There's something inherently wrong with e-society when '4chan noticed me' is equivalent to a death knell or a diagnosis of incipient nervous breakdown.
I really hope in the next coming year topics like this get addressed soon.
Also, Sarah Andersen's explanation as she expands into unwanted AI training is excellent, and it is growing increasingly concerning in the industry. We're only 2 years since the first DALL-E rocked the world, and it is already wrecking havoc.
Yeah that's the main thing that seems, uhh, really not okay, but it's also not particularly about AI so much as corporations always trying to externalize their operating costs in whatever shady ways they can manage.
Very broadly I'd defend AI creativity as a tool, but if a tool functions in a recklessly harmful manner, that's the responsibility of the people making and/or operating that tool, and regulated standards for both are meant to minimize harm and draw clear lines of liability.
It's gonna be a rocky period until we get enough people in legislative power who actually have some conception of what the internet is and what happens on it and what AI is, etc, etc
As an artist, AI becoming able to reproduce a specific art style in a minute fraction of the time it would take the human artist is a huge fear of mine...
prompt "Billie Eilish as a beautiful stunning tempting pin-up medieval female witch weraring a shirt and skirt, intrinsic details, ominous, eery, dramatic light, colorful, hypermaximalist, ornate, luxury, elite, concept art in the style of Bob Kehl"
IDK I'm not sure the people making a lot of use of that represent a big market for artists, so much as people who can't afford to commission art anyways. And the things I'd want to commission, I definitely don't trust an AI to do even slightly well enough, much less with enough consistency.
(and of course corporations, to some degree, but they already steal art and use stock photos to avoid paying artists, so I feel like the issue here is corporate governance and IP protections that actually protect creators, regardless of AI or no AI)
Tillie
: I do find it really interesting the places that AI breaks down. It still can't do small intricate details that make sense. Jewelry is recognizable by a human as supposed to be jewelry and even the sort of jewelry, eyelashes look sort of like they could be eyelashes. Symmetry is nearly impossible too.
yeah i mean... ai is really good at reproducing patterns, but its central flaw as a tool (not just in art but in science/engineering as well) is that you don't generally know what it thinks the important patterns are, or why
human perception is way more complicated than just pattern reproduction, with all the layers of associative networks and metacognition that produce what we think of broadly as "meaning," and as far as i'm aware, that's still far beyond the grasp of AI
Exacerangutan
: And I think that is a really important distinction, because watching the AI apostles speak about AI they are all addressing the AIs are going to destroy humanity fears in completely the wrong way. All this talk of gaining awareness and triggering the apocalypse.
My vision of AIs destroying humanity involves humanity destroying humanity because dumbass CEOs fire all their employees and replace them with AI next week and all our supply chains fail at once and our medical systems lock everyone out because somebody posted boobs on Facebook.
'Everyone fired their human employees and replaced them with robots, then all humans but programmers and the 1% ended up homeless and starved to death because social infrastructure demanded they get jobs if they wanted to survive.'
What I'm expecting is a variant on the paperclip problem that's allowed to perpetuate because of CEOs not actually seeing it as a problem even as people start to suffer.
Except when have those revolutions not just installed a different form of economy that would also fall apart under the idea that blue collar jobs simply no longer exist...
(The "paperclip problem", for reference, is a problem wherein an AI is too efficient at its job to the point of resisting all efforts to have it turned off and eventually destroying the world.)
(The problem being, we have a 0.1% so greedy and shortsighted that they wouldn't actually see the problem with their paperclip-making system setting out to turn the entire world into paperclips.)
E.S. Levi
: i have a whole soapbox or two about that actually XD and i think we're in a transitional period where that model (what i think of as "scarcity economics," idk if there's an official term) becomes increasingly unnecessary and even counterproductive
The damage I see AI doing now is that it can kill of ambition. 10y ago a young kid that liked to draw found out it was just slightly better then most other kids at it. She would try more and improve. Now the same kid likes to draw but it just can't get anything don that is even close to what AI does.
This is the fallacy of Star Trek and the futurists who saw automation resulting in liberation of humanity from drudgery and the ability to pursue greater things. Versus the dystopian realists who recognized that capitalism funnels all the benefits upwards to the already wealthy.
...eehh... odk, i'd argue automation, like all other tools, just does what we use it to do. If we use it to support a system of unfettered capitalism (which is itself a pretty intensely pathological version of capitalism) then that's what it does. I don't think any serious futurist ever said it can't be misused.
And I do think we'll eventually reach a point where artificially maintaining scarcity economics requires such drastic contortions of reasoning that people refuse to keep doing it. But how far off that is really depends on people and collective political will.
