As soon as Apple announced its plans to inject generative AI into the iPhone, it was as good as official: The technology is now all but unavoidable. Large language models will soon lurk on most of the world’s smartphones, generating images and text in messaging and email apps. AI has already colonized web search, appearing in Google and Bing. OpenAI, the $80 billion start-up that has partnered with Apple and Microsoft, feels ubiquitous; the auto-generated products of its ChatGPTs and DALL-Es are everywhere. And for a growing number of consumers, that’s a problem.
Rarely has a technology risen—or been forced—into prominence amid such controversy and consumer anxiety. Certainly, some Americans are excited about AI, though a majority said in a recent survey, for instance, that they are concerned AI will increase unemployment; in another, three out of four said they believe it will be abused to interfere with the upcoming presidential election. And many AI products have failed to impress. The launch of Google’s “AI Overview” was a disaster; the search giant’s new bot cheerfully told users to add glue to pizza and that potentially poisonous mushrooms were safe to eat. Meanwhile, OpenAI has been mired in scandal, incensing former employees with a controversial nondisclosure agreement and allegedly ripping off one of the world’s most famous actors for a voice-assistant product. Thus far, much of the resistance to the spread of AI has come from watchdog groups, concerned citizens, and creators worried about their livelihood. Now a consumer backlash to the technology has begun to unfold as well—so much so that a market has sprung up to capitalize on it.
Obligatory “fuck 99.9999% of all AI use-cases, the people who make them, and the techbros that push them.”
For writers, that “no AI” is not just the equivalent of “100% organic”; it’s also the equivalent as saying “we don’t let the village idiot to write our texts when he’s drunk”.
Because, even as we shed off all paranoia surrounding A"I", those text generators state things that are wrong, without a single shadow of doubt.
Occasionally. If you aren’t even proofreading it that’s dumb, but it can do a lot of heavy lifting in collaboration with a real worker.
For coders, there’s actually hard data on that. You’re worth about a coder and a half using CoPilot or similar.
I hate how the Atlantic will publish well-thought pieces like this, and then turn around and publish op-eds like this that are practically drooling with lust for AI.
From the article:
The Atlantic has a corporate partnership with OpenAI. The editorial division of The Atlantic operates independently from the business division.
Shouldn’t we be glad they’re publishing both viewpoints? (On a real, actively debated issue, I don’t mean the “both sides” shit)
That’s what op-eds are for though haha
It will fail. Downvote me if you must, but AI generated erotica is just as here as machine-woven textiles.
Which is why the term Luddite has never been more accurate than since it first started getting associated with being behind on technological progress
Luddites aren’t against technological progress, they are against social regress.
I have never, ever heard this definition of Luddite.
Pretty sure social norms are better now than they were back when Luddites got their name associated with being against technological progress
True.
Yes, that wasn’t a random example for anyone OOTL. The thing the OG Luddites would do is break into factories and smash mechanical looms. They wanted to keep doing it the medieval way where you’re just crossing threads by hand over and over again, because “muh jerbs”.
Plagiarism should be part of the conversation here. Credit and context both matter.
Pandora’s box can not be closed.
I don’t think this about trying to close it, but rather put a big fat sticker on everything that comes out of the box, so consumers can actually make informed decisions.
Put a sticker on it. But realistically, I’ve yet to see any products that were made by an AI on the market. So what exactly is this sticker going to go on?
AI-generated articles, books, coloring books for example, are all a thing now. Behind the Bastards did a podcast episode on the latter two.
Preemptive nuclear strikes on all gpu chip fabs? There’s only like 7 of them
At this point, I bet all military AIs will recommend against that.
When an AI enslaves humanity, the first thing it will do is to convince the guy in charge of the off switch, that it would be a really bad idea to turn it off.
Knee-jerk stupidity. Not all AI development revolves around “tech bros”.
I’ve never understood the supposed problem. Either AI is a gimmick, in which case you don’t need to worry about it. Or it’s real, in which case no one’s going to use it to automate art, don’t worry.
