AI PBs
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I’m here trying to figure out how AI image generation is gonna reduce menial labour for me. What is it gonna do? Make an image of someone doing my laundry???
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@Juniper That’s part of the disconnect I think, at least if I take arguments at face value. At least one party to this argument views the actual “creating” part of “creating art” to be menial labour.
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I’m confused. Is genAI a fun, harmless tool to be more efficient at creating art, or is it the catalyst for the race to the bottom, a “painful and violent” future for humanity? I feel like the original argument deviated a bit.
It can be both.
I think it is both. Especially since AI continues to grow and evolve.
I find AI exceptionally helpful and useful. It has saved me time, effort, and energy and has allowed me to finish menial task faster (work and fun related) so that I have more free time to enjoy other things. and it has allowed other enjoyable things to be even more enjoyable than they were before. To me, AI has been amazing and exciting.
I laugh at the people who complain about AI’s faults and errors. It is like criticizing a toddler for making errors on the bar exam. AI is still in its infancy and will continue to grow better at everything, for good or ill. Just like a child.
Remember dial up? How is internet now? Remember Pong? How’s that compare to Balder’s Gate 3? Knock it and get your jokes in now while you can. It’s just going to get better at everything by orders of magnitude. (Meanwhile, companies are also improving quantum computing at an alarming rate. Don’t even consider if these two paths meet…)
That being said…
I also think that it will bring more harm than good the more it evolves.
I think this, not because of what AI can do or will do, but because of what people will do with it. I don’t think the problem is AI. As with most things, the problem is people.
We don’t need AI to solve world hunger. We could do that, easily, already if the right people wanted to. They just don’t. The same issues of what people will do with power will only worsen with AI, but that isn’t the fault of the technology.
People are the worst. Plain and simple.
You can argue about the legality of what AI does all day long, but the law is a joke. If anything, we’ve learned over the last decade that the law is whatever the people in power decide it is. Laundering cartel money is a crime. The punishment is paying a fine that doesn’t even scratch the surface of the profits made from it. OpenAI is being sued by god knows how many people. Even if they all win (they won’t), is the punishment fine gonna shut down OpenAI? Even if it did (it won’t), would that even put a dent in the AI community considering how many other AI companies are out there and how many continue to be formed every month/week/day?
Again, the problem isn’t AI. The problem is people.
If AI can solve that problem, the world will be better off.
(And yes, I know that this is not a new conclusion. This is the plot of many a sci-fi movie. And for good reason. I’m just not sure that they got the hero/villain roles correct.)
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Cue every AI movie/series compilation to the tune of We Didn’t Start the Fire.
Grand. Now I have to make a watch list starting with 2001: A Space Oddesey and all the way through to Zardoz or Zoe.
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@Warma-Sheen said in AI PBs:
Again, the problem isn’t AI. The problem is people.
Of course the problem is people, but imagine what the world would be like if we’d taken that stance with other technological advancements. We can’t un-invent LLMs any more than we can un-invent the steam engine, but that doesn’t mean we have to let tech companies run rampant either.
The industrial revolution caused a whole lot of chaos before we had reform and regulations to make it better. And for all the faults of the modern world, things are better in countless ways than they were in the 1870s.
Copyright law came about after the invention of the printing press, to recognize that just because you had a copy of a book, that didn’t give you the right to re-print it and sell your own copies. Those laws have evolved over time, but the core idea has remained the same: it’s not right to make money off of someone else’s creative work, and it’s not good for the world if artists have no incentive to share their art.
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but that doesn’t mean we have to let tech companies run rampant either.
That’s a tricky phrase. I’m not sure the context you mean it in.
At this point it is highly unlikely, in any practical sense, that we can do anything about tech companies running rampant.
When has that ever happened before in any meaningful way?
and it’s not good for the world if artists have no incentive to share their art.
The artist issue is one that I have an unpopular opinion about, at least on this forum, but that statement is definitely a problematic opinion.
It suggests that the only, or main, incentive for creating art is financial gain. But there are many other reasons that art is created. The trope of the starving artist is a trope for a reason. Many artists do art just for art’s sake, even if there is no money in it, which, in most cases, there is not. Art for art’s sake is the motto of MGM Studios, despite the mountains of cash they make in entertainment. If you’re only creating art for financial incentive, you’re not being displaced by AI, you’re just competing with it in a market that’s historically been brutal for artists. It just means that your art has to be subjectively better than what AI can produce - by any possible metric. You have a soul. AI doesn’t. You can truly create. AI can’t. These are all the arguments made, but at the end of the day, does that make your art more marketable than AI art? If the reason you do art it is financial, you better hope so.
