zlacker

>>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...

>>meebob+kc
Artists have all my sympathy. I'm also a hobbyist painter. But I have very little sympathy for those perpetuating this tiresome moral panic (a small amount of actual artists, whatever the word "artist" means), because I think that:

a) the panic is entirely misguided and based on two wrong assumptions. The first is that textual input and treating the model as a function (command in -> result out) are sufficient for anything. No, this is a fundamentally deficient way to give artistic directions, which is further handicapped by primitive models and weak compute. Text alone is a toy; the field will just become more and more complex and technically involved, just like 3D CGI did, because if you don't use every trick available, you're missing out. The second wrong assumption is that it's going to replace anyone, instead of making many people re-learn a new tool and produce what was previously unfeasible due to the amount of mechanistic work involved. This second assumption stems from the fundamental misunderstanding of the value artists provide, which is conceptualization, even in a seemingly routine job.

b) the panic is entirely blown out of proportion by the social media. Most people have neither time nor desire to actually dive into this tech and find out what works and what doesn't. They just believe that a magical machine steals their works to replace them, because that's what everyone reposts on Twitter endlessly.

>>orbita+Z62
>Artists have all my sympathy.

Humans have my sympathy. We are literally at the brink of the multiple major industries being wiped out. What was only theoretical for the last 10-15 years started to happen right now.

In few short years most humans will not be able to find any employment because machine will be more efficient and cheaper. Society will transform beyond any previous transformations in history. Most likely it's going to be very rough. But we just argue that of course our specific jobs are going to stay.

>>vl+jF2
If we take your vision at face value, what do you think should be done?

>>gwbroo+OH2
Honestly, I don't know. I spent last few days thinking about all this more seriously than in the last 20 years.

Essentially we are going to get away from market economy, money, private property. The problem is that once these things go personal freedom goes as well. So either accept the inevitable totalitarian society, or something else? But what?

>>vl+7J2
This sort of thing was thought about 20 years ago in the story “manna” by Marshall Brain - https://marshallbrain.com/manna1

I have no idea how well it holds up to modern reading, but I found it interesting at the time.

He posits two outcomes - in the fictionalised US the ownership class owns more and more of everything, because automation and intelligence remove the need for workers and even most technicians over time. Everyone else is basically a prisoner given the minimum needed to maintain life.

Or we can become “socialist” in a sort of techno-utopian way, realising that the economy and our laws should work for us and that a post-labor society should be one in which humans are free from dependence on work rather than defined by it.

Does this latter one imply a total lack of freedom? It certainly implies dependence on the state, but for most people (more or less by definition) an equal share would be a better share than they can get now, and they would be free to pursue art or learning or just leisure.