But that's all historical context. In the US especially, we got politically complacent, like the late Roman Republic after the Punic wars, and now it's biting us. We'll get our act together someday, hopefully before but maybe after a (maybe lengthy) period of self-destructive illiberal regression.
It's too bad that CGI already means something else, because we really need to stop calling this stuff art. When computers develop consciousness and intent, then we can reconsider the question.
that's probably fair, although "wtf is art, anyway?!?" has been one of the foremost questions in art for like the last century at least so there's probably room for debate by people more familiar with the nuances than i am
Trying to define art is definitely not going to accomplish anything. I think the question for most of us should be whether an artist should own their work and have that ownership protected and enforced. We can certainly throw out the entire concept of art being a profession and get rid of protections on all art.
Art collections have no value, Getty can go pound sand and artists can decorate cakes and make holiday cards for family. Not to mention giving a big middle finger to Disney.
An artist's IP is the product of their labor, so absent a post-scarcity economy where attaching all value to either labor or capital makes no sense, I'm not sure erasing all protections on art really helps artists...
It would definitely hurt Disney, but I feel like it would hurt artists a lot more by reducing them to manual laborers (from an economic standpoint, obviously, not an artistic or philosophical standpoint).
I tend to look at these questions from a cultural lens. Who we are, who we THINK we are, and who we wish to be. Our art indicates we wish to live in that utopia of enough for everyone and leisure to create. But our actions reflect the hierarchical primate social structure we have inherited from our evolution.
The aspiration overlays the execution extremely awkwardly. Some places do it a bit more gracefully and others much worse. This makes economic systems a symptom of deeper issues as well as a driver. Our current culture builds its hierarchy on economic prowess rather than martial or reproductive.
I can forgive that part. ...that we (as a society, not us in this plurk individually) are largely responding by either ignoring the problem or trying to regress rather than plan ahead, though, I have trouble with.
Trouble is, no matter what a society's standards for social hierarchy, you can usually acquire most of them if you have enough resources under your control.
and somewhere along the line we let ourselves get convinced that "free" and "unregulated" mean the same thing, which, looking at it through a physics lens, is very very obviously not true
a free body diagram doesn't mean there are no forces, it means all forces are properly accounted for and balanced so the diagram is free of unexplained mystery influences; the way we use "free market" relies heavily on basically ignoring important, asymmetric market forces but pretending that those forces are somehow magically balanced just because
Exacerangutan
: well you also have to look VERY critically at what is being flogged as a “free market”. The way I see it being used and understood most of the time is “benefitting me and only me”. “Free of anything I don’t like but ensuring any competition is gleefully stifled”. “Free of regulation but not protection, subsidies or tax breaks”.
Corgi
Fun fact, I taught a philosophy class that had a unit delving into "what is art?" and had a full class debate on that exact question. It was a thing with very divided opinions.
Also, since I've been following all this - I do recommend people looking into what AI can do towards making video subjects, as well. It's not out of the realm of possibility that AI will be making effects sequences or entire films one day, and probably sooner than we'd wish. There's a lot of difficult implications to all this.
The article is one of a number of warning bells I've seen, and I admit I had the "oh neat" reaction at first - but now? It's getting increasingly disturbing.
At any given time the planet has a number of libertarian paradises where government is your private army and the freest market you ever did see. And yet the flood of nanny state refugees fleeing to these utopias has failed to materialize
well the problem even more specifically is, how much separation between human and product marks the transition from art to non-art? a human using a commercial brush and industrially manufactured paints is presumably indisputably art, but if a human developing an AI that produces images isn't art, where's the line, and why?
If a human makes a mechanical device that produces images, is that still art? I feel like that probably still counts, even if the machine were so complicated and chaotic that it resembled procedural generated content.
Foggy
: yeah but the advocates of unfettered "capitalism" (actually more like plutocracy, but whatever) have spent generations insisting that any system left of Thatcher is indistinguishable from Leninism
c_for_characters
: I'll definitely agree we should be having serious conversations about it, and planning ahead for appropriate guardrails, and not just ignoring it or trusting cyber-Jesus to take the wheel
unfortunately, no matter the system, people who want power will find ways to gain it... so i'm pretty sure people being responsible, informed, and politically competent is the only real fix, so that they're able to sustain accountability
Also, Sarah Andersen's explanation as she expands into unwanted AI training is excellent, and it is growing increasingly concerning in the industry. We're only 2 years since the first DALL-E rocked the world, and it is already wrecking havoc.
liberation of humanity from drudgery and the ability to pursue greater things. Versus the dystopian realists who recognized that capitalism funnels all the benefits upwards to the already wealthy.
i have like half a dozen soap boxes in this area, though, so apologies for the rantingorz