Is it easier to do art when you’re getting paid for it? Sure. But art is hardly the only medium that AI is taking over and I don’t know why it gets romanticized as a protected class that needs saving, exempt from the same pressures that affect every other job in a capitalist system. I’d love to game, or dance, or write all day instead of working a job, but there isn’t any money in it for 99.9% of people who can do it. So I don’t do it. The world I live in sets the reality I have to operate within. And AI is now part of the world that we live in.
But on the flip side, there are plenty of venues where computers are better but haven’t taken over. Computers can play chess and beat grand masters, but they haven’t stopped chess tournaments. AI can outplay most people in competitive video games, but e-sports hasn’t crumbled.
Again, the problem isn’t AI. The problem is people. When people value human work/creation/skill, there will be money to follow. If they don’t, there won’t be. There are tons of concern for artists put out of work by AI, but not much for the customer service reps that are being cut at a far higher rate. Hasbro’s Dungeon’s and Dragons tribulations are a battle ground for that right now. They first said they wouldn’t use AI art, then they got caught using AI art, then they pretty much abandoned their pledge to not use AI. There was a big ado and calls for boycotts. But do people still buy their product? Yes. Absolutely.
If people value art made by other people, they’ll find it and pay for it. If they don’t, no amount of regulation or gatekeeping will save it. AI doesn’t kill art. People choosing convenience, price, or novelty does. And because people are the worst, artists suffer.
And copyright law… well, that’s also a joke, like most laws. The punchline here is that the “law” is heavily favored to big corporations and companies with expensive legal teams that make it increasingly easy to steal from individuals who can’t afford to fight back in court. It definitely does not favor the majority of artists, most of whom are forced to sell the rights to their art to some soulless company or corporation “in perpetuity and throughout the universe” in order to make scraps of money from it.
The industrial revolution caused a whole lot of chaos before we had reform and regulations to make it better. And for all the faults of the modern world, things are better in countless ways than they were in the 1870s.
I agree.
The Industrial Revolution happened over many decades. But it took just as many decades for laws and regulations to catch up to what has happening - for many of the same reasons it won’t work today. Too much money and influence on the side of the people with the new toys. In the meantime people were brutally and inhumanly pushed past their limits for generations with what we’d today consider abuses in order to feed the industrial machine. But here, today, AI isn’t playing out over decades, it’s evolving over months, across dozens of industries.
Governments are barely able to define what an LLM is, let alone agree on how to regulate it. Meanwhile, companies are training new models, with trillions of parameters, trained on questionable data sources, and putting them out before the public even understands the risks.
So yes, regulation is an option. But trying to regulate AI is like putting a rookie traffic cop on a Formula 1 track. They can try to slow things down, but no one’s gonna listen. In the absolute worst case scenario, they move their servers to another country with less scruples without missing more than a beat.
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@Warma-Sheen said in AI PBs:
The Industrial Revolution happened over many decades. But it took just as many decades for laws and regulations to catch up to what has happening - for many of the same reasons it won’t work today. Too much money and influence on the side of the people with the new toys.
This is a misrepresentation of the historical facts. Laws and regulations that reformed the worst excesses of the Industrial Revolution happened because ordinary people demanded it in spite of overwhelming monetary opposition from the incredibly wealthy and influential capitalists of that time. John D. Rockefeller’s net worth is estimated at around $253 billion in 2013 dollars, Cornelius Vanderbilt at $203 billion, and Richard Mellon (of Carnegie-Mellon) at $103 billion. These and other “captains of industry” of that era commanded money and influence on the same scale as any modern tech billionaire.
The government did not decide to regulate because there was no money telling them not to. “Strikes organized by labor unions became routine events by the 1880s. There were 37,000 strikes between 1881 and 1905.” We owe the eight-hour workday to continual agitation by hundreds of thousands of workers over more than fifty years. The President of the United States sent federal troops to end strikes (these are all different Presidents), and Rockefeller was widely blamed for organizing the murder of 21 people, striking miners and their families. Between 1850 and 1937 almost 900 people were killed by the authorities in labor disputes. Regulations did not “catch up to what was happening,” they were dragged kicking and screaming by we the people.
This kind of mealy-mouthed defeatism serves no one but the ruling class. Ordinary people have stood up for themselves and demanded better treatment in the past, and we can do it again.
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The fact that our government is currently useless is not really an argument against regulation. Like I too am depressed by living through a goddamn authoritarian takeover as a goddamn career public servant but it has nothing to do with my opinions on what should be. It’s almost a red herring - what the law currently is has no real bearing on what is right and that is something that has been true practically forever.
Eventually the law will catch up to reality, or eventually the heat-death of the universe will render this all moot, but that doesn’t change whether those materials used to train AI were stolen in fact (they were) or whether AI is having a negative impact on art that outweighs its positive applications as a tool (it is).