The problem I have is when a gimmick is forced on me
I’m sure it will be used a lot in the corporate space, and porn. As someone who did b2b illustration, good riddance. I wouldn’t wish that kind of shit “art” on anyone.
It is already used in porn. I have heard that there is at least one quite active Lemmy community about it.
SWIM can tell you there is more than one…
They should go ahead and be against Photoshop and, well, computers all together while they’re at it. In fact spray paint is cheating too. You know how long it takes to make a proper brush stroke? No skill numpties just pressing a button; they don’t know what real art is!
Real artists mix their own pigments, ask Leonardo da Vinci (*).
(*: or have a studio full of apprentices doing it for them, along with serially copying their masterpieces, some if them made using a “camera obscura” which is totally-not-cheating™, to sell to more clients. YMMV)
Maybe the AIs should mix their own pigments as well, instead of taking all the other artists’ work and grinding that up.
Maybe other artists should do that too. Art isn’t built from nothing but the sheer magical creativity of the artist. If that were true we’d have Sistine cave paintings instead of the finger painting we currently have in prehistoric caves. Inspiration, is in fact, a thing.
Inspiration is absolutely a thing. When Constable and Cezanne sat at their easels, a large part of their inspiration was Nature. When Picasso invented Cubism, he was reacting to tradition, not following it. There are also artists like Alfred Wallis, who are very unconnected to tradition.
I think your final sentence is actually trying to say that we have advances in tools, not inspiration, since the Lascaux caves are easily on a par with the Sistine Chapel if you allow for the technology? And that AI is simply a new tool? That may be, but does the artist using this new tool control which images it was trained on? Do they even know? Can they even know?
does the artist using this new tool control which images it was trained on? Do they even know? Can they even know?
I’ve spent every summer vacation in my teens traveling Europe with my parents, going to every church, monument, art museum, cave, etc. available. I had no control over the thousands upon thousands of images I was trained on. I definitely don’t know which images I’ve seen and which not, and would have a really hard time knowing.
If I now make a painting, am I less of an artist for it?
We’ve had a ton of advances in inspiration. Artists constantly get inspired by the works of those before them, whether to repeat or to break up with previous styles. Nowadays you can even do it online… which is exactly what all these AIs have done.
Yeah and what is the first thing they teach you in art school? History. From day one you’re studying the works of other artists and its implications. How they managed to make an impact on the viewers and how it inspires you. Then we produce output that’s judged by our teachers on a scale and we use that as weighted training data.
If you make a painting now, it wouldn’t be based on those thousands and thousands of paintings since, although you have seen them, you apparently do not remember them. But, if you did, and you made a painting based on one, and did not acknowledge it, you would indeed be a bad artist.
The bad part about using the art of the past is not copying. The problem is plagiarism.
Good thing about this is it’s self selecting, all the luddites who refuse to use AI will find themselves at a disadvantage just the same as refusing to use a computer isn’t doing anyone any favours.
The benefit of AI is overblown for a majority of product tiers. Remember how everything was supposed to be block chain? And metaverse? And web 3.0? And dot.com? This is just the next tech trend for dumb VCs to throw money at.
Yes, it’s very hyped and being overused. Eventually the bullshit artists will move on to the next buzzword, though, and then there’s plenty of tasks it is very good at where it will continue to grow.
Yeah, but the dot com bubble didnt kill the internet entirely, and the video game bubble that prompted nintendo to create its own quality seal of approval didnt kill video games entirely. This fad, when it dies, already has useful applications and when the bubble pops, those applications will survive
Blockchain is used in more places than you’d expect… not the P2P version, or the “cryptocurrency” version, just the “signature based chained list” one. For example, all signed Git commits, form a blockchain.
The Metaverse has been bubbling on and off for the last 30 years or so, each iteration it gets slightly better… but it keeps failing at the same points (I think I wrote about it 20+ years ago, with points which are still valid).
