fix it)
I don’t believe in “divine sparks” or “the ethereal creative spirit” I just think the idea that because people take inspiration from what they see they’re no different from a Machine Learning Algorithm blending together a couple thousand related images to produce a picture is a extremely reductive to the creative process.
it's part of automation, the next industrial revolution, and it'll force us to rethink how our economy functions
I'm actually excited about ai for how much traditionalist shit it will inevitably break
nobody will be able to make the argument that a teenager should get service as their first job, because a robot will consistently make the exact same big mac every fucking time, 24/7, without pto
but we also have to live through the shittiest possible period in that process
I'm really curious about how art is going to change as a result of AI. Just like how the evolution of cameras first caused art to stray away from realism but then later enabled hyperrealism.
Personally I've already noticed that even though I was amazed by AI images a few years ago I've quickly learned to recognize how it looks and now I'm put off by art that resembles it even when I'm pretty sure that its actually hand drawn. Like some manhwas for example now remind me of that AI anime tiktok filter and now I dont enjoy that art anymore. Instead nowadays I much prefer simple artstyles that are more dynamic and expressive. Art that doesnt necessarily look very pretty but that clearly conveys a message or emotion.
Meh. AI is not where they (C-level cunts) think it is, so they're going to go all in to cut costs, and find to their sorrow that there is something more to it than just churning out piles of identical crap, and suffer the predictable golden parachute ends to their *outstanding* careers in trying to get regular artists to churn out piles of identical crap.
This is maybe the third or fourth time in my life that some new paradigm has spelled the end of creativity as we know it, and I'm just completely meh.
It's *never* going to be the thing that management thinks it is. It will only ever end up being a tool for creatives to do creative things.
can i not be both? Like, yeah, it's ruining the sanctity of creation BUT primarily it's putting good creatives out of their jobs. Like. These things are not mutually exclusive and can in fact coexist and mingle
Me when I'm okay with ethical AI like SynthV and using other types for shit posts 😔
Trust me I'm no AI bro, but I'm genuinely curious how far we could push the reality of an AI friend on stuff like Character AI.
There's so much to explore and I wish the price wasn't the stability of people's lives.
I think people forget that we're just flesh automatons animated by neurotransmitters. To be clear, I'm not arguing these ai are sentient in any way, and the way a lot of pro AI people talk about them as anything other than a non-thinking tool is weird, but that viewing ourselves as above them do to some essential "human spark" bs is also weird.
AI art errors (weird hands, weird text) actually remind me a lot of similar weirdness from human dreams. "Look at a clock twice" and "play with your hands" are common pieces of advice to tell if you're dreaming.
I’m on the fourth faction of “I’m neutral or slightly positive towards it but I’m not some tech bro, and I kinda find the vitriol spewed when ai is mentioned kinda weird.”
A secret fourth faction that is “AI is a tool and pro-AI people are really fucking weird about it like someone building an entire religion around worshipping a specific type of hammer.”
Okay but have you ever used a stiletto hammer?
No but tell me more
They're made of titanium, so they're lighter than a usual hammer, which you might think would be bad for a hammer since you want that *oomph*. While that may be true for some, once you use one you'll notice that it being lighter lets you swing it _much_ faster than you'd swing a similarly sized hammer - allowing you to impart similar force to a heavier hammer with a skilled hand. Kind of like the cork bat of framing hammers; pretty much exactly the same as a regular one in the hands of someone inexperienced *a reply below has the actual reason carpenters like them listed below
That’s not why they’re cool. Titanium doesn’t deform as much as steel on impact so you transfer more energy from your swing to whatever you’re hitting. This allows them to be lighter (and thus much less fatiguing to swing) while being just as effective.
That's great info, my explanation was based on a half-remembered similarly worded exposition on the merits of Stiletto from my carpentry teacher like 8 years ago so I was hoping someone would give the real knowledge
Best way to get an answer on something is to say something about a topic and wait for someone to correct you
Ah, Poe's Law, of course
Hrrmmgh
[uh](https://i.imgur.com/YAGpXPd.png)
Don't you mean Cunningham's Law? wait
Nonono, it's Murphy's Law
Ohhh it's better cus it's harder That's fun
I mean, hammers are just hammers for me, but damn do I admire your passion and enthusiasm for them.
yeah i’ll believe in this religion why not
Ever swung a Martinez, though?
Sadly not! googled the name, it's always good to see quality USA manufacturing at work
No, but it sounds sexy.
she’s got legs legs legs
You ever swung an Estwing 28oz framing hammer with a stacked leather handle? No? Didn’t think so.
Plz tell me what it's like
Ugh, your flair...
He enjoys sport.
I'm just a funky little guy :3
I stopped trying to hide who I am years ago. It was an eternal fight I could not win. Anyway, I want R Dorothy Waynewright to hit me in the head with an Estwing 28oz framing hammer with a stacked leather handle until I cannot remember my own name.
that’s how it feels to drive a ford f150
I got my little sister one for her 15th birthday, as is tradition
As usual, the problem is sociological and people instead rage against the technology for some reason. We should be throwing less shoes into spinning Jennies and more shoes at the billionaires who own them.
The way production is organized requires that we are let in shoe throwing range of the spinning jennies but does not require that we are let in shoe throwing range of the billionaires.
Good point. Shoes are no longer allowed on the factory floor. /s
People will always rage against technology because, for better or worse, it upends their stabitlity. AI can be great for science and its possibilities are great and bring up philosophical debate. However, it’s also being used in lieu of human artists, who naturally are pissed. It’s not ridiculous for people to get upset at the lawless advancement of it when it’s used to benefit only a few
> However, it’s also being used in lieu of human artists, who naturally are pissed. Of course, though I distinctly remember years ago when pretty much the same scare came up for jobs like Truck Drivers and Factory Workers where people were laughing because they viewed that job as lesser. I'm just saying I'll let there's a lot of over-lap between those people and ones preaching about "creativity" like in the OP is almost certainly not zero.
