It’s pretty terrifying when you think about the possibilities of deception. And also how throwaway content is going to become. We are going to generate content at a volume orders of magnitude larger than our already current excessive volume, and finding the stuff that has real meaning and a real message is going to be even harder.
Also, artists whose work and styles fed this will be put out of business without ever being paid for their work that was used to train these models. 🫤
That sounds like hell, making money is a blast. If everything was truly equal we would all be living in extreme poverty. Global average income is $9,733 USD per year. I make that in a week, hard pass on that commie bullshit.
Going to work so I can eat and pay rent fucking sucks, what are you talking about? The fact that you even conceptualize economic output as being all about money means you’re missing the point of an economy. Money is a representation of wealth, not wealth itself. You can’t eat money, shelter yourself from the elements with money, cure diseases with money, etc. Having access to goods and services is a blast, but money is nothing more than a mechanism to facilitate trade and the distribution of wealth.
The “commie bullshit” is entirely your contribution. I said nothing at all about making everyone’s income equal. Not within a country and certainly not between regions with wildly different costs of living. I’m talking about actual wealth, actual labor, and the way a society decides who deserves to have access to material wealth.
Let me spell it out for you: when a new technology makes a category of work obsolete, it sounds be a good thing because less work needs to be done to produce the same wealth. It’s like how having a washing machine is great because it saves you from doing many hours of tedious labor with essentially no downside. The reason that doesn’t work at a societal level is because our economic system is designed to funnel 100% of the benefits of labor-saving technology to a parasitic ownership class, leaving the average person poorer as a result. Our economic system is based entirely around scarcity, and introducing just a little bit of abundance breaks it and fucks over people whose labor is no longer needed by denying them access to wealth.
Do you really think it’s reasonable that having less work needing to be done to produce the same wealth should ever make the average person less well off?
Global average income is $9,733 USD per year.
Why would you cite this fact in defense of the current system?
The idea behind universal basic income is that hpu get enough money to cover your basic needs - then you can do a job you like to earn more so that you have more than basic needs fulfilled. So you could still earn money if that’s what you so enjoy.
Do you really cornpop? And what do that consistently makes you over half a million dollars a year in income?
When I was a kid, I had seen, or at least heard of, nearly every TV show from my parent’s generation. Going back probably 40 years. Like, I’ve probably seen every Looney Tunes, every episode of M.A.S.H., and most episodes of The Munsters, because some days there wasn’t anything else to watch. My kids look at me crazy if I haven’t heard of the latest flash-in-the-pan influencer, but if I bring up a 10-year old movie or TV show, they have no idea what I’m talking about.
I miss the shared culture that broadcast TV and radio gave us. Is the selection today better, with more, higher quality content? Definitely.
But all of us Millenials can quote Simpsons at each other all day even if we’ve never met. South park, Futurama, King of the Hill, James Bond and other corny action movies. We all saw them so many times, because that’s what was on.
That shared culture is worth more than the content actually being good, IMO. Half the time now someone will ask if you’ve seen a show and you haven’t ever heard of it.
And we will be stuck in a loop of type of art and culture that is a ouruborus feeding itself without new styles or genuine new art being fed after artists not being recognized and payed and not wanting to give more content to the machine. That dark ages are upon us and we are all singing it’s praise.
We are going to generate content at a volume orders of magnitude larger than our already current excessive volume, and finding the stuff that has real meaning and a real message is going to be even harder.
It could go both ways: similar software could “compress” video (especially AI-generated video) into text prompts that could then re-create it without needing to store it. (Currently, of course, the processing cost would be higher than the storage cost for the raw video—but the scenario in which we’re cranking out excessive amounts of AI-generated content implies that the high processing costs have been eliminated.) That would also have the side effect of making it easier to find and organize videos based on their “meaning”.
I think the idea of using natural language to generate video is flawed for the vast majority of applications we want. Imagine you could give a script to one of these models and have it output a TV show episode. While we can make these models deterministic it seems like the vast majority of generative content with some amount of quality requires the addition of random noise through the process. Should we want TV episodes whose visual quality and little details shift from model to model? Why not store a plain text description infered by some model and store the video component in a medium less prone to misinterpretation? We may use deep learning compression for videos and audio in the future if there are significant advancements but I doubt the compression will be to English.
If you are concerned about AI making “content” more throwaway, then you are already viewing creative works as something throwaway. Artists make works with meaning, AI doesn’t have a brain, it can’t make things with a meaning. That’s the job of the artist.
But now, or soon, you can have one person with half an idea, like “what if The Rock had to save Shanghai from mole zombies”, and they can grab a text generator to fill in most of the screenplay, and then dial in the number of synonyms for “exciting” used to describe the explosions, and come out with Day of the Living Moles, a 95 minute feature film, in a weekend. Without actually having to have had any traditional cinematography skills or breaking an artistic sweat.
There are categories of creative work that are throw-away; little sketches on napkins, improvised songs, quick sketches that an artist might think of are of no account to anyone. And the scope of what can be dashed off like that, with minimal time and effort, is growing because of more powerful tools.
Why should I watch Universal’s superhero blockbuster when I can watch my buddy Jimothy’s? What happens when the number of plausible films dramatically exceeds the time that movie critics have to watch them to sort out which are any good?
Why should I watch Universal’s superhero blockbuster when I can watch my buddy Jimothy’s?
That’s up for you to decide.
What happens when the number of plausible films dramatically exceeds the time that movie critics have to watch them to sort out which are any good?