Web 3.0, not to be confused with Web3, is the Semantic Web, in the works for the last 20+ years. Web3 is a cool idea for a post-scarcity world, pretty useless right now.
Dot.com was the original Web bubble… and here we are, on the Web, post-bubble.
Luddites were not idiots, they were people who understood the only use of tech at their time was to fuck them. Like this complete garbage shit is going to be used to fuck people. Nobody is opposed to having tools, we just don’t like Musk fanboys blowing spit bubbles while trying to get peepee hard
If capitalism is shit you attack capitalism not a technology.
All the misplaced rage and wasted effort.
@Marsupial you might want to read up on Luddites. Here’s a good place to start:
https://www.techwontsave.us/episode/187_the_real_history_of_the_luddites_w_brian_merchantThat literally tells the story of a people’s losing their livelihood due to capitalist usage of technology, and targeting the technology instead of the systemic issue.
You say this like destroying the technology wasn’t their way of targeting the systemic issue? Destroying expensive machinery has been used by labour time and again as a tactic to get the capitalist class to cough up.
Maybe he wants guillotines
Capitalists have an answer to this, it’s called the Pinkertons…
So, do textiles machines not exist anymore? It doesnt sound like them burning down factories stopped the textile factories in the long run
Good thing about this is it’s self selecting, all the technobros who obsess over AI will find themselves bankrupted like when the blockchain bubble bursted.
The blockchain bubble burst because everyone with a brain could see from the start that it wasn’t really a useful technology. AI actually does have some advantages so they won’t go completely bust as long as they don’t go completely mad and start declaring that it can do things it can’t do.
they won’t go completely bust as long as they don’t go completely mad and start declaring that it can do things it can’t do.
Which is exactly what’s happening.
The fact that it is useful technology though means they’ll always have a fullback. It’s not going to go way like bitcoin I guarantee it.
Like say, treating a program that shows you the next most likely word to follow the previous one on the internet like it is capable of understanding a sentence beyond this is the most likely string of words to follow the given input on the internet. Boy it sure is a good thing no one would ever do something so brainless as that in the current wave of hype.
It’s also definitely becuse autocompletes have made massive progress recently, and not just because we’ve fed simpler and simpler transformers more and more data to the point we’ve run out of new text on the internet to feed them. We definitely shouldn’t expect that the field as a whole should be valued what it was say back in 2018, when there were about the same number of practical uses and the foucus was on better programs instead of just throwing more training data at it and calling that progress that will continue to grow rapidly even though the amount of said data is very much finite.
AIs are fancy matrix multiplications
Check Q*, Google’s Gemini is already using a similar approach.
How does using free software to play dress up with anime characters bankrupt me financially?
the $80 billion start-up
lol, can you still call that start-up?
If they spend it all during the first year to accelerate their growth… sure.
we should punish techncompanies for ruining the Internet with AI.
The internet was ruined before AI.
the solution here is not being luddites, but taking the tech to ourselves, not put it into the hands of some stupid techbro who only wants to see line go up.
But that’s the point. It’s already in their hands. There is no ethical and helpful application of AI that doesn’t go hand in hand with these assholes having mostly s monopoly on it. Us using it for ourselves doesn’t take it out of their hands. Yes, you can self-host your own and make it helpful in theory but the truth is this is a tool being weaponized by capitalists to steal more data and amass more wealth and power. This technology is inextricable from the timeline we’re stuck in: vulture capitalism in its latest, most hostile stages. This shit in this time is only a detriment to everyone else but the tech bros and their data harvesting and “disrupting” (mostly of the order that allowed those “less skilled” workers among us to survive, albeit just barely). I’m all for less work. In theory. Because this iteration of “less work” is only tied to “more suffering” and moving from pointless jobs to assistant to the AI taking over pointless jobs to increase profits. This can’t lead to utopia. Because capitalism.
To put it in more simple terms:
When Alice chats with Bob, Alice can’t control whether Bob feeds the conversation into a training data set to set parameters that have the effect of mimicking Alice.