@Trashcan ty for those receipts.
let it be a challenge to you
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@Trashcan It isn’t a misrepresentation. Its just a retelling. You’re saying the same thing I did, but with a different, antagonistic slant for no other reason than to be mean and nasty, presumably because I don’t agree with you.
You quoted the first part of what I wrote, then left out the rest.
@Warma-Sheen said in AI PBs:
In the meantime people were brutally and inhumanly pushed past their limits for generations with what we’d today consider abuses in order to feed the industrial machine. But here, today, AI isn’t playing out over decades, it’s evolving over months, across dozens of industries.
But if helps you to give a more detailed picture restating and supporting my points, then insult me anyway, you do you. That is definitely a pretty common response these days.
If your argument is that we should start the march against AI now so that in 70 years we might have a chance of winning the fight like we did during the Industrial Revolution, feel free. As I agreed, regulation is an option.
But the rest of my point remains that this isn’t a fight that will last 70 years and the same tactics won’t work because the circumstances are drastically different and the thing we’re trying to stop is moving much, much faster.
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@Warma-Sheen
Thisit won’t work today.
is
But trying to regulate AI is like putting a rookie traffic cop on a Formula 1 track.
They can try to slow things down, but no one’s gonna listen.
by definition.
At this point it is highly unlikely, in any practical sense, that we can do anything about tech companies running rampant.
Disagreeing with you does not equate to insulting you. If your argument is not that there is nothing (in any practical sense) that we can do, so why bother, feel free to explain what it is.
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I’m too lazy to quote, but there was something said by Mr. Probably An AI or At Least An AI Fanboy about how one of the things that makes something plagiarism is if it causes loss of profit for the person it’s stealing from.
AI has been doing precisely this to… basically every creative field. Visual art, writing, music, now video (remember that horror of a Coca-Cola ad??).
Additionally, the initial training of it utilized stolen works (books, art, film, etc.). The companies have admitted to this. The primary reason they are fighting back in court is because (as they’ve also admitted) to start over would be a massive loss of money for them.
It is theft. Plain and simple. And dude up there admitted it during his roundabout blatherings.
(Also, I hate the ‘but I can’t art’ arguments. Anyone can. Visual art is literally just practicing and training yourself. idgaf if you work 40 hours a week- so do many artists. Step away from the forums, the Fortnite, the RP for like, 30 minutes a day and you can art. Expensive? It can be but to start you literally just need paper and something to make marks with. You can go to Dollar Tree, spend $3, get a pack of printer paper and a box of pens or pencils.)
Now, that said: I am not a omg never touch AI for anything ever. It has its place as a tool (ChatGPT works well for me to brain dump into and then get it to organize my thoughts for me). But I am exhausted by people going ‘I spent 15 minutes typing in prompts my art is real and just as valid as your 80-hour painting!’.
Hell, people shouldn’t even be bragging about ‘prompt engineering.’ Basically every major AI now responds to real language, no need for +this -that in your prompts anymore.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Everett_massacre
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thibodaux_massacre
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludlow_Massacre
People died for those rights and still do. It’s privileged and insulting to talk about worker’s rights as a given and simply unintelligent to think rights happen naturally at the benevolence of wealthy leadership.
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@Warma-Sheen said in AI PBs:
But art is hardly the only medium that AI is taking over and I don’t know why it gets romanticized as a protected class that needs saving, exempt from the same pressures that affect every other job in a capitalist system. I’d love to game, or dance, or write all day instead of working a job, but there isn’t any money in it for 99.9% of people who can do it.
You are vastly underestimating the quantity of creative people who currently make a living with their creative skills. I’m not just talking about the starving artist trope making their own music in their garage. I’m talking about the graphic designers, the technical writers, the voiceover narrators, the people who write ad copy, the animators who make the Marvel movies, the musicians, the novelists, etc. There are a tremendous number of jobs impacted by GenAI.
And hey, if the AI companies had gotten their tech through legit means, that’d still suck, but it would be different. The printing press put the monks out of business, but it did not steal their work to do so. These companies are, in my opinion, crooks. You can say copyright law is a joke but I couldn’t disagree more. I think it is a cornerstone of society. Not just for financial reasons, but for moral ones. Because it’s one thing to not make money off your art. It’s quite another to make art and then have some company steal it so THEY can make money.
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@Warma-Sheen
Thisit won’t work today.
is
But trying to regulate AI is like putting a rookie traffic cop on a Formula 1 track.
Is it “mealy-mouthed”? You seem to have a habit of leaving off the parts that are relevant to the point you’re trying to counter, as though the posts aren’t all above to be referenced.
Your obvious omission of it shows that even you know it was wrong.
But again, you can be insulting if you need to. That’s how these conversations go on this forum. I just don’t know why you do, instead of just having a conversation with an exchange of ideas with someone who might have different thoughts than you. But you do what you need to do.
