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
I'm mostly seeing software developers looking at the textual equivalent, GPT-3, and giving a spectrum of responses from "This is fantastic! Take my money so I can use it to help me with my work!" to "Meh, buggy code, worse than dealing with a junior dev."

I think the two biggest differences between art AI and code AI are that (a) code that's only 95% right is just wrong, whereas art can be very wrong before a client even notices [0]; and (b) we've been expecting this for ages already, to the extent that many of us are cynical and jaded about what the newest AI can do.

[0] for example, I was recently in the Cambridge University Press Bookshop, and they sell gift maps of the city. The background of the poster advertising these is pixelated and has JPEG artefacts.

It's highly regarded, and the shop has existed since 1581, and yet they have what I think is an amateur-hour advert on their walls.

>>ben_w+Dg
> code that's only 95% right is just wrong,

I know what you mean, but thinking about it critically, this is just wrong. All software has bugs in it. Small bugs, big bugs, critical bugs, security bugs, everything. No code is immune. The largest software used by millions every day has bugs. Library code that has existed and been in use for 30 years has bugs.

I don't think you were actually thinking of this in your comparison, but I think it's actually a great analogy - code, like art, can be 95% complete, and that's usually enough. (For art, looks good and is what I wanted is enough, for code, does what I want right now, nevermind edge cases is enough.)

>>edanm+Ao
Two issues. First, when a human gets something 5% wrong, it's more likely to be a corner case or similar "right most of the time" scenario, whereas when AI gets something 5% wrong, it's likely to look almost right but never produce correct output. Second, when a human writes something wrong they have familiarity with the code and can more easily identify the problem and fix it, whereas fixing AI code (either via human or AI) is more likely to be fraught.

>>Curiou+2F
You (and everyone else) seem to be making the classic "mistake" of looking at an early version and not appreciating that things improve. Ten years ago, AI-generated art was at 50%. 2 years ago, 80%. Now it's at 95% and winning competitions.

I have no idea if the AI that's getting code 80% right today will get it 95% right in two years, but given current progress, I wouldn't bet against it. I don't think there's any fundamental reason it can't produce better code than I can, at least not at the "write a function that does X" level.

Whole systems are a way harder problem that I wouldn't even think of making guesses about.

>>edanm+YM
It might improve like Go AI and shock everyone by beating the world expert at everything, or it might improve like Tesla FSD which is annoyingly harder than "make creative artwork".

There's no fundamental reason it can't be the world expert at everything, but that's not a reason to assume we know how to get there from here.

>>ben_w+sh1
What scares me is a death of progress situation. Maybe it cant be an expert, but it can be good enough, and now the supply pipeline of people who could be experts basically gets shut off, because to become an expert you needed to do the work and gain the experiences that are now completely owned by AI.

>>namele+vK1
Exactly this.

The problem of a vengeful god who demands the slaughter of infidels lies not in his existence or nonexistence, but peoples' belief in such a god.

Similarly, it does not matter whether AI works or it doesn't. It's irrelevant how good it actually is. What matters is whether people "believe" in it.

AI is not a technology, it's an ideology.

Given time it will fulfil it's own prophecy as "we who believe" steer the world toward that.

That's what's changing now. It's in the air.

The ruling classes (those who own capital and industry) are looking at this. The workers are looking too. Both of them see a new world approaching, and actually everyone is worried. What is under attack is not the jobs of the current generation, but the value of human skill itself, for all generations to come. And, yes, it's the tail of a trajectory we have been on for a long time.

It isn't the only way computers can be. There is IA instead of AI. But intelligence amplification goes against the principles of capital at this stage. Our trajectory has been to make people dumber in service of profit.

>>nonran+DY1
What's under attack is the notion that humans are special - that there's some kind of magic to them that is fundamentally impossible to replicate. No wonder there's a full-blown moral panic about this.

>>int_19+6B2
Agreed, but that train left the station in the late 1800s, driven by Darwin and Nietzsche. The intervening one and a half centuries haven't dislodged the "human spirit" in its secular form. We thought we'd overcome "gods". Now, out of discontent and self-loathing we're going to do what Freud warned against, and find a new external something to subjugate ourselves to. We simply refuse to shoulder the burden of being free.