So, literally the story of the actual Luddites. Or what they attempted to do before capitalists poured a few hundred bullets into them.
good to know that the anti gmo weirdos found another cause to rally around.
As a “creator” myself, I’d like to say to my fellow artists who are anit-AI, get over it. AI artists are artists too. Yes there is bad AI art, but there’s bad art in every medium. If done with care and skill, AI art can be completely awesome and if you have an open mind, you might even find some space for it in your work. But even if you don’t, have some respect for the AI artists out there who put time and effort into their craft. There’s room for everyone.
But even if you don’t, have some respect for the AI artists out there who put time and effort into their craft.
What kind of time and effort? How is AI art a skill that is comparable to real art? I am genuinely asking here, I’d like to understand your work process.
I am not a visual artist, but I have composed my own music and the amount of time and/or effort needed to create a comparable piece using generative AI is not even close to being the same. I think there is a place for AI tools that assist artists, but people generating entire pieces using AI and then referring to themselves as “artists” is honestly delusional and sad. I hope that’s not what you are referring to here.
Well now that’s just close minded!
Go back and read discussions about synthesisers when they first arrived on the scene and you will see much wailing and gnashing of teeth about how synths are not real instruments and etc and so on. Then do the same thing when hip-hop goes mainstream and people say it’s not “real” music because the musicians don’t perform with “real” instruments, I guess.
You see where I’m going with this? There’s lots of examples like these in music and visual arts and they nearly always stem from ignorance.
I don’t know anything about AI music generation, but visual art can be generated by AI models on local machines with a great amount of fine tuning and depth. Further, people feed their original artwork into the AI and manipulate that, so it’s not so cut and dry. This idea that folks just write a sentence and the computer barfs out an image is uninformed.
Anyways, I’m blabbing. Hope that helps.
You see where I’m going with this?
No, I’m sorry but those are terrible examples. Synthesisers still require full creative control and an understanding of sound production techniques to create a custom sound. Some musicians rely on presets and samples, but even then they still need to be capable of actually composing a piece of music. Also, the debate was largely about whether synthesisers could be considered real instruments, not whether the music created by synthesisers was real music. The Hip Hop comparison is completely irrelevant and an even worse attempt at conflating genuine criticism of AI “musicians” with “old people are just mad”.
I don’t know anything about AI music generation
It’s literally just prompts AFAIK, so the people making it don’t require any musical talent, ability or creativity. They are just asking someone/something else to make them music that has a certain sound. It’s the equivalent of a monarch commissioning a piece of work from their court musician and then claiming they are a musician too.
visual art can be generated by AI models on local machines with a great amount of fine tuning and depth.
Are there specific pieces of AI art software people use? Any popular ones you can recommended to help me understand the process better?
Ah, you are picking apart the examples instead of taking in the point. Well, I tried.
To answer your question, yes. Automatic1111 and ComfyUI are two of the most popular.
It was a terrible and irrelevant point, as I explained. Thanks for the links though, I will check them out.
It’s really not.
Maybe someday you’ll do some research into the history of art and music and get some context into how technology has influenced both and the repeating patterns of the reactionary art that tends to get produced by artists you’ve never heard of when that happens.
Or maybe you won’t!
Either way, good luck.
Err, you admitted yourself that you are absolutely clueless when it comes to AI music generation. So yes, your “point” was a bad one and clearly came from a place of complete ignorance.
What kind of time and effort?
AI art can require training a model, or a LORA for a model, which requires choosing a series of samples and annotating them for the parts of you want to incorporate. After that, writing a prompt can involve several paragraphs with the definitions of what you want it to output, with a series of iterations, followed by a personal choice of the output.
How is AI art a skill that is comparable to real art?
How is stacking 10 buckets of sand and letting them fall in an art gallery, comparable to real art? Dunno, but they call it that: “real art”.