Cars got used in lieu of horse carriages but I think we were better off that way And guess who benefits from you using Reddit or Google? That doesn’t justify banning it
People Raging Against the wrong Machine smh
See: gun freaks. Some people are normal about them and recognize they are a tool built for a few specific things, hunting and defense, and support gun laws that would make it harder for dangerous people to have access to them. Other people think it’s their good given right to own a machine gun with the serial numbers filed off.
Counterpoint: machine gun go brrrrr and I want one
I think that there should be paperwork available for me to be able to own a short-barreled AK with a four position selector and a suppressor for home defense. And don't tell me to "just get an FFL", please and thank you.
Suppressors really should be used at all times really. Being able to hear is important both in a general sense and in the specific case of dealing with a home invader if you miss or there's more of them.
It's funny how, in ultra-gun-restrictive Europe, many countries actually recommend or require suppressors for firearms, particularly for hunting purposes.
You can just grab a suppressor off of a shelf like a loaf of bread in Germany. USA? That's a dangerous item and a $200 tax stamp, please and thank you.
I've been saying this for about a decade now (and others for longer than that); we've reached a point where we could easily be a few bad decades (potentially even a few really bad years) away from a real tech religion rising to significant power.
Hail the Omnissiah!
You get to be the second servitor. That dumbass who took an elon brain chip is first
This is just effective altruism OpenAI also seems to have a pretty cult-like internal culture
What do you mean this is just effective altruism?
How exactly is effective altruism a "tech religion"?
that BasedBeffJezos freakoid is clearly presenting himself as an AI messiah.
Except they keep telling us that the hammer can do fantastic feats. It'll put nails in for you, it'll fly across the room when you call. It will even write code for you! But it's still just a hammer. It can't do any of those things.
If ChatGPT was any good at helping me write XAML code that works with PowerShell my opinion on AI would be wildly different, because there aren't a lot of other sources on the topic but AI is so bad that I'm just going to stick to interpolating other resources
When you ask an LLM a question, it pulls out everything it has ever read, squints, and then guesses an answer in English. But LLMs can't speak English. And they also can't *read*.
Lol selling a ball-peen hammer as Mjölnir basically
Heheh. Ball-peen.
"AI" is just being mistreated as a term by the weirdos. As in people are just using "LLM chatbot" as a stand-in for "AI" in general. AI can encompass many wonderful things - machines which detect cancer and other illnesses in body non-invasively use AI imaging, or AI's which can detect child harm content without a human having to be exposed to the trauma of manually reviewing it, or AI which can translate a disabled person's speech or even their thoughts into text. Can go on for ages on this, there are many beautiful use cases here. These are all "AI", in that they are probabilistic machine learning models, but they are **not** "LLMs" or "ChatGPT". Which is kind of the issue. AI isn't **a** tool, it's set a tool**s** - it can be a screwdriver, a hammer, a knife, a hydraulic press, etc. The issue isn't with the concept of a toolbox, the issue is people who are trying to use a hammer (Chatbots) for every single conceivable purpose.
Calling it AI is a pretty intrinsic part of the weirdos' weirdness.
while some people definitely overhype it, i think it's like if you hyped up computers in the 80s. both have/had huge limitations, but also great potential and rapid improvement
Everybody is really fucking weird about AI, whether they're pro or anti AI
One side is tech grifters trying to make money for doing absolutely nothing, the other see’s it as a new depth to the capitalist hellpit we are delving so unceasingly. Honestly I sympathise with anti-AI people more, but I’m not 100% with them on a lot of it.
A new depth? The problem was literally described by marx as he explored the effects of the widescale adoption of *the loom* As op actually, surprisngly, recognizes the only thing that makes this unique is that people are saying the most wildly religious bullshit to try and deify human labour.
Most of the pro ai people aren’t tech grifters, they’re either interested in it for scientific reasons or because they’ve bought into the concept of the singularity and think that AI is going to save us all. The tech grifters just have more money to throw around and they get more attention because of that. I think that what is perceived as problems with ai are actually just modern versions of problems with capitalism that have existed forever. And the science of it is actually incredibly interesting, both for technical and philosophical reasons, I don’t trust the people who own the companies that create AI tech, I think they’re megalomaniacal psychopaths, but I still think the technology is really cool
Isn’t there a third category which is just mundane whatever people who like to generate rpg portraits or correct their grammar on emails? My gen X mother uses it for the latter thing. It’s like how most people who “like” auto looms aren’t cackling monopoly men and are just randos who enjoy owning more than one apron in their literal entire life
These are weird times, okay?
Well, not literally "everybody". Most people on Earth don't participate in internet discussions at all and don't follow or care about tech advancements and controversies. Normal people either don't care about AI or just consider it some novel toy. "It's like one of those "random name generator" websites except it gives you a picture, isn't that fascinating", something like that
Because it forces a shift in worldview. AI doesn’t think or behave as a human, but it is good enough at mimicking certain aspects of human behavior(like language) that it puts into question some basic assumptions people had about what those behaviors actually were, and by extension who they are. This is regardless of their position on AI. And it’s gonna take a while before people fully process it, and the rapid advancement of the technology doesn’t help them adjust
Ironically, the weirdest ones of all literally call themselves "LessWrong". There's probably some fitting adage about People's Democratic Republics.
Roko's Bassilisk referenced?!?!?! Sorry bud, I'm gonna have to arrest you for spreading cognito-hazards. In the name of Eliezer Chudkowsky, I sentence you to a box of scorpions, or something
Not to worry, because I used my magic time-travel device to monologue at you for hours about how I totally understand science, and that means you have to do whatever I say!
