In a post-scarcity solarpunk future, I could imagine some reasonable uses, but that’s not the world we’re living in yet.
AI art has already poisoned the creative environment. I commissioned an artist for my latest solarpunk novel, and they used AI without telling me. I had to scrap that illustration. Then the next person I tried to hire claimed they could do the work without AI but in fact they could not.
All that is to say, fuck generative AI and fuck capitalism!
Someone said something that stuck with me the other day. “I don’t want AI to create all of our art and music so we can work more. I want AI to do our work so we have more time to create art and music”.
The reason for that is that you have to look at this as if you’re some greedy corporate bastard.
A robot butler costs money to build and if it doesn’t pan out, they’re on the hook for the cost. Firing people saves money right now, and if generative art doesn’t pan out, they can hire new employees that will work for less.
AI is just the latest craze to justify what these greedy bastards do all the time. The way they’re fucking us is new, but the act of fucking us is as old as dirt.
Funny - I distinctly remember not having any time to recreationally make, and most importantly, actually finish small art pieces. Because our society nowadays demands me to be working on things that aren’t quite art for 80% of the time I’m awake. AI assisted tools have caused me to be able to use that 20% to actually make something again in a satisfactory way. At least for me and most people I talk to in a similar situation, it has allowed me to enjoy being creative again.
AI is on its way to automate most jobs. The economy is about radically change
Yeah, except we don’t have anything even close to ready for everyone who will lose their income. I foresee a lot of hardship coming, especially since those in power tend to horde all resources for themselves, and AI will allow them to horde resources at never before imaginable levels.
That should be at the forefront of our political discourse. We had Andrew Yang bring make some noise back in 2019/2020, but he was the only one to bring AI, automation, and UBI and he kind of faded into irrelevancy. Which is unfortunate because nobody else is talking about any of these things, especially the dinosaurs we have running for president right now.
AI in IT is about to obsolete new staff, but still require experienced staff. Of course experienced staff start out as new staff, the current experts retire or die
But that won’t stop management. Management will say “with this great tool we don’t need as many people” and will fire everyone but a few well experienced people who can polish the turds the AI produces
Then they’ll be left a few years later with no experts.
I have seen this in practice. The place I work for found that labour hire was able to replace long term staff, backed by a team of experts. Now they want to bring IT back in house and all the experts are retired, long term people like me have found other careers within the place, and they’re right now begging me to return to my old career to train a new lot of people. I’m not likely to co-operate
If the AI isn’t stealing content, then piracy isn’t stealing either.
Would that not mean that AIs aren’t stealing either? 🤔
It would undermine the exact point OP is making, but I understand what he means, so that still stands.
Unlimited IP protections only benefit the rich. If we return copyright back to its original 25 year limit, it would actually benefit the actual artists because the corpos would have to pay artists for new ideas pretty frequently.
I really hope more people start believing this. Our current copyright system has been abused and bought by the rich and screws over both consumers and small artists, but “copyright of any form is terrible” is harmful to artists too.
IP protections don’t protect anyone but the rich in any form, Disney have been caught selling T-shirts with art outright stolen from small artists online buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo and their only punishment was that they had to stop, no admission of liability and they got to keep all the money they made. Hell the guy who invented the underlying concept behind the TV never saw a penny because a radio company decided that it was their invention and managed to drag it out in courts until the patent expired.
So don’t strengthen IP laws. Strengthen labor and antitrust laws.
Say: “You can’t use someone’s own creative work to compete against them in the same market”
Creators get a modicum of protection. The power-grab by the ultra-rich faces a major setback. FOSS models keep on truckin.
AI doesn’t steal art. It creates new and unique images, it just uses existing art as inspiration… Like what real artist do.
This is a deliberate misunderstanding I have seen repeatedly. They don’t mean the AI stole art. They mean the training data used to train the ai stole art and is now being used to lever artists out of the workforce because it’s cheaper.