I don’t have all the answers. I never claimed to. But I can see when 2 + 2 does not equal 5 and I don’t have a problem speaking when I see people trying to make that math work. If the answer was that simple, somebody else would have figured it out by now.
Rather than looking for a solution that actually has a chance in hell of working, if you want to take a 200 year old solution that takes 50-70 years and apply it to a modern problem that will be irreversible in no more than 10 years absolute max (as if it isn’t basically already there now) and ignore all the very obvious issues between the two so you can pat yourself on the back and get all the upvotes, go for it.
Problem solved. “You got it, dude.”
See you in 70 years when we will all most definitely be AI free of the problem that became ubiquitous 65 years prior.
You are vastly underestimating the quantity of creative people who currently make a living with their creative skills.
Possibly. But I also think you are overestimating how many jobs GenAI is currently affecting - the key word being currently. Those jobs still exist. Some are affected. But others are not. My mother is a voiceover narrator. She doesn’t make a living off of it but she does make side income. She hasn’t seen much drop off of work YET, because, based on the conversations she’s had with the people she works with, the companies that pay for voiceover narration don’t find that AI quality is sufficient to stop hiring real people. AI can’t get the right amount of emotional range and proper inflections when it needs to. But what AI has done is allow people/companies who were not paying for it before to add GenAI robotic voicerovers to their service or business model for free. But these were people who wouldn’t have paid for real voicever anyway. The worry is that in the future as AI improve, it will get better and be good enough to stop hiring real people. The companies have told her when she’s asked, that more than likely that will be the case. It just isn’t at that point yet.
I think there could/would/should be some kind of graph with a line representing the quality of “creative” work (some creatives produce a more quality product than others, they just do) and the ability of AI to replicate that creative work to a specific degree. And as AI gets better, the more it will eclipse people and the more people will be put out of work as companies cut payroll to make more profits. That’s what companies do.
And I’m not arguing that its not bad and its not wrong. AI was trained on the cesspool that is the internet. The good stuff and the bad and everything in between. But ignoring the realities of it won’t make it go away. Railing about how bad it is for people won’t make it go away. Moar defeatism, I know…
At this point, I think there’s value in being able to use GenAI to enhance what you do for as long as you can do it. If you’re a technical writer, use AI to make you a better technical writer so that you can stay working longer than other technical writers who ignore it and do not increase in quality or production.
People have to adapt to changes in order to survive. Get on board the train or get run over by it. As I said above, I don’t have all the answers. But I think it is obvious that this thing is gonna be here to stay. So at this point, it is a matter of using it to your advantage and staying ahead of others who cannot/will not evolve along with it.
It has been said ad nauseam, but GenAI is tool. And the better you can use that tool, the better off you will be. But you can’t get better if you don’t practice with it. There is an art and a talent to using AI and some people don’t understand that. And in the current climate and the foreseeable future, being able to use AI skillfully is quickly becoming a survival skill in the job market. Early adapters will benefit.
Do I think that’s a solution to the problem? No, its just an adaptation to it. And a lackluster one at that. But that’s as much as I have right now.
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Rethinking the Luddites in the Age of AI
Brian Merchant’s new book, “Blood in the Machine,” argues that Luddism stood not against technology per se but for the rights of workers in the face of automation.
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@Warma-Sheen said in AI PBs:
At this point, I think there’s value in being able to use GenAI to enhance what you do for as long as you can do it. If you’re a technical writer, use AI to make you a better technical writer so that you can stay working longer than other technical writers who ignore it and do not increase in quality or production.
People have to adapt to changes in order to survive. Get on board the train or get run over by it. As I said above, I don’t have all the answers. But I think it is obvious that this thing is gonna be here to stay. So at this point, it is a matter of using it to your advantage and staying ahead of others who cannot/will not evolve along with it.
More than plenty are hopping onto that train. But like. The problem with that train you’re advocating folks should be hopping onto in order to get ahead is that the ahead it’s barrelling towards is over the bodies of everyone else.
The train of AI is barreling down tracks littered with the bodies of art that weren’t its to take, and it’s heading straight towards the artists. I don’t see any reason at all to want to help it run any faster. And I’m sure as hell not about to think much decency about others who are willing to do so. If that train is running people over, why would ANYONE think that the reasonable reaction to that massacre is to board it?
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@Warma-Sheen said in AI PBs:
Is it “mealy-mouthed”?
Unwilling to state facts or opinions simply and directly.
There is no thesis statement in any of your posts beyond “AI is harmful but there’s no point in resisting so we might as well all use it anyway”, and you’ve spent almost 2000 words saying it if I remove the asides about how I’m mean.
If this is not your argument, feel free to state simply what it is.