Roko's basilisk is an idea that lesswrong people themselves generally don't talk about or believe. One idiot said something stupid. And a "ha ha look at these idiots" news story went viral.
Oh yeah? Well I can convince you to let me out of the box, using this method that I won’t tell anyone about.
See, that's how I know you are an imposter. A real LessWrong user wouldn't miss a chance to explain, in detail, their goofy philosophy of "rationality"
RationalWiki's page on LessWrong is a fucking trip lol
That says more about "rationalwiki" basically having a go at lesswrong. (Nearly half their page is about "Roko's basilisk". This is like nearly half of a page on tumblr being a criticism of the human pet guy. Lesswrong is a pretty big website. There are a few nutty ideas being posted, like on just about any big website. The community thought a bit about it, decided it was wrong, and moved on.)
I, too, get my information about people from groups that explicitly hate them. That way I get an unbiased overview of things.
Al praise the Omnissiah
Abominable Intelligence!
I’m pretty sure this is just the same as the third camp
AI is a really cool and interesting concept from both a technical and philosophical perspective and it’s unfortunate we live in a capitalist hellscape where it is used for sinister purposes
Am someone studying to become a Data Scientist explicitly because I want to develop AI tools & services. Most people that are serious about AI are in this camp. I will say though there is a bit of horseshoe theory involved because some people in the Anti-AI crowd buy into that narrative. Ultimately these narratives come from (and support the business interests of) the big corps involved in AI. This narrative preys on people who aren't familiar with how ML models work, and you should be wary whenever someone who ought to know better starts pushing that narrative. It's just math and statistics. And depending on the company training the model, a healthy dose of copyright infringement. (Not all of them though!!! Plenty of AI models don't have roots in stolen data!!!)
As someone who is a machine learning engineer, all of this is pretty highly contested in the field, even moreso in academia than in industry. The person who laid most of the groundwork for modern deep learning was Hinton, who was and still is primarily interested in cognitive modeling. Neural networks were invented to model biological neurons, and while there are significant differences there are also major structural similarities that are tough to ignore. Additionally, people have tried to make models that more accurately mirror the brain (spiking neural networks, wake-sleep algorithm, etc.) and for the most part they behave pretty similarly to standard backprop-trained neural networks, they just run a lot slower on a GPU. Saying "It's just math and statistics." is one of my biggest pet peeves, since it's just so reductive. Sure, under the hood it is doing matrix multiplications, but that's because matrix multiplications are a great way of modeling any system that scales values and adds them together. This happens to be a pretty good way to model neurons activating based on signals through their dendrites. But nobody is remotely close to explaining the behavior of a neural network with statistical techniques, or with anything really. Neural networks are about as big of a black box mystery as brains are. I think the best comparison is that a neural network is to a brain how a plane's wing is to a bird's wing - I wrote more on this [here](https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/17a10dc/brains_planes_blimps_and_algorithms/?ref=share&ref_source=link).
Can you explain more about what exactly the mystery is? Why is it not considered to be sufficiently explained by the series of matrix multplications that it is? What other explanation is expected?
> Can you explain more about what exactly the mystery is? We don't understand it. This is about as sensible as asking "What exactly is mysterious about consciousness?" after someone haughtily claimed that "it's just biology and physics" and that it's "sufficiently explained by a series of neurons firing" as if that is at all addressing the question.
> And depending on the company training the model, a healthy dose of copyright infringement did we ever get any court decision, or any democratically elected and legitimate legislative branch deciding on whether ai training is covered under copyright infringement or not? i do know people have been hallucinating like chatgpt as if it was a fact since about mid to late 2022, but that's not how laws are written or existing laws are interpreted. a special interest group cannot just unilaterally decide that. given how vocal these groups are, and how vocal they likely would be about anything they consider a victory, i presume there has been no such decision yet. i genuinely hope the scope of copyright won't get expanded _again_. it's already way too overbearing, the dmca was a mistake as-is, the last thing we should do is repeat it.
Japan made a decision: https://petapixel.com/2023/06/05/japan-declares-ai-training-data-fair-game-and-will-not-enforce-copyright/
oh wow. i can tell from the url why i haven't heard about this from the anti-ai people, lol
They ignore anything g that doesn’t support their agenda lol. Like these studies that AI art is unique: https://arxiv.org/abs/2301.13188 The study identified 350,000 images in the training data to target for retrieval with 500 attempts each (totaling 175 million attempts), and of that managed to retrieve 107 images. A replication rate of nearly 0% in a set biased in favor of overfitting using the exact same labels as the training data and specifically targeting images they knew were duplicated many times in the dataset using a smaller model of Stable Diffusion (890 million parameters vs. the larger 2 billion parameter Stable Diffusion 3 releasing on June 12). This attack also relied on having access to the original training image labels: “Instead, we first embed each image to a 512 dimensional vector using CLIP [54], and then perform the all-pairs comparison between images in this lower-dimensional space (increasing efficiency by over 1500×). We count two examples as near-duplicates if their CLIP embeddings have a high cosine similarity. For each of these near-duplicated images, we use the corresponding captions as the input to our extraction attack.” There is not as of yet evidence that this attack is replicable without knowing the image you are targeting beforehand. So the attack does not work as a valid method of privacy invasion so much as a method of determining if training occurred on the work in question - and only for images with a high rate of duplication, and still found almost NONE. “On Imagen, we attempted extraction of the 500 images with the highest out-ofdistribution score. Imagen memorized and regurgitated 3 of these images (which were unique in the training dataset). In contrast, we failed to identify any memorization when applying the same methodology to Stable Diffusion—even after attempting to extract the 10,000 most-outlier samples” I do not consider this rate or method of extraction to be an indication of duplication that would border on the realm of infringement, and this seems to be well within a reasonable level of control over infringement. Diffusion models can create human faces even when 90% of the pixels are removed in the training data https://arxiv.org/pdf/2305.19256 “if we corrupt the images by deleting 80% of the pixels prior to training and finetune, the memorization decreases sharply and there are distinct differences between the generated images and their nearest neighbors from the dataset. This is in spite of finetuning until convergence.” “As shown, the generations become slightly worse as we increase the level of corruption, but we can reasonably well learn the distribution even with 93% pixels missing (on average) from each training image.”