The online scrapers just add whatever can be publicly viewed to their datasets. I fail to see how this is any different from actual artists going on the internet to view art to inspire and influence them. Regardless, what exactly do these artists demand? They can’t fight technology and win, this is a futile battle that has been fought and lost many times before. AI art isn’t going anywhere, it’s here to stay and it’ll only get better. No amount of anti-AI posts is going to change this. What exactly is the ultimate goal here?
Haven’t seen a penny arcade comics in like 15 years. Gotta say, the art style has suffered. Tycho looks like he has hydrocephaly
It may have suffered, but it’s distinctive.
The webcomic space is flooded with generic “good art”. If you want to stand out and build or maintain your brand - you need a unique look. Artists want their audience to be able to look at a character and instantly know they drew it.
(The best example of this is perhaps the worst human being in webcomics today. You can recognize his style in the first three lines of a face.)
I think PA was in kind of a bad place, because they were popular so early in the webcomic boom and so many people copied their style that their original art became generic. What’s going to attract a new teenage reader to PA if it looks just like every other crappy “two guys on a couch playing video games” webcomic they’ve seen?
So PA had to change their style. And say what you will about it, there’s no doubt who drew (or had an AI tool draw) those characters.
AI is a lot like plastic:
It is versatile and easy to use. There are some cases for which it is the highest quality product for the job; but for most cases it is just a far cheaper alternative, with bit of a quality reduction.
So what we end up with is plastic being used a lot, to reduce costs and maximise profits; but mostly the products it is used for are worse than they would otherwise be. They look worse. They degrade faster. They produce mountains of waste that end up contaminating every food source of every animal in the world. As a species, we want to use it less; but individual companies and people continue to use it for everything because it is cheap and convenient.
I think AI will be the same. It is relatively cheap and convenient. It can be used for a very wide range of things, and does a pretty good job. But in most cases it is not quite as good as what we were doing before. In any case, AI output will dominate everything we consume because of how cheap and easy it is. News, reviews, social media comments, web searches, all sorts of products… a huge proportion will be AI created - and although we’ll wish they weren’t (because of the unreliable quality), it will be almost impossible to avoid; because its easier to produce 1000 articles with AI than a single one by a human. So people will churn junk and hope to get lucky rather than putting in work to insure high quality.
For individual people creating stuff, the AI makes it easier and faster and cheaper; and can create good results. But for the world as a whole, we’ll end up choking on a mountain of rubbish, as we now have to wade through vastly more low-quality works to find what we’re looking for. It will contaminate everything we consume, and we won’t be able to get rid of it.
It’s not even the fact it’s cheap and easy, it’s just a bunch of idiots overinvested and now they’re desperately trying to make it A Thing so they can recoup losses.
Mcdonalds tried to shoehorn it into drive thru orders. The place that popularised a set menu you select a a controlled list of items from. Wtaf.
It also makes a way for the poor to be able to afford to get art to make comics and other things when they otherwise would have been unable to hire artists. Generative ai also allows poor people to write code they couldn’t before because they couldn’t afford the help. It also gives poor people the ability to brainstorm new ideas when they can’t afford a team of consultants.
It helps the poor, just like search engines and the internet. There were people back in those days scared of change as well. Gen ai is a huge equalizer or wealth and power. The vast majority of people using Gen Ai are using it for things that they never would have considered being able to hire someone to do anyway.
shh. if you can’t afford to pay people, then you should just die. /s
you’re quite right, and it’s a shame that generative AI art is treated like a gun and not a hammer. Both can be used to kill someone. (it’s not a great analogy, but hopefully people see my point about it generative AI being more than a weapon to kill artists)
I once heard an American saying, “God created men, but Sam Colt made them equal”, so perhaps the comparison to a gun isn’t that incorrect?
@RobotToaster @ASeriesOfPoorChoices
The comparison is correct, the logic is not. Sam Colt did not make humans equal. Look at the wealth and political power disparity between the richest and the poorest in Sam Colt’s nation. Notice anything?
First of all it concentrates power and wealth on the owners of the models (Microsoft, OpenAI) or the ones that provide the tools (Nvidia).