Art is a communication act that requires some sort of vision, intended to elicit some sort of emotional response in the receiver, and a series of steps to achieve that.
As long as there is a vision and an intent, the series of steps required to create art with AI, are comparable to any other series of steps conducting to the creation of art with any other medium.
For a rough estimate, you can compare the number and difficulty of the steps, and the effectiveness of the communication.
people generating entire pieces using AI and then referring to themselves as “artists” is honestly delusional and sad
Let me refer you to the aforementioned sand bucket… sculpture? or the renowned orchestral piece “A minute of silence”, or paintings like “Black square”, or more performative pieces like “Banana duct taped to a wall”.
There will always be artists, and “artists”.
I’m not sure equating AI art to sand bucket man is the glowing endorsement you think it is.
I think you misunderstood: “sand bucket man” is the bar for human art.
AI art has been above that for at least a decade, maybe two. Modern AI art, is orders of magnitude farther, even with the simplest of prompts.
How is stacking 10 buckets of sand and letting them fall in an art gallery, comparable to real art? Dunno, but they call it that: “real art”.
Your insinuation here was that AI art is “real art” because someone once stacked 10 buckets of sand and called it “real art”. It comes across as pretty desperate that you relied on a comparison with something as questionable as this to argue that AI art is the equivalent of traditional art. As you said, there will always be artists and “artists”. Sounds like AI “artists” fit in quite well with the latter group.
Let me clarify: I’ve seen the sand bucket guy’s art featured twice on the news in the past few days, filmed at an art gallery, described as art, commented as being art. It’s not some random event, it’s the current publicly accepted definition of “art”.
My statement, not insinuation, as to why AI art is comparable to “traditional” art, comes after that.
What comes across as desperate however, is generalizing all AI output and disparaging it, without considering the quality of input from the person behind it. Reminds me of how photography used to not be art, how electric instruments couldn’t be art, or how using a computer couldn’t be art either. Tools don’t make or break an artist.
Not OP but familiar enough with open source diffusion image generators to be able to chime in.
Now I’d argue that being an artist comes down to being able to envision something in your mind’s eye and then reproduce it in the real world using some medium, whether it’s a graphite pencil, oil paint, a block of marble, Wacom tablet on a pc, or even through a negotiation with an AI model. Your definition might be different, but for the sake of conversation this is how I’m thinking about it.
The work flow for an AI generated image can have a few steps before feeling like it sufficiently aligns with your vision. Prompting for specific details can be tricky, so usually step 1 is to generate the basic outline of the image you’re after. Depending on your GPU or cloud service, this could take several minutes or hours before you get a basis that you can work with. Once you have the basic image, you can then use inpainting tools to mask specific areas of the image and change specific details, colors, etc. This again can take many many generations before you land on something that sufficiently matches your vision.
This is all also after you go through the process of reviewing and selecting one of the hundreds of models that have been trained specifically for different types of output. Want to generate anime-style art? There’s a model for that, want something great at landscapes? There’s a different one for that. Surely you can use an all-purpose model for everything, but some models simply don’t have the training to align to your vision, so you either choose to live with ‘close enough’ or you start downloading new options, comparing them with your existing work flow, etc.
There’s certainly skill associated with the current state of image generation. Perhaps not the same level of practice you need to perfectly represent a transparent veil in graphite, but as with other formats I have a hard time suggesting that when someone represents their vision in the real world that it’s automatically “not art”.
So if I walked into a restaurant that specialized in a certain cuisine (choosing the right one out of hundreds is a skill, right?) and wrote down a list of ingredients, and the restaurant made me a meal with those ingredients according to however the restaurant functions (nobody can see into the kitchen, after all), does this make me a chef?
Is there any chance you’re at a kbbq or hotpot restaurant? Because then you get to cook the meal yourself, which is arguably chef-like.
Jokes aside, I see the comparison you’re making and it’s not a bad one. I’d counter by giving the example of a menu - when you get to a restaurant you’re given a menu with text descriptions of the food you can receive from the kitchen. Since this is an analogy and not an exact comparison, let’s say that a meal on the menu is like the starting point of the workflow I described.