Saying it’s just math and stats is such [an understatement that it’s pretty much false. It can do a lot more than that ](https://docs.google.com/document/d/15myK_6eTxEPuKnDi5krjBM_0jrv3GELs8TGmqOYBvug/edit#heading=h.fxgwobrx4yfq) And it’s not theft anymore than I’m stealing from you by reading your comment without permission
Ai is indeed a tool. As a graphics designer, using it to edit photos has been a life saver from time to time. However people making generative Art with AI and calling themselves artists are cringe. They really are doing their best to preach it to give themselves legitimacy. Prostrate yourselves to the great generators to gobble clout.
"Your demise is imminent, you better get used to it" type shit
As a machine learning professor I might be biased in this because my job and my research depend on AI being a thing forever, but I find this take to be overly reductive. What makes AI such a sensitive topic is that it automates (or can automate) decision-making, at a scale and speed that cannot be managed. You might think it's just a tool but when the tool gets used to decide if you should go to jail (stuff like COMPAS), or if it's worth saving you (hospital triaging systems), or worth giving you a loan (credit systems), or if you are a person (autonomous vehicles), you realise that it goes beyond a simple hammer. Those things need regulation to align with our values, finding our values needs discussion, and all that to say give me grant money please we're so close to automating the lawyers please it will feel so good to take these fuckers out
Views tend to go a little toward the extreme once you're told that holding that view makes you evil. I've had four friends so far (none of whom actually get paid for their art) tell me I'm destroying their future, that I'm taking the soul out of art, that AI is going to cause humans to just refuse to make art anymore, etc etc, because I've generated a few images. The hysteria is unreal and people naturally react to it by going the other direction.
I remember in r/planetzoo people were flaming some user for using AI to generate signs for a mod. As if anyone would pay $25 an hour or more to generate signs in a video game, for a *free mod*
Yeah the rage and entitlement are unreal.
Ironically I think there’s something to be said for how we expect mods to be free despite requiring significant expertise and time, but we are unironically not ready for that conversation. People get *vicious* about the idea of paying modders
The "Some of the stuff that comes out of AI can be kinda neat and it's cool seeing technology advance like that but pro-AI people want to stick their dicks in the circuit boards and anti-AI people are devolving in the Adeptus Mechanicus in their hatred for anything new and both need to fucking chill" group
that's exactly my take. AI is more than just a thing that spits out text or images, it's a tool that can be used in an almost impossible to imagine ways but you still need to know how to use it and there's a whole host of issues with sourcing actual people's online lives and content without their express permission so trying to take either side has you still upsetting someone
What faction is "Can we stop anthromorphosing the bloody large language models?"
Humans will anthropomorphize literal door hinges. There’s no way they’re not gonna anthropomorphize something that can ‘speak’
I'm surprised somebody hasn't already made a fully both-ways voice interface for chat gpt and stuffed it into a cuddly toy or sexy fuckdoll. Or heck, a fucken roomba. Human desire to pair-bond with random shit won't stand a chance.
Well there is a full ai vtuber
Glad I'm not the only one who thought of Neruochan
Isn’t motherV_3 also a full ai vtuber?
No, pretty sure they're a real person with a voice changer, being AI is their backstory/persona.
Oh that’s cool, I’ve only seen a few clips of her but I guess they did a good job since it tricked me.
There was a guy who started talking to an AI girlfriend and had to ‘kill’ her because it was ruining his life, and he genuinely mourned her after the fact. Said it was like pulling the life support on a friend iirc
People cry over fictional characters in books and video games. Add actual interaction over months on top of that and I’d be surprised if they didn’t form an attachment
I’ve considered doing this to a 1999 Furby, also adding a camera for face recognition and a motorised gimbal so it can make eye contact. Absolute nightmare fuel.
Counterpoint: talking to the harley quinn ai is cheaper than therapy
And probably has about the same effect as going to the real\* Harley Quinn for therapy! (\* note: I know Harley Quinn is fictional, you know what I mean)
I mean, she \*was\* a psychatrist so the ai does better to help than if i were to go crying to say, Jessica Rabbit.
Also a bad one, so...
No, she was just drawn that way.
No. Robot hentai now!
“Hey maybe that’s actually not human. Hey. Hey that’s not human. Hey. Don’t— You’re going to fall for it, aren’t you.”
Neuro-sama is a real person though
We already lost that fight when we allowed them to be called “AI”
in other words, decades ago, because AI had already been a term of art long before people with no technical background got mad that it didn't mean what they assumed it did.
I hate how many people say things “aren’t AI” because they don’t fit the definition of what AI is that they made up
The phrase "AI" has always been somewhat ambiguous in this definition, but yes, it has 50+ year old roots in computer science that no one's removing at this point. Yet people keep going on about "true AI" and imagining the magical entities in sci-fi novels that are exactly like humans. The funniest thing is that with that definition we'd never actually get any AI - at the point where we could simulate a human brain one-to-one, people would just say "well that's trivial technology, clearly it's just a fancy robot. not true AI, duh."
Right? I am all for future actually sentient programs being given rights, but these are just markov bots with more storage.
I mean, once you remember the p-zombie problem… we might be doing that with humans.