Movie critics don’t have to watch every movie in the world. Also why trust some critics anyways? Just watch something and see for yourself
So you’re saying the people who write and tweak the prompts to create the output they envisaged don’t deserve to be called artists?
In my mind, AI just lowers the barrier required for people to be able to express what’s in their mind
if you actually were to try and engage in artistic expression you’d find out the whole process from conception to finishing your creation is something worth the time, and mistakes/accidents that often happen during it can bring new ideas to the surface. In that process you have the ultimate control over how good it turns out. Be it comically bad or a masterpiece there’s a charm in how you have expressed your idea.
AI flattens all that to a button click and regurgitates what’s already been made by somebody else, oftentimes creating something you’ve most likely already seen, somewhere, and won’t remember for long.
AI just lowers the barrier required for people to be able to express what’s in their mind
Yeah, there’s nothing wrong with people being about to express themselves, but that’s not necessarily art. With art the barriers are things like talent, creativity, and hard work. Lowering those barriers mostly creates rubbish. Typing ‘Make a pic of an x fighting a y and make it look cool!’ doesn’t make anyone an artist.
We spent decades depicting science fiction AIs as the key to giving humanity true freedom from mandatory labor, and now we’re scared because it can do creative work too? We’ll adapt. We’ll be just fine. A new generation will crop up that will have no issues with AI-generated content. We’re too old to see it like they will. Just like a lot of our parents and grandparents didn’t understand email until they were forced to, while us kids were doing all kinds of things online.
I mean shoot, my parents still argue with me over whether electronic music is even music or not. It’s just gonna be another tool in an artist’s arsenal.
We spent decades depicting science fiction AIs as the key to giving humanity true freedom from mandatory labor
Very few people benefit from automation and AI. Most of us will eventually be replaced by an IA and our only freedom will be to starve (or to rebel, who knows)
People can and have made the same argument about new technology since the dawn of the industrial revolution, but it hasn’t worked out that way. Industrialized countries are synonymous with rich countries. The problem with new technology, both now and then, it’s that the ownership of the means of production always becomes concentrated in the hands of a small class of people who have no interest in sharing their wealth. This far the benefits of technology have trickled down to the masses, but never without hurting a bunch of people in the process precisely because a few people have been allowed to hoard most of the benefits for themselves.
We spent decades depicting science fiction AIs as the key to giving humanity true freedom from mandatory labor
Maybe those stories never make it to the cinema but any time I see AI in a movie the humans do not come out on top.
Utopian science fiction is less popular, but look at Star Trek for example. Commander Data in The Next Generation and the EMH in Voyager provide invaluable help to the crews they work with. Or look at the robot in Interstellar for another example for a possibly portrayal of AI in a mostly dystopian setting. Even the droids in Star Wars would be impossible without very advanced AI (even if that fact isn’t discussed in universe), and a great many droids are shown as being critical to the success of ventures they take part in.
Why would real meaning and messages be harder to find, does AI generated art inherently have less meaning?
Let’s say I wanted to convey the message that oil companies are destroying the environment so , throwing subtlety out the window, come up with an idea of “a vampiric oil baron draining mother nature of oil”, does the picture that is generated from me putting that prompt into an AI generator have any less meaning then if I actually drew it myself?
For all the advances in AI it still lacks intentionality, and always will under these current models, that has to be supplied by the person in the form of a prompt. I’d say that intention is the source of messages and meaning in art. AI just allows people without technical abilities in art to express those intentions, feelings and messages.
I can’t speak for everyone, but for me personally, yes I feel like art is less interesting now. Over the past couple years or so I’ve found that I’m less impressed by art that I see online.
I’m not an artist, and I’m not someone who seeks out art to appreciate it. I’m just talking about art that I scroll past on the internet. I find it less interesting now. I assume that it’s all AI generated, and if it’s not, I figure it might as well be. It’s just not interesting to me anymore. The image generated by a prompt is no more interesting or thought provoking than the prompt itself.
Now imagine that 100 oil employees make good looking ai art to show mother nature either sharing the oil with someone to help them in some way, or even make it look like oil is helping remove a cancer or something from herself. 100 different variations of this. How impactful is your message compared to theirs? Will people even see yours?
If anything this was worse under the old system. Making art previously costed a lot of money, you had to pay the artists for their time and money, and better artists cost more. So in the past that oil company could commission 100 top quality artists to make corporate propaganda while a person who cares for the environment but has no money could only make a drawing limited by their own personal technical artistic ability, which could be just stick figures.
This is why “high quality” consumerist and capitalist “art” and branding in the form of advertising is so abundant meanwhile anti-consumerist, anti-capitalist art is rarer, no one’s paying to get it made.
Now any cause, regardless of money, can create at least mid art to get there message across. Those causes can also have way more people behind them then an oil company can reasonably hire
It’s sort of like how the gun changed how power worked. Previously a king could use there resources to pay for a smaller army of well equipped highly trained knights to subjugate a group of people. Then when the gun came training and equipment didn’t matter nearly as much and it became more of a numbers game, and to get those numbers rulers needed to give more power to the masses in order to be able to marshall them for their cause. Those rulers who didn’t got overthrown in revolutions.
You are correct and it drives people crazy. Just consider, though, that people were saying that the web allowing anyone to publish their views as fact would undermine the averages person’s ability to know what is true. It kind of did.
I don’t have a hot take. I agree with you. But I also think this will change things in ways we don’t fully understand yet.