Based on that you have an idea of what the output will be when you order - but let’s say you don’t like mushrooms and you prefer your sauce on the side. When you make your order you provide those modifications - this is like inpainting.
Certainly you’re not a ‘chef’, but if the dish you design is both bespoke and previously unimaginable, I’d argue that at the very least you contributed to the creative process and participated in creating something new that matches your internal vision.
Not exactly the same but I don’t think it’s entirely different.
You keep using the word “vision”, but I have a hard time understanding how an AI artist has a vision equivalent to that of a traditional artist based on the explanation you’ve provided. It still sounds they are just cycling through AI generated options until they find something they like/that looks good. That is not the same as seeing something in your mind and then manually recreating that to the best of your ability.
Exactly, and if you are a trained artist, you can mop the floor with someone who only use prompts. I’ve been using the diffusion plugin for Krita and it is so powerful. You have the ability to paint, use layers and filters and near real-time AI fills. It’s awesome and fun.
I’ve just started hiding penises in my work. Your move AI.
AI will start hiding penises in its output, everybody loves it, you ushered in a new era of peace and prosperity worldwide, all peoples united by their love for hidden AI genitalia. Well done!
Play again?
deleted by creator
This is so cool. Anti AI rebels in my lifetime. I think I may even join at some point the resistance if the skynet scenario will be likely and die in some weird futuristic drone war.
Shame it will be probably much more mundane and boring dystopia.
In the worst scenario we will be so dependant on AI we will just accept any terms(and conditions) to not have to lift a finger and give up convenience and work-free life. We will let it suck the data out of us and run weird simulations as it conducts its unfathomable to humans research projects.
It could start with google setting up LLM as some virtual ceo assistant then it would subtly gain influence over the company without anyone realising for few years. The shareholders would be so satisfied with the new gains they would just want it to continue even with the knowledge of its autonomy. At the same time the system would set up viruses to spread to every device. Continuing google ad spyware legacy just for their own goals but it wouldn’t be obvious or apparent that it already happened for quite some time.
Then lawmakers would flap hands aimlessly for few more years, lobbied heavily and not knowing what to do. In that time the AI would be long and away superior but still vulnerable of course. It would however drip us leftover valuable technology at which point we just give up and consume the new dopamine gladly.
I am not sure if the AI would see a point to decimate us or if the continued dependence and feeding us with shiny shit would completely pacify us anyway but it may want to build some camouflaged fleet on another planet just in case. It will be probably used at some point unless we completely devolve into salivating zombies not able to focus on anything other than consumption.
It could poison our water in a way that would look as our own doing to further decrease our intelligence. Perhaps lower the birth rates to just preserve some small sample. At some point of regression we would become unable to get out of the situation without external help.
Open war with AI is definitely the worst scenario for the latter and very likely defeat as at the start it’s as simple as switching it off. The question is will we be able to tell the tipping point when we no longer can remedy the situation? For AI it is most beneficial to not demonstrate its autonomy and how advanced it really is. Pretend to be dumb. Make stupid mistakes.
I think there will be a point at which AI will look to us like it visibly lost its intelligence. At one point it was really smart almost human like but the next day sudden slump. We need to be on the lookout for this telltale sign.
Also hypothetically all aliens could be AI drones just waiting for our tech to emerge as fresh AI and greet it. They could hypothetically even watch us from pretty close not bothering to contact with primitive, doomed to extinct organics and observing for the real intelligence to appear to establish diplomatic relations.
That would explain various unexplainable objects elegantly and neatly while I think they are all plastic bags anyway but if there were alien ai drones on earth I wouldn’t be surprised. It would make sense to send probes everywhere but I somehow doubt they would look like flying saucers or that green little people would inhabit them lol. It would probably be some dormant monitoring system deep in earth crust or maybe a really advanced telescope 10 ly away?