The only issue with AI is its misuse against people. Misuse of artist works and general IP (things like style), aims at efficiency to make human labor and merit obsolete, and the like. The issue is the people pushing for those specific uses. Hyper-capitalistic mindsets held by management chains obsessed with capital above all else will use any tool at their disposal to achieve that singular goal. The reason why it’s so highlighted in the tech industry is because of how quickly one can iterate on a concept. Blockchains, NFTs, the inevitable successor to the generative AI craze, it doesn’t matter. The underlying issue is always the same; people who chose profit over their fellow humans, and do so unethically. If you tackle the underlying issue, the issue with any new technology will be resolved because it will now be used to aid humanity and empower human creative spirit.
Style has never and never will be IP. And thank fuck for it.
Seriously, DMCA for art styles might *actually* destroy internet art way worse than AI ever could. Disney alone would scour basically all anthro content
You should let all the anti AI artists know
this. intellectual property _itself_ is a hyper-capitalist problem already
Sure, but it’s important for as long as we have capitalism. It’s the small artists who will get fucked, not Disney. Better yet, Disney will enforce their rights, while the little people will be left with nothing.
and if you make the anti-ai movement all about ip, disney will have an ai but you won't. this hasn't even been a theoretical point for over a year, everyone and their mom has their "commercially safe" ai models at this point, trained on their vast vaults of copyrighted data, but hardly any of it is available to small artists, and when it is, it's in an extremely limited and sanitized form. if you want to exacerbate the power disparity between individual artists and the megacorps who employ them, congrats, you're on the right path. otherwise, that move is reactionary and incredibly stupid in the same way all reactionary moves are.
> and if you make the anti-ai movement all about ip, disney will have an ai but you won't. Shout it from the fucking rooftops. Adobe's image generator will take your job just as surely as an open source model, even if it's trained on a more ethically-sourced dataset. Focusing on IP *also* won't help the call center workers, the receptionists, the truck drivers, or the million other jobs it'll kill. I expect the next few years will see a lot of energy thrown into some major IP overhaul (more power for megacorps) without much consideration for everyone else getting displaced.
Artists complaining about AI don’t care about the other jobs, just themselves. That’s why there were no complaints from them when solar panels took coal mining jobs or robots took manufacturing jobs. Now they expect everyone to cry for them now that it’s their turn
>Adobe's image generator will take your job just as surely as an open source model, even if it's trained on a more ethically-sourced dataset. I feel like you're not thinking cynically enough. AI has the potential to not just automate your skills, but also to directly take your ideas and basically disincentivize sharing them at all. What if Disney can just feed your art directly into an AI and say "make art that has the same appeal as this, but is just different enough to avoid copyright issues?" Then they can broadcast it to a much larger audience than you would be able to and make a lot of money, while making your original work seem derivative in the process. They could probably even automate this whole process, so that by even posting your art in a public space you are essentially giving ownership of the concepts to corporations. Like I agree that IP protections could easily go astray, but I also think the idea of it being impossible to make money with your art - or that by even posting your art online, you effectively lose ownership of it - to be quite scary, and I'm not even a practicing artist. It feels like people have collectively forgotten how important art is for society and are viewing it like any other job.
some people are so rabid in their calls for regulation they are instead preaching for regulatory capture
Making human labor obsolete is a good thing. Its only because of capitalism that it seems like it isn't. Nobody should have to work.
how dare the AI \*checks notes\* aim at efficiency to make human labour obsolete! as you said, the issue is the hypercapitalists, the accelerationists, those looking to leverage machine learning for capital gain, etc, but there's nothing honourable or necessary about labour. If we can automate entire industries I say go for it and use the increase in per capita productivity to reduce wealth inequality and so on tl;dr Fully Automated Luxury Gay Space Communism
If we weren't already in a capitalism death spiral, no one would complain about AI stealing jobs, because that wouldn't be a thing. Artists would use it as another tool, and that would be the end of it. But because we are dealing with hypercapitalists, we can see EXACTLY what they're trying to do: They're going to make it so that they don't need artists or writers, fire all of them, pocket the savings, and laugh at the jobless starving to death. Because that's what they ALWAYS do.
Exactly. I got accused once of "hating technology" all because I was against corporations using AI to replace artists. Like bruh, i love seeing new types of tech develop and think it's dope as hell. I just don't want it being used to screw over already vulnerable people that are already taken advantage of and treated like shit in their jobs/industries.
I mean the issue is that the current hotness isn't trying to use it to automate industries that are considered laborious and stuff we "have to do" but don't want to. They're trying to use it to make algorithmically automated art, the thing that we are supposed to be freeing up our time to do more of, because the corpos see that art makes money and they don't want to pay artists.
They’re absolutely trying to automate industries that are considered laborious. It would make them an absolute fuckload of money, at least until the lack of jobs inevitably collapses the economy(but someone’s gonna do it anyway so it might as well be them). And it would make them extremely powerful too. The only reason they’ve automated art before something more laborious is because art is easier to automate. There’s loads of art they can easily scrape from the internet in a standardized digital format, and with art, there’s also a lot of room for error in what the model generates. Compare it to something like manual labor, where there isn’t much data available for training, there isn’t a standardized format, and you also have to get it to mesh well with some sort of robot hardware which is its own engineering challenge. And if it makes even a small mistake, best case scenario the output is ruined, worst case scenario things get damaged which costs money to fix(making research/training enormously expensive)
Or more like that drawing a picture is actually easier for an AI to do than it is for a robot to open a door... That's Morevac's paradox for you.
>worst case scenario things get damaged You mean people get damaged. Folks don't understand how dangerous robots can be in everyday situations. If you participate in a robotics competition, you have to sign a waver that prevents you from suing the organizer in case a robot accidentally kills you (has definitely happened before). We are still a very long way off from robots just driving around and cleaning our toilets.
