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[return to "Who knew the first AI battles would be fought by artists?"]
1. meebob+kc[view] [source] 2022-12-15 13:03:10
>>dredmo+(OP)
I've been finding that the strangest part of discussions around art AI among technical people is the complete lack of identification or empathy: it seems to me that most computer programmers should be just as afraid as artists, in the face of technology like this!!! I am a failed artist (read, I studied painting in school and tried to make a go at being a commercial artist in animation and couldn't make the cut), and so I decided to do something easier and became a computer programmer, working for FAANG and other large companies and making absurd (to me!!) amounts of cash. In my humble estimation, making art is vastly more difficult than the huge majority of computer programming that is done. Art AI is terrifying if you want to make art for a living- and, if AI is able to do these astonishingly difficult things, why shouldn't it, with some finagling, also be able to do the dumb, simple things most programmers do for their jobs?

The lack of empathy is incredibly depressing...

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2. strken+Kx[view] [source] 2022-12-15 14:42:58
>>meebob+kc
My empathy for artists is fighting with my concern for everyone else's future, and losing.

It would be very easy to make training ML models on publicly available data illegal. I think that would be a very bad thing because it would legally enshrine a difference between human learning and machine learning in a broader sense, and I think machine learning has huge potential to improve everyone's lives.

Artists are in a similar position to grooms and farriers demanding the combustion engine be banned from the roads for spooking horses. They have a good point, but could easily screw everyone else over and halt technological progress for decades. I want to help them, but want to unblock ML progress more.

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3. yamtad+Wj1[view] [source] 2022-12-15 17:58:01
>>strken+Kx
Everyone else's future?

I see this as another step toward having a smaller and smaller space in which to find our own meaning or "point" to life, which is the only option left after the march of secularization. Recording and mass media / reproduction already curtailed that really badly on the "art" side of things. Work is staring at glowing rectangles and tapping clacky plastic boards—almost nobody finds it satisfying or fulfilling or engaging, which is why so many take pills to be able to tolerate it. Work, art... if this tech fulfills its promise and makes major cuts to the role for people in those areas, what's left?

The space in which to find human meaning seems to shrink by the day, the circle in which we can provide personal value and joy to others without it becoming a question of cold economics shrinks by the day, et c.

I don't think that's great for everyone's future. Though admittedly we've already done so much harm to that, that this may hardly matter in the scheme of things.

I'm not sure the direction we're going looks like success, even if it happens to also mean medicine gets really good or whatever.

Then again I'm a bit of a technological-determinist and almost nobody agrees with this take anyway, so it's not like there's anything to be done about it. If we don't do [bad but economically-advantageous-on-a-state-level thing], someone else will, then we'll also have to, because fucking Moloch. It'll turn out how it turns out, and no meaningful part in determining that direction is whether it'll put us somewhere good, except "good" as blind-ass Moloch judges it.

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4. loveha+jv1[view] [source] 2022-12-15 18:52:12
>>yamtad+Wj1
What role exactly is it going to take? The role we currently have, where the vast majority of people do work not because they particularly enjoy it but because they’re forced to in order to survive?

That’s really what we’re protecting here?

I’d rather live in the future where automation does practically everything not for the benefit of some billionaire born into wealth but because the automation is supposed to. Similar to the economy in Factorio.

Then people can derive meaning from themselves rather that whatever this dystopian nightmare we’re currently living in.

It’s absurdly depressing that some people want to stifle this progress only because it’s going to remove this god awful and completely made up idea that work is freedom or work is what life is about.

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5. except+nz1[view] [source] 2022-12-15 19:11:56
>>loveha+jv1
I am happy to write code for a hobby. Who is going to pay for that? The oligarchs of our time pay their tax to their own 'charities'. Companies with insane profits buy their own shares.

AI powered surveillance and the ongoing destruction of public institutions will make it hard to stand up for the collective interest.

We are not in hell, but the road to it has not been closed.

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6. loveha+xP1[view] [source] 2022-12-15 20:22:00
>>except+nz1
The ideal situation is that nobody pays for it. Picture a scenario where the vast majority of resource gathering, manufacturing, and production are all automated. Programmers are out of a job, factory workers are out of a job, miners are out of a job, etc.

Basically the current argument of artists being out of a job but taken to its extreme.

Why would these robots get paid? They wouldn’t. They’d just mine, manufacture, and produce on request.

Imagine a world where chatgpt version 3000 is connected to that swarm of robots and you can type “produce a 7 inch phone with an OLED screen, removable battery, 5 physical buttons, a physical shutter, and removable storage” and X days later arrives that phone, delivered by automation, of course.

Same would work with food, where automation plants the seeds, waters the crops, removes pests, harvests the food, and delivers it to your home.

All of these are simply artists going out of a job, except it’s not artists it’s practically every job humans are forced to do today.

There’d be very little need to work for almost every human on earth. Then I could happily spend all day taking shitty photographs that AI can easily replicate today far better than I could photograph in real life but I don’t have to feel like a waste of life because I enjoy doing it for fun and not because I’m forced to in order to survive.

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7. except+YR1[view] [source] 2022-12-15 20:33:15
>>loveha+xP1
Look, I like the paradise you created. You only forgot about who we are.

> There’d be very little need to work for almost every human on earth.

When mankind made a pact with the devil, the burden we got was that we had to earn our bread though sweat and hard labor. This story has survived millennia, there is something to it.

Why is the bottom layer in society not automated by robots? No need to if they are cheaper than robots. If you don't care about humans, you can get quite some labor for a little bit of sugar. If you can work one job to pay your rent, you can possibly do two or three even. If you don't have those social hobbies like universal healthcare and public education, people will be competitive for a very long time with robots. If people are less valuable, they will be treated as such.

Hell is nearer than paradise.

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8. loveha+oV1[view] [source] 2022-12-15 20:47:49
>>except+YR1
Humans have existed for close to 200,000 years. Who we ‘are’ is nothing close to what we have today. What humans actually are is an invasive species capable of subjugating nature to fit its needs. I want to just push that further and subjugate nature with automation that can feed us and manufacture worthless plastic and metal media consumption devices for us.

Your diatribe about not caring about humans is ironic. I don’t know where you got all that from, but it certainly wasn’t my previous comment.

I also don’t know what pact you’re on about. The idea of working for survival is used to exploit people for their labor. I guess people with disabilities that aren’t able to work just aren’t human? Should we let them starve to death since they can’t work a 9-5 and work for their food?

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