Yes, there is truth in it, that people who couldn’t afford to pay someone to create art, or get consulting, can get this now to a certain extend (if they can afford internet access and pay the AI services they need). But this comes also at the price of lowering the income of the people who provided these services. They now need to compete in the business creation market and not in the market that they trained for. Not everyone can create and maintain a business with or without starting money, just from a skill point of view. Nor does everybody want to.
Umm what?
When I run a checkpoint at home, how do you think the creator of checkpoint is profiting or gaining any power/wealth?
This stuff is ridiculously easily self hosted and run independently of any company.
The concentration of power part is not true unless people keep trying to use copyrights and the legal system to protect themselves from genai, at which point it will be true. Currently there’s plenty of self hosted solutions like stable diffusion and services like the ai horde to help even people without gpu for free
You are still reliant on the models trained by these companies. This training is very expensive. And yes there are ioen source models exist (thank god) but there are also closed source models that are very successfully advertised.
And self hosting requires money and skill. This means there is a lot of people who lack both and may then use closed source models.
So your gonna solder your own video cards?
In theory sure, but in practice it’s just gonna give more control to MS and NVidia since they are the ones most people would use.
The people who get screwed are the ones who cling to the idea that AI is the enemy and refuse to learn to use it. The jobs will be taken by the flexible and adaptive people who use this new incredible tool. This isn’t a new idea, this is how it’s been as long as people have had any jobs and found any more efficient way to do them. The issue is that some people are more willing to continue to grow and adapt than others. The ones who are not willing to, maybe because they are old, or just have oversized egos, will be left behind while they shout angrily into the wind that progress is evil.
This is why I focus on distribution rather than training. If you commercialize a model trained on things you don’t own/license, and it generates anything remotely infringing, you should be fully on the hook for every single incident.
But if a model is trained and distributed freely as FOSS, then it’s up to anyone running it to ensure the output is not infringing. This protects fair use while also ensuring that big companies tread more carefully when redistributing models that can violate fair use by competing with those whose work was trained on without permission and are subsequently being emulated without permission.
Who do you care so much about protecting the failed and unethical law of copyright? Are you going to tell me you don’t pirate media too?
@JackGreenEarth @Veraxus
Failed and unethical as long as it’s used by non-human entities like “companies” to enrich bosses who didn’t create the content themselves. Just and ethical when it’s used to protect actual named human authors, and only them. Big difference. Big big difference.
Why do you care so much about defending unimaginably wealthy corporations stealing the labor of regular people?
See, now we have both misrepresented each others comments.
And it helps the poor perform heart surgery because they couldn’t afford medical school. And it helps the poor build space craft because they couldn’t afford engineering degrees.
There’s a reason some of these things are done by experienced professionals not some AI kludge. If you really want to fix the problem, allow the poor access to education so they can become professionals in these areas if they so wish. The answer isn’t some AI telling them to put glue on their pizza.
I need a cover for my novel. Hold on real quick while I get this 4 year degree and spend $80k to send an fu to the AI overlords and design it myself.
After that I’ll throw my shovels away and use spoons instead.
Or you could pay someone… There’s a bunch of starting artists who work for cheap. There, saved you $79.5k Sadly your novel won’t sell because it’s been buried by an avalanche of ai generated books. (amazon recently limited the number of books you can self publish to only five per day… Your argument works both ways, why should I study and practice for years to learn to write my own novel (or pay you) when Ai can just generate it for me?
There’s another way for the poor to acquire art for their own comics. Can you guess what it is?
You would die (or be out on the street and wish you were dead) if your primary source of income relied on having access to filler art for some purpose and you didn’t have thousands of dollars to hire an artist.
Yeah, I can guess that you think that everyone who wants to make comics should either have to draw it themself or hire someone to draw it. Just like how you probably would have thought that anyone who wants a shirt should weave it themself or hire a hand weaver.
People will always create new and better machines to automate away what they don’t want to do. Similarly, there will always be people who are upset about this. It’s an age-old story. You can accept the times or try to prevent an avalanche with your body, but that snow doesn’t care at all about your favorite little patch of land. It’s doing its thing regardless.
Environmentally speaking, people should probably learn to sew and not be overly reliant on unsustainable mechanisation.