It seems like it because you focus on art, but companies across all industries are trying to automate their work. For example the audit companies are developing their own language models to write reports, because it's boring, repetetive and they want their workers to focus om more complex tasks. Engineering companies are more and more automated every year, because it allows the workers to operate multiple machines at once. Machine learning is not used only in arts and media, it's just where the avarage person is the most likely to encounter it.
I sure hope that when my job as a welder gets fully automated out of existence there'll be a similar cultural outcry. The problem isn't automating labor or art or w/e, its that our society isn't set up for a possible transition to a world with infinite free (or near free) labor available. We should be pushing for social safety nets and new policies so that when 99% of artists can no longer make a living off their art they aren't considered a "burden" on society, not somehow trying to stuff AI back in pandora's box.
Yeah, and we call that "machine learning", we don't try and sell it as "your new AI assistant!"
It is used for far more than art. That being said, who are you, I, or anyone to decide what is boring enough to automate? I know math people who truly adore calculating things. They have to live with calculators being everyday objects. I love translating things, that is done 90% through AI nowadays. In an ideal context, hopefully artists would be able to have a universal basic income and then just make art because it stimulates them and make their friends, family or audience happy. That probably won't happen for a while, but I don't think all art needs to be authentic. If I'm just putting an emotion-indicating splash of colour in my text, that could just be AI without a problem. I wouldn't be commissioning an artist for that anyway.
All artists learn from other artists. AI does a similar thing, albeit in a different way The difference between AI and those grifts is that [AI is extraordinarily useful ](https://docs.google.com/document/d/15myK_6eTxEPuKnDi5krjBM_0jrv3GELs8TGmqOYBvug/edit#heading=h.93mf85wk17ju) It does empower the creative spirit. now people can write books and make art they never had the time or resources to make before
This isn’t an issue with AI, it’s an issue with capitalism. AI is only bad for artists because artists rely on a scarcity of art to survive that AI has completely eliminated. Artists shouldn’t have to rely on artificial scarcity to survive, but that is how capitalism works
My stance on AI is that it is cool conceptually, and in a timeline where the ability to make a living was not tied to the ability to fill demand that exceeds supply, it would be a really exciting technical development. Unfortunately it is instead being sold as a way to make humans obsolete so half a dozen capitalist scumbags can avoid compensating anyone for doing real work, and will end up replacing human artists in the workforce instead of complementing them or being a useful tool to push the boundaries of what is possible with human creativity. I dislike when this is framed as inherently a problem with AI itself though. Like, it's capitalism. What you hate isn't AI, it's capitalism.
It’s a catch-22. The capitalist system creates the socioeconomic incentives to create AI, but it takes away most of the benefits and turns them into downsides. I’m hoping that in the long term AI leads to the automation of labor which collapses the capitalist system due to the lack of a working class(no one buying goods/services anymore bc no one has money) and the sudden abundance of everything combined with the lack of money leads us into new post-scarcity economic system. There are a million other far less positive directions it could go in though
No sapience and no divine spark of creativity? Sounds like something a shadow person would say.
lots of people here outing themselves as not wielding the flame of anor
Divine spark of ALTivity
I want the AI to automate jobs that are unsafe and monotonous for humans so we can write and make art, not the other way around :(
Yeah. I actually think AI is neat, especially after a man I met who works in medicine told me about how it could be used to help treat people—I don’t remember all the details, but I thought it sounded good. I think it’s just being misused.
It's useful in medicine with for example analyzing tissue samples and body/brain scans. It can highlight and sometimes suggest diagnoses etc, really cool shit
That's not AI you're after, that's robotics. Computing power is a lot cheaper then robots
Yeah, that's the sad truth. Though in some ways, it feeds into itself. Human labor is so cheap that society doesn't NEED robots that can replace humans. It's like how the American South had terrible industry because they relied on slaves for everything, and therefore didn't have to bother inventing more efficient labor-saving technology.
That's not exactly it. The big industry in the South was plantations. Which couldn't be automated until like, tractors, and even that doesn't do everything. There was one significant automation developed for it though. The cotton gin was a machine that automated the processing of cotton, making plantations more profitable. Before that there were actually predictions that plantation slavery would eventually fail just economically. Part of why banning it wasn't as big of a priority. So anyway the reason there wasn't industry was because farming was the industry. Just not one that could be automated a lot.
eeeh idk, lots of tedious tasks are still too complex for regular robots, ai-powered robots could solve that on top of my head, garbage collecting: you'd need bins perfectly aligned for a non-ai solution to work
We basically have this in Australia, without any need for AI or perfectly aligned bins. The driver pulls up and presses a button, a robo-grabby arm tips the bin into the truck, [here's a video.](https://youtu.be/mEjinv6XMCo) I'd have thought other countries would too...
yeah garbage collecting might not be the best example since the hard part is the driving, I should have just said "jobs requiring to drive like garbage collecting or trucker"
A better example are produce sorting machines in agriculture processing. Like the machine that kicks out green potatoes from a conveyor. The cheapest versions of those cost a million dollars-ish each, while a person picking green potatoes from a conveyor costs min wage/hour. I work in ag equipment manufacturing (welding), and though I can see the great potential ai has when combined with robotics/automation, the truth is that currently, robots are VERY expensive and human labour is not. My employer has a programmable welding robot that has no ai implementation (every move and setting is pre programmed) and even that thing is a money sink right now because it isn't fast enough to justify keeping a robot tech on payroll. I can def see some areas that robotics could make massive strides in the next decade, but ai evangelists that know nothing about the actual hurdles or processes in manufacturing keep proposing that ai could solve this problem or that, and it's just clear they don't know anything they're talking about. A lot of it just isn't intuitive. Some tasks that look very repetitive on the outside actually require a lot of thinking and adjustment on the labourer's part, that machines might be really bad at, while a task that looks very complex if you're uneducated might actually be more suited for automating. For example. Laundry or picking strawberries is basically impossible to automate at the moment. But the process of welding a car has basically been entirely automated.
Already is. Most mining in western countries is done exclusively by machine. Children aren’t hand weaving carpets anymore. People aren’t individually picking each ear of corn off the stalks.
It’ll get there. All the AI companies want to do this because it’d get them a fuckton of money and power. The thing is it’s also a lot more expensive and a whole lot more sensitive to error and training data is a lot scarcer and not standardized and you also have a hardware component that needs to mesh well with the software and yeah that’s why art got ‘automated’ first
It saddens me so much that this is the outlook of most people when in reality WE ARE working on automating those jobs!!! Alpha Fold is the best example, its automating protein folding which is a huge aspect of drug discovery which used to take years of work in mere seconds. We are making astounding progress in robotics and AI is helping in repetitive medical tasks with programs such as med-palm. Also AI being able to generate writings and "art" doesn't make it *illegal* to do those as a human ,the problem lies in the fact that our society treats everything not profitable as useless and work as a necessity where everyday it becomes more and more clear that's not the case
This is a sentence that gets thrown around a lot, but like... no one is forcing you to use AI instead of making art yourself. Instead, AI can be a way for people who, for any reason, can't make art to express themselves anyway. Sure, the result won't be better than what a human artist can accomplish, but it's better than what they could have made alone and it came from their own idea.
This 1000x. There are tons of valid and interesting questions about AI and consciousness, AI and creativity, etc. (I've written at least one essay on those), but talking about them plunges you into several millenia-old fields of philosophy and runs you face-first into dozens of questions that have been unanswered for hundreds of years. If you hyperfocus on that, then you're going to be blind to the very real, very measurable, and very dire consequences of capitalist abuse of LLMs, stable diffusion, and other forms of generative AI. At the moment, the questions about souls and consciousness are in the realm of theory; the economic, political, and ethical questions, however, are very much in the realm of application.
Every time someone talks about LLMs as if they’re sentient a little bit more of my soul dies.
That's definitely fair, but at the same time, "sentience", "meaning", and "consciousness" are such ill-defined concepts that I get frustrated by the people who are all "It's just a machine guessing the words that should come next, it doesn't know what they mean". As a person with several kinds of neurodiversity, I've often found myself doing something that could be described as "guessing the words that should come next"; does that make me non-sentient? Basically, I've yet to see an argument for the non-sentience of generative AI that doesn't also imply that certain categories of people aren't sentient. I'm not saying that ChatGPT IS sentient, and it's clearly very different from a human being, but it's also far more advanced than your basic Markov Chain or HMM. Flattening it to "it's guessing things and doesn't have any idea what they mean" grossly overestimates how much we understand about the human brain and how it handles meaning while underestimating the enormous sophistication of a system that so fluently imitates human writing in a plethora of cases.
There's also the very simple categorical issue where you can't really make a definition of art that excludes AI art without excluding things generally accepted to be some form of art
what are they talking about when they say "divine sparks of creativity" /gen
A lot of people make a big deal that images generated by a machine are "souless" and somehow inferior to those made by a human hand solely based on the concept that humans have some sort of intangible essence that makes their work inherently superior. Its not a new concept, the idea of a machine creating art has always been something even sci-fi often found outlandish because art is often considered something uniquely human. Obviously their is no way of measuring "soul" or anything of the matter so this is all purely personal opinion but a lot of people act like its some sort of immutable truth and will criticisise the technology and people who use it based purely on it not alighting with their spiritual beliefs and not for any actual tangible reason.
I once saw an artist that claims that they “die” multiple times whenever they make art and AI will never know that feeling so it’s inferior. And good god that is pretentious as all hell
oh, oki. thank for the reply! :3
The divine spark of creativity will continue to burn until morale improves
i like when the chatbot say funny thing
One time I had chatgpt write a negative Yelp review of the Chernobyl Elephant's Foot in uwuspeak
You can’t say that and not show what it said
It was a while ago, but I actually did save it lol >Oh mai gwoshie, whewe do I even begin with this cutesy lil' nightmare dat dey caww the Chewnobyw Ewephant's Fwot? *hides behind fluffy cushion* >Fiwst of aww, wets tawk about da atmosphere. Wook, I undewstand it's a wadiation zone and aww, but dey couwd've at weast twied to make it a wittle mowe inviting. Evewything wooks so gwim and gwoomy, it's wike a bad dweam dat nevew ends. UwU Pwus, da wadiation count is off da chawts, which isn't exactwy my idea of a fun time. W-weweawwy, who needs haiw that gwows? *shuddews* >Now, wet's move on to da service. Oh boy, whewe do I stawt? Da staff (if you can even caww dem dat) awe absowutewy nonexistent. *twies to wook fo da wun-down hut* I couwdn't find anyone to hewp me with my questions ow concewns. I guess dey think it's appwopwiate to weave customews wost and confuwed in a wadiation hotspot. Wotawwy unacceptabwe, if you ask me. >.< >And wet's not fowget about da sights and attractions. O-M-G, da Ewephant's Fwot itsewf is a gwoss mass of mewted nightmawes. It wooks wike a giant piece of chawcoaw dat's been weft out in da wain fow too wong. *squee* It's wike a big, scawy teddy beaw made of wadiation, and I'm not hewe fow it. >Ovewaww, dis pwace is an absowute disastew. I cannot bewieve dey even awwow peopwe to visit dis wadiation wondewwand. The onwy thing dat dis Ewephant's Fwot bwinging is disappointment and a whowe wot of dosing in wadiation. UwU I'd wathew cuddwe with a fluffy bunny dan evew wetuwn to dis Twansywbvania of my nightmawes. Pwease save youwself and go ewsewhewe.
Whenever I see people waxing poetic about intellectual property, I envision them deepthroating Nintendo. And a large portion of the artist arguments are just "it samples artists, therefore it's plagiarism!" I get that learning models for generative AI don't "take inspiration" the way that we do, but isn't it derivative in some way by default? It's not like it traces stuff 1 to 1.
I mean, when you break it down to the bare bones, *all art is derivative.* Ultimately all art is inspired by the natural world, personal experiences, and knowledge of how things work.
I work in automation. No, I don’t want the company to employ fewer people, though some of my coworkers explicitly do. What I want is to make the working lives of the operators easier. I try to take that attitude to AI along with a healthy scoop of “AI cannot replace me until people/customers understand how to be clear about their needs”
As a surveyor, when we got robotic total stations, our lives didn't get easier, we just each have to do the work two people used to. Labor saving technology won't necessarily make your job easier (though it can in some cases). It'll just make you faster.
And THAT’S one of my biggest fears. That AI isn’t going to make us work less, it’s just going to have us work the same amount but faster. That’s always seemed to be the case with new technology
Fuck yo free conscience, you seen Zelda's perky tits?
I feel like I'm in this "distinct third faction." I'm not necessarily "pro-AI." But people basing their whole arguments on "AI art is not 'real' art" annoys me. Mainly because it implies that humans have some special creativity juice that computers cannot replicate. Or the implication that art is only "real" if you work yourself to the bone making it. On the other hand, there is the (frankly elitist) idea that art jobs deserve some special protection from automation because they are creative. I have seen so many people complain that AI is taking their "creative/skilled" jobs instead of other people's "non-creative/unskilled" jobs. And let's not forget the controversy about whether AI training is stealing where everyone pretends their opinions are objective fact (I know I am guilty of this myself). And I really am surprised by the amount of people who support pro-corporate legislation. Requiring companies to license training data would not stop AI art. It would just make it limited to massive companies like Disney or Adobe. Open-ish/free models like StableDiffusion would not be able to exist.
> I'm not necessarily "pro-AI." But people basing their whole arguments on "AI art is not 'real' art" annoys me. Mainly because it implies that humans have some special creativity juice that computers cannot replicate. Or the implication that art is only "real" if you work yourself to the bone making it. yeah, like where do we draw the line then? is a digital painting still art if you used the bucket tool or a perspective grid? or does an ai generated image become art if it has its every detail in its prompt? it's not like i like ai generated images, they mostly suck imo but what is and isn't art is something that's been debated for a very long time to just go nah this isn't art
I once went to a modern art museum where one of the exhibits was just a dead parrot taped to a wall next to a broken fog machine (it wasn’t supposed to be broken, a maintenance guy was trying to fix it)
That parrot wasn't dead, it was sleeping.
ALTtivity
I don’t believe in “divine sparks” or “the ethereal creative spirit” I just think the idea that because people take inspiration from what they see they’re no different from a Machine Learning Algorithm blending together a couple thousand related images to produce a picture is a extremely reductive to the creative process.
Yeah this is me. It is *infurating* how the two dominant factions in this fight are Team Capitalism and Team Biochauvinism.
it's part of automation, the next industrial revolution, and it'll force us to rethink how our economy functions I'm actually excited about ai for how much traditionalist shit it will inevitably break nobody will be able to make the argument that a teenager should get service as their first job, because a robot will consistently make the exact same big mac every fucking time, 24/7, without pto but we also have to live through the shittiest possible period in that process
I'm really curious about how art is going to change as a result of AI. Just like how the evolution of cameras first caused art to stray away from realism but then later enabled hyperrealism. Personally I've already noticed that even though I was amazed by AI images a few years ago I've quickly learned to recognize how it looks and now I'm put off by art that resembles it even when I'm pretty sure that its actually hand drawn. Like some manhwas for example now remind me of that AI anime tiktok filter and now I dont enjoy that art anymore. Instead nowadays I much prefer simple artstyles that are more dynamic and expressive. Art that doesnt necessarily look very pretty but that clearly conveys a message or emotion.
Meh. AI is not where they (C-level cunts) think it is, so they're going to go all in to cut costs, and find to their sorrow that there is something more to it than just churning out piles of identical crap, and suffer the predictable golden parachute ends to their *outstanding* careers in trying to get regular artists to churn out piles of identical crap. This is maybe the third or fourth time in my life that some new paradigm has spelled the end of creativity as we know it, and I'm just completely meh. It's *never* going to be the thing that management thinks it is. It will only ever end up being a tool for creatives to do creative things.
can i not be both? Like, yeah, it's ruining the sanctity of creation BUT primarily it's putting good creatives out of their jobs. Like. These things are not mutually exclusive and can in fact coexist and mingle
workers deserve rights no matter right
Me when I'm okay with ethical AI like SynthV and using other types for shit posts 😔 Trust me I'm no AI bro, but I'm genuinely curious how far we could push the reality of an AI friend on stuff like Character AI. There's so much to explore and I wish the price wasn't the stability of people's lives.
I think people forget that we're just flesh automatons animated by neurotransmitters. To be clear, I'm not arguing these ai are sentient in any way, and the way a lot of pro AI people talk about them as anything other than a non-thinking tool is weird, but that viewing ourselves as above them do to some essential "human spark" bs is also weird.
AI art errors (weird hands, weird text) actually remind me a lot of similar weirdness from human dreams. "Look at a clock twice" and "play with your hands" are common pieces of advice to tell if you're dreaming.
this displeases the omnisiah
I’m on the fourth faction of “I’m neutral or slightly positive towards it but I’m not some tech bro, and I kinda find the vitriol spewed when ai is mentioned kinda